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

Plato is very ironically named really. He could do with thinking things through a bit sometimes. #BTCC

— Peter Allen (@PeteAllen_) April 1, 2012

The BTCC continues this weekend at Donington Park, so I thought I’d answer the question we’re all asking: how does Jason Plato compare to Plato?

	Plato	Jason Plato
Born	Sometime between 429 and 423 BC, probably in Athens or Aegina, Greece.	14th October 1967, in Oxford, England.
Education	Student of Socrates, mentor to Aristotle. Founded the Academy in Athens, the Western world’s first institution of higher learning.	Public school educated at The King’s School, Tynemouth. Former BTCC and WTCC driver Harry Vaulkhard – now in the Euro Racecar Series, incidentally – also went there.
Achievements	Helping to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science.	Twice BTCC champion, in 2001 and 2010. 1996 Renault Spider Cup champion, 1991 Formula Renault Eurocup champion.
Works	36 dialogues and 13 letters, on subjects including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.	A weekly column in The Sun; Fifth Gear for Channel 5, Driven for Channel 4, Mission Implausible for Sky One. Mainly on the subject of cars, though the latter on the subject of stunts.
Criticism	Carl Sagan: “Plato expressed hostility to observation and experiment. He taught contempt for the real world and disdain for the practical application of scientific knowledge. Plato’s followers succeeded in extinguishing the light of science and experiment that had been kindled by Democritus and the other Ionians.”	Just keep an eye on #BTCC on Twitter on a race weekend and you’ll see plenty. Generally not quite as eloquent as Carl Sagan, mind.

Quite similar, then.

Credits
Source: Wikipedia. For everything. Always.
Plato photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen – Wikimedia Commons – Some rights reserved
Jason Plato photo: CraigMoulding – Flickr – Some rights reserved

I don’t have a problem with the MotoGP coverage on the BBC – I actively enjoy it, most of the time. But trying to nail down exactly what is on and where can be… challenging. I’ve lost count of the number of posts like this I’ve written, attempting to clearly lay out how to catch the coverage.

The Qatar GP and the Dutch TT at Assen tend to be the problems, falling inconveniently on Sunday evening and Saturday lunchtime respectively, rather than the regular Sunday lunchtime. Like it or not, for a mainstream – not to mention public service – broadcaster like the BBC, making room for them outside of the regular MotoGP slot is tricky.

2012 Qatar GP on the BBC

Onto the practicalities of this weekend, then. I’ve tried to spell it out as clearly as I can in the panel on the right.

In short, qualifying for all three classes on Saturday will be on the BBC Red Button and online, from 15:55 to 19:00. The BBC Red Button schedule is a bit vague, but it looks unlikely that it will be available on Freeview.

The MotoGP race on Sunday is straightforward, if not entirely satisfactory: 19:30 to 21:00 on the BBC Red Button, including Freeview, and the BBC Sport website. Then there will be a full repeat on BBC One and BBC One HD from 23:25. Yes, MotoGP will be in HD all year on the BBC.

Where it gets complicated is the support races. The BBC Red Button and BBC Sport website will carry coverage between 16:55 and 19:05. The Freeview stream, however, will finish at 18:30. With the Moto3 race at 17:00 and Moto2 at 18:20, only the very start of the Moto2 race will be on Freeview.

Why?

This is where I start to get agitated.

Masters Golf has a stream on the Red Button 18:15-23:00. An hour of this, 18:30-19:30, is on Freeview. And for that, the BBC chops off the majority – but not all – of the Moto2 race.

Surely there are two logical options here: leave Qatar after Moto3, and show the Masters Golf from the start of the stream; or show the Moto2 race in full.

Cutting away from the Moto2 race to join the golf coverage late seems nothing short of perverse. Who exactly is it meant to satisfy?

Ho hum. At least it’s all online.

Photo Credit
Alex Simonini / Absolutely Simple – Flickr – Some rights reserved

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.

I don’t know about you, but if someone makes no effort with me, then I’m not inclined to make much effort with them. I think that’s where I am with the WTCC.

I don’t want to seem petty. I was moderately excited about the glamorous-sounding World Touring Car Championship when it was resurrected in 2005, and enthusiastically went along to the race at Silverstone that year. I followed it reasonably closely on Eurosport when I had the channel, and thereafter made an effort to catch the highlights on ITV4.

That changed last year, when the WTCC disappeared from free-to-air TV in the UK. That continues this year. But also this year, for the first time, there’s no race in the UK. Ever get the feeling you’re not loved?

National vs International

Perhaps that’s part of the reason that, as new WTCC pitlane reporter Ben Constanduros intimated, the UK holds the BTCC in higher regard. It might not be objectively fair, but it’s obvious why: the cars are ostensibly identical, so the racing looks the same, but the BTCC is broadcast live on free-to-air TV and tours UK circuits.

Is it a coincidence that Germany, home to the DTM, also has no WTCC race?

The fact is, the WTCC doesn’t really care about the UK – or probably Germany for that matter. It’s far more interested in emerging markets – and if that’s what the championship’s stakeholders want, then fair enough.

After all, it’s not the only series to desert the UK this year: the Silverstone round of the free-to-attend World Series by Renault clearly wasn’t doing enough for Renault’s UK sales figures.

National to International

But what’s vaguely surprising to me is that the WTCC seems to hold a significant appeal for British drivers. No less than four are moving across from the BTCC this year: Tom Chilton, James Nash, Alex MacDowall and the returning Tom Boardman.

It’s perhaps not a given that Nash and MacDowall are moving entirely by choice. But Chilton’s Team Aon and Boardman’s Special Tuning Racing are moving and expanding respectively into the WTCC, so it’s clear that the world stage is where they want to be.

That’s despite the WTCC being basically invisible in the UK compared to the BTCC.

Shame

With so much British interest, I want to be more enthusiastic about the WTCC season ahead. It should be fascinating to see how they all get on; MacDowall is already making headlines in testing.

But the WTCC makes it so damned difficult to be enthusiastic. Shame, that.

Photo Credit
Jens / mautau – Flickr – Some rights reserved

“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.