Perhaps the true measure of Sky Sports’ all-new, horn-honking, pedal-to-the-metal Formula One coverage was not the amount of time the channel devoted to the run-up to the season’s first race, impressive though that was. (About three weeks, as far as I could work out.) It was the amount of time the channel was prepared to spend hanging around afterwards.
So, as the shadows lengthened and the evening fell over Melbourne’s Albert Park, on walked Simon Lazenby, Martin Brundle and Damon Hill, talking, discussing, dissecting. At one point, their wanderings took them through the deserted McLaren garage, past some spent champagne bottles where a party had been, and eventually into the path of Jenson Button, who, by now, had weighed in, attended the trophy presentation, given a press conference, shaved, showered, changed, married, raised several children and retired.
Garages were emptying, marquees were deflating, trucks were pulling out and soon it would be Christmas, but on went Brundle and company, apparently happy to walk and talk for all eternity, or at least until the Malaysian Grand Prix got in the way. Still, if you’re devoting an entire channel to the sport, you’ve got room to stretch your legs — or at any rate, Damon Hill’s legs.
The heat was always going to be high in launch week, the trailers and appetisers carefully pitched to suggest that you were about to witness the crack of doom in the world’s most expensive branch of Kwik Fit. Nevertheless, experience taught you that, at any moment, it would be over to Ted Kravitz in the pits for a discussion about soft-tyre compounds. And lo, it came to pass.
For that, too, is the story of F1, where apocalyptic heroism meets any amount of chat about flaps opening on the rear wing when the driver activates the DRS — this season’s buzz acronym in the commentary box. Incidentally, for the avoidance of confusion, Ted is, so far as we are aware, no relation of Lenny Kravitz, whom Brundle discovered on the grid before the race, and who couldn’t be pushed to name a favourite driver, let alone a suitable tyre compound. “It’s my first time,” said the American guitar hero from behind a large pair of sunglasses. “I’m just happy to be here, man.”
Advertisement
This exchange occurred during Brundle’s pre-race grid-walk, a feat of improvisation sensibly retained for 2012 by Sky and which, for our money, should be its own programme, with its own theme music and credit sequence. Unfortunately, on this occasion, nearly all of the drivers that Brundle wanted to seek a word from were either deep in conversation already or making a last-minute trip to the bathroom, where even this most boldly inquisitive of broadcasters does not venture.
Still, there was always Leo Sayer. “Welcome to my country,” said the falsetto-favouring singer. (One forgets Sayer’s 2009 naturalisation, so closely does one think of him as one’s own.) Extraordinary to recount, though, Brundle then walked away, without asking even one of the thousands of apposite and pressing questions that bubbled to the surface.
For example, did a flap open up on Sayer’s rear wing when he activated the DRS during the recording of You Make Me Feel Like Dancing? It certainly sounds like it, to me, but it would have been nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.
Instead, Brundle found himself reduced to interviewing a “grid girl” — one of the women whose job is to spend the grid-walk period holding aloft a sign with the driver’s name on it and who may not have been employed primarily for her grasp of tyre compounds.
Brundle wanted to know whether Nico Rosberg (the named driver on this occasion) had taken the trouble to thank her for her services. The woman said that, as yet, he hadn’t. Brundle said he hoped that Rosberg would do so in due course. It was a driver’s duty, Brundle insisted, to thank his grid girl for “showing you where to park it up”. There was the briefest pause and then he moved swiftly on.
Advertisement
Innovations? Well, the red button services split the race into a billion component parts and, in a windowless cabin, Georgie Thompson and Anthony Davidson ran the key footage through the “SkyPad”, prodding and swiping graphics and images on to the screen — a process that, in days long ago, used to happen invisibly, as if by magic, but is now, in a surprising outcome of the technical age, manual labour.
Mainly, though, it felt exactly like F1 again, only longer. But hey. We’re with Lenny. We’re just happy to be here, man.