Such is the advantage of brand new tyres in Formula 1 this season, teams and drivers are becoming tempted to play silly buggers in qualifying, staying in the garage to avoid using up that precious pristine rubber.

That’s what happened in Q3 for the Spanish Grand Prix today, when only seven times were set. Kobayashi stopped on track at the end of Q2, Schumacher and Vettel only did out laps – and Rosberg only posted what looked like a half-arsed time.

So, what can be done? I have some ideas:

• Any driver who doesn’t go out in a session, has to hand their car over to a paying spectator to give them a go. That should bump up the motivation to get out there.
• Give the teams more tyres. Hundreds of the bloody things. Happy now?
• Trial by Twitter. If you don’t go out, you have to convince the baying hordes on social media that it was for a good reason. Good luck with that.
• Award points for pole position – or the front row, or top three.
• It doesn’t have to be points. Hand out sweets for pole position. Or a yacht. Whatever it is modern F1 drivers like.
• Whoever comes last in Q3 has to do a forfeit – wear stupid overalls for the race or something. You know, like the McLaren drivers had to for qualifying last season.

There, all of those would definitely work. FIA, you’re welcome.

Photo Credit
richjjones / Rich Jones – Flickr – Some rights reserved

As already mentioned today, the Bahrain Grand Prix was the BBC’s first prime time Formula 1 highlights show. So, I thought it’d be interesting to have a look at the viewing figures.

For this sort of thing, we must consult The Guardian.

Live coverage on Sky averaged 0.7 million viewers. At teatime, the BBC highlights grabbed an average of 3.6 million. That’s a ‘total’, for what it’s worth, of 4.3 million viewers.

Of course, there was no Bahrain Grand Prix in 2011. But if we go back to 2010, that had an average of 4.8 million viewers for the BBC’s exclusive live coverage.

So, it looks like the combination of live pay-TV coverage and prime time free-to-air highlights hasn’t yielded the increased viewing figures that some expected.

Or it hasn’t yet: this is an inexact science, and one data point does not make a trend. Increased ratings could come as viewing habits adjust to the new model. Or could not. Either way, it’ll be interesting to keep an eye on.

Photo Credit
Kevin Simpson / videocrab – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Four races into the 2012 Formula 1 season, we’ve now seen each of the three forms that the BBC coverage will take this year. That’s live, and the two types of highlights – which were trailed as 120 minutes at lunchtime for early morning races, and 90 minutes at teatime for European time zone races.

Seems like a good time to shovel out some opinions, then.

The early fly aways: a good start

The first two fly away races were both highlights only: 120 minutes for the Australian Grand Prix; 115 minutes for the Malaysian Grand Prix. Having seen only these highlights, I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything significant.

The BBC hadn’t forgotten how to do live coverage by the time the Chinese Grand Prix came around; the 195 minutes didn’t strike me as noticeably out of place compared to the last three seasons.

The Bahrain Grand Prix: a bad job

Then we get to the first race of the year in a European time zone: the Bahrain Grand Prix. For that we got 80 minutes of highlights. Now, I hate to agree with the BBC blogs angry mob, but it wasn’t good.

The running time was a bad start: ten minutes less than the expected hour and a half. Whacking 11 percent off the duration of a highlights show is no small matter.

Then there was the curious decision to include only 50 minutes of actual race coverage. Devoting half an hour of the already shorter than expected show to build up and post-race interviews is pretty much inexplicable.

Funnily enough, I’m not sure that a lack of time was the real problem. Last season, the 60 minute highlights show was all I saw of a number of races, and without cause to complain.

No, I think the highlights of the Bahrain Grand Prix were just badly put together. It was, to my mind, a matter of ‘action’ taking priority over ‘story’: so you saw the overtakes, but got no sense of one driver catching another. Maybe it was a difficult race to cut down, but whatever the reason, the result was quite unsatisfactory.

And the air of inconsistency wasn’t helped by the wildly varying light levels of the post-race segments, which had obviously been recorded at different times.

But I’m not convinced that the rest of the ‘90 minute’ highlights shows will be a similar mess up. Hopefully this weekend was just a bad job, and the rest of the European highlights-only races will be more satisfactory. I think they will be.

The new boys

A couple of quick thoughts on the BBC team to finish with.

I found Martin Brundle and David Coulthard a little dry as a commentary team last year. Ben Edwards has, as I’d hoped, injected a bit of excitable enthusiasm into proceedings, and he’s gelling with Coulthard faster than I would have anticipated.

Gary Anderson strikes me as a bit of an untapped resource at this stage though. He’s clearly got a lot of good stuff in that big old head, but it doesn’t feel like he’s popping up in the commentary anything like as much as Ted Kravitz did. I’d like to hear much more of what he’s thinking, please.

Photo Credit
DumbYellowDog / Cameron Rogers – Flickr – Some rights reserved

A couple of weeks into the Formula 1 season, and it’s not the faintly hideous stepped noses that are bothering my eye. Well they are, but other things are too. These:

Italics

It’s lovely that McLaren have a new sponsor to put on their rear wing, but the Lucozade logo irks me slightly every time it catches my eye. It’s the use of red and a italics. It looks… American. A bit NASCAR, in some unquantifiable way. Not that there’s anything wrong with looking American – whatever that actually means. It just clashes with the refined – for want of a better word – style that McLaren go in for.

The Cube(s)

Then there’s the BBC’s new title sequence. The pulsating car is curious in itself, but it complements ‘The Chain’ as it builds. Fine. But why, as the car pulsates, does it shed little cubes? It just looks… weird. Not in an interesting or artistic way, just baffling. Or am I missing something?

Photo Credit
McLaren: Dawin Wongsodihardjo /niwad25 – Flickr – Some right reserved

Pick TV is a funny channel. It exists pretty much as a means for Sky to advertise their wares to a free-to-air audience, hence its place on Freeview et al. When it was known as Sky 3, it even had a few shows that people might actually want to watch, to boot.

Now, however, it’s anything but funny, consisting almost exclusively of ageing fly-on-the-wall series and blooper shows. To glance at its schedule is to peer into a cold, dark chasm of creative bankruptcy. It’s mainly awful.

Sky Sports F1 HD launch

However! Sky do occasionally still use the channel to give non-subscribers a little sniff of what they’re missing on the other side of the wall in the perfumed pay TV garden – the Free Weekend Pass, for example.

Now, you might not have noticed – they’ve been pretty subtle about it – but Sky launched a little something called Sky Sports F1 HD on Friday night. The first programme was a 2012 preview edition of the imaginatively titled The F1 Show, the channel’s regular magazine show presented by Georgie Thompson and Ted Kravitz. It seemed to go down quite well.

Wisely, that show is being pumped out on Pick TV – on Sunday night at 10pm (hat tip to @f1zone via @wtf1couk). What better way to convert the undecided viewer?

That’s being preceded by a Grand Prix Greats edition of Time Of Our Lives at 9pm, featuring Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Murray Walker looking back at the British success of the ’90s. That’s also being broadcast on Sky Sports F1 HD a number of times this week, though from what I can gather the programme is a couple of years old.

BBC counter punch

It’s been amusing to watch Sky and the BBC manoeuvring around each other in the off season. Sky welcomed selected bloggers through their doors, so the BBC felt it had to do the same, for example.

So on Friday, an hour before Sky launched its F1 channel, Jake Humphrey and David Coulthard appeared on The One Show. Probably not a particularly effective counter punch – it was all rather panto.

But it goes to show that this competition between broadcasters is clearly making them both try harder, which can only increase the quality of coverage for viewers – wherever they’re watching.

While there’s nothing really going on – contrary to popular belief, Formula 1 testing doesn’t count – there’s been plenty of time to pick over the week’s quotes. Here are four of the best.

“NASCAR and IndyCar could be a possibility, but obviously I don’t have sponsors.”
- Jarno Trulli (via AUTOSPORT.com)

Jarno Trulli has been refreshingly realistic about his departure from Caterham, hasn’t he? If he had sponsors, of course, he wouldn’t have lost his seat to Vitaly Petrov.

“Slim to none.”
- Bernie Ecclestone (via @byronf1)

That was Bernie Ecclestone‘s assessment of the likelihood of Formula 1 teams getting more money from the commercial rights holder, though he did tell The Mirror’s Byron Young that they were “right” to ask for it. Curious chap.

“I’m so small and also alone!! damn it !!”
- Kamui Kobayashi (via @kamui_kobayashi)

Kamui Kobayashi hasn’t been on Twitter very long, but he’s already proving exceptional value. This was one of a series of tweets from his hotel room for testing this week. His assessment of new white towels is equally unmissable.

“I like to collect trophies.”
- Sebastian Vettel (via James Allen on F1)

Well that’s a happy coincidence. The latest for Sebastian Vettel was the Silver Bay Laurel Leaf from the President of Germany. As you do.

Photo Credits
Jarno Trulli: ph-stop – Flickr – Some rights reserved
Kamui Kobayashi: ph-stop – Flickr – Some rights reserved
Bernie Ecclestone: Silverstone Circuits Limited – Flickr – Some rights reserved
Sebastian Vettel: ph-stop – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Testing is well under way now, bafflingly fascinating large swathes of the motorsport population. But it’s also my prompt to place my bets for the season ahead. On a couple of Aussies, as it turns out.

Formula 1

Of course Sebastian Vettel is the favourite. Who else? At 5/4 though, I’m not interested. Like most, I’m by no means convinced that he’s going to run away with it this year. No, like last year, I’m going to go for his team-mate Mark Webber. You know what they say: once bitten, twice… bitten. At 18/1, it’s safe to say that I’m going out on a limb. Again.

But there’s a modicum of logic here: it’s in qualifying that Vettel trounced Webber last year, thanks to his unerring knack of making the new, harder Pirelli tyres submit to his wily ways. This season, with softer tyres, the landscape should look a little more like 2010, when Webber was in the title fight until the final race. Maybe.

I’m taking it as given that the RB8 will be the pick of the field. No guarantee there, mind: separating the Red Bull team-mates are Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso (9/2), and the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton (6/1) and Jenson Button (10/1). Intriguingly, after those five it’s Nico Rosberg, followed jointly by Kimi Raikkonen and Michael Schumacher, and Felipe Massa.

MotoGP

I expected the MotoGP odds to be a little closer than Formula 1, but no. It’s curious: there’s a complete change in regulations, so there’s more chance of a shake-up in the order than usual. Yet still 2011 champion Casey Stoner is a clear favourite at virtually 1/1. But I’m still going to go for him, because he’s a class act and, well, I think he’ll take the title.

I assumed that blind faith in The Doctor would lead to inappropriately good odds on Valentino Rossi, but no, he’s fourth favourite at 7/1. The one rider I really wouldn’t put any money on is Stoner’s team-mate, Dani Pedrosa, who is third favourite at 11/2. He’s arguably rather fragile, and unarguably rather small, which is only going to be more of a disadvantage this year with the bigger bikes. That leaves Jorge Lorenzo as second favourite at about 3/1, who on recent form does seem likely to be Stoner’s biggest threat.

Was this commissioned before Raikkonen knew he was returning to Formula 1? Given that rallying features heavily, and there’s no single-seater action to be found, it seems likely.

It’s a shrewd move though: Raikkonen has a rampant fan-base, and a game for iOS isn’t a bad way to pump them for cash. It’s a free download, with in-app purchases. To be fair, it isn’t stingy with its free content, and it does look pretty smart.

There are four racing disciplines, which vary from the nearly-okay to the quite-terrible.

Starting with the latter: rallying. At first, it feels borderline uncontrollable: on snow, there seems to be little on offer between driving in a straight line and handbrake-turning into a snow bank. After driving a different vehicle on tarmac, however, the problem is clarified: there’s an infuriating split-second delay between tilting the iPhone and your car responding to the input. With this knowledge, the rallying is less fist-mashingly bad, but the nearly-digital steering means it’s still far from enjoyable.

The lack of handling subtlety also hinders the NASCAR-style truck racing: ovals are a painful experience when it’s a battle to maintain a nice even cornering radius.

Things start to pick up with the sporty tuner car: the tight corners are more suited to the twitchy handling, and the car skids pleasingly without entirely losing grip. But bafflingly, either I just managed to avoid ever encountering another car, or it’s a rally-style time trial for no good reason. I’m fairly confident it’s the latter.

Karting is by far the game’s most enjoyable discipline: the handling is perfectly at home, and the tracks are nicely designed.

But it’s also where the game’s biggest bug is most obvious. The computer-controlled opponents can be absolute idiots, swerving everywhere and constantly resetting themselves. That’s not the bug though: if you lap your opponents, then you’ll cross the line in 1st, but the results screen will have you finishing last, presumably comparing your time over two laps to everyone else’s over one. Which means that, to register as winning, you have to wait up to five minutes or more for everyone else to unlap themselves. Which is rather tiresome.

So: the rallying is unsuccessful, and it’s a bit unresponsive. An accurate representation of Raikkonen himself, then. (Joke! Sort of.)

While it’s no Real Racing 2, it’s also nothing like as bad as the utterly incompetent TT3D tie-in. And plenty of the game’s problems could – and should – be fixed via updates.

We’re firmly into in Formula 1 launch season, which as always provides a stream of photos of largely familiar looking cars and empty soundbites. Far more interesting is what’s going on over in TV land.

GP2 & GP3

On the good news front, a TV deal for GP2 and GP3 has been announced: as widely hoped, they will be broadcast live on Sky Sports F1 HD. It’s only sensible; after all, they have a whole channel to fill. As Ted Kravitz reported Jenson Button as saying at the McLaren launch yesterday:

“I’m giving long answers because Sky Sports have a lot of time to fill on their new channel!”

He’s not wrong. GP2 and GP3 is a very good way to fill a bit more of the schedule on race weekends: dedicated fans want it, the casual viewer might just find something they like, and it’s great for the series to have live coverage on a serious channel. It’ll probably also tip the balance for a few undecided viewers to sign up for Sky.

WRC

While common sense has triumphed for the Formula 1 support classes, it’s still trying its best to do so in the WRC. iRally is the place for an up-to-date, blow-by-blow account, but let’s summarise.

WRC commercial rights holder North One Sport was bought by Convers Sports Initiatives in 2011. Later that year, the company went into receivership, following the activities of Vladimir Antonov. That sort of screwed everything up, just before the 2012 season was due to begin.

Eurosport stepped in and provided coverage of the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally, doing a good job at short notice, by all accounts. Eurosport, having experience from running and broadcasting the IRC, were – and are – the obvious choice to take over as promoter and broadcaster of the WRC. There’s been little word from the FIA, but the latest from iRally suggests that both sides want to make it work, but European employment law may be the latest sticking point.

It is a quite staggering mess. I complained last year that there was no free-to-air coverage in the UK, but this is another level of badness for the sport. Common sense says that a deal will be made between the FIA and Eurosport; let’s hope it triumphs in the end.

Photo Credit
Kevin Simpson / videocrab – Flickr – Some rights reserved

The BTCC made a bit of a thing recently of tickets for all this season’s meetings now being on sale.

That got me wondering about how much motorsport tickets vary in price. As is my wont at such times, research and a little visualisation followed. Not every venue has every event on sale yet – for example British F3 & GT meetings aren’t all available yet – so I’ve stuck to the main events: BTCC, British Superbikes, and international championships.

There’s a surprising conclusion, that I really wasn’t expecting: Silverstone is the UK’s bargain motorsport venue.

BTCC & BSB

There’s not a lot of variation in the big two domestic championships. All the MotorSport Vision venues – Brands Hatch, Cadwell Park, Oulton Park, Snetterton – are £25 a pop for race day general admission, as are Donington Park, Knockhill and Thruxton.

The only ones below that are Croft at £24, and Silverstone with an early bird price of £23.20. Do Silverstone’s haul of big international events create economies of scale that enable them to undercut the competition?

Rockingham is the only venue at over £25, though in fairness their £26 includes a grandstand seat as standard. Mainly because there’s virtually nowhere else to watch from.

International

Inevitably Formula Two is the cheapest international event, and again Silverstone comes out on top at £9 compared to £17 at Brands Hatch. You could argue that the Brands Hatch event is co-headlined by the International GT Open, and that Silverstone’s support line-up of Radicals and Minis is not comparable. But having been to F2 at Brands Hatch last year, I can assure you that it’s not worth the asking price, relative to other events.

Next up at £29 is DTM, which doesn’t really work on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit. Moving on, then.

The Superbike World Championship is another where Silverstone wins: £32 compared to £40 at Donington Park.

Silverstone is also the most expensive venue though – but then, hosting the two premier class championships, that’s not much of a surprise. There are still early bird discounts to be had on MotoGP, starting at £52, but no such luck with Formula 1, which is quite the leap up at £135 or more. Perhaps there’s something to the argument that F1 is subsidising everything else at Silverstone.