Ted interviewed Charlie about track limits yesterday.

I agree that Croft was making too much of it. He admitted in FP3 that he hadn't seen the stewards' bulletin and was reporting it second hand, but then just confused himself even more.

As Charlie said to Ted, the way the rule is being interpreted is exactly the same as countless other series, including BTCC, which Ted should have remembered as it was less than a decade ago he presented that.

Crofty needs to shut up sometimes. Kimi looses a bit of front wing and Crofty goes 'Will Ferrari be reconsidering signing him up a year'

It wasn't even his fault!!

Yeah, Thats a change FOM made for this year.

In the past it was like this:
http://i.imgur.com/3Sr60tq.jpg

Sky took a backwards step replacing the quad on car channel with the old 2x on car + main channel + timing screen today. That setup is ideal for qualli but a poor choice for the race. It was compounded with a poor choice of cars for the on-car, Max's should have been replaced by Kimi's after a few laps.

Yeh its odd they have done that this year.
But I rarely use the pit channel as with 8 onboards, timing, tracker, on board mix, on board quad, having 13 streams is enough to be flicking through in a race and watching the main feed.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6hjv1h8lo...ntrol.png?dl=0

The on board quad was on and off a bit at one pint I noticed.

Really poor stuff from FOM to wait over a lap to show a replay of Nico getting super close to Lewis after his lock up. Surely, as they were making their way through the traffic, we should've been seeing that live. That has to take precedence over Kimi and Max's battle for 5th.

And pretty idiotic of them to play Jenson's radio message criticising the penalty, but not actually play out the illegal message.

Those hoover dry ice plug-ins that martin showed on the gridwalk were just OTT. Was wanting the driver to move off a bit quicker and each side chap would have gone really tits up. Not sure that is really good H&S.

Errrr.... They did!
When they told him not to shift!

When the temp is at 31C ?

No, there was (apparently) a message about changing a mode on the steering wheel as a sensor failure was responsible for his problem. Jenson said it was this message that he was penalised for.

Utterly ridiculous, why on earth do they need to wear a suit, especially on a race track where the temperature was 30+, would YOU like to be dressed in a suit?

I didn't see that interview so i stand corrected, my apologies sir

That would be difficult as their engine is turn off and they are being pushed to their grid spot.

The race could almost have been directed automatically for big chunks of it, just following the same battle with the same angles lap after lap. Swap to some other cars and do the same thing. Lewis's mistake wasn't shown for ages and by the time it was his lead was back up to a safe distance.

The frustrating thing is that Hamilton and Rosberg, Ricciardo and Vettel, and Verstappen and Raikkonen were spaced out quite well so that they could have occasionally shown the first battle through the first couple of corners, then gone back to turn 1 for the race for 3rd, then back to the battle for 5th, nothing else was going to happen while they did that as the rest of the track is just following each other, sticking with Max and Kimi round the whole lap for so long made a boring race appear even more dull.

The weekend's action seems to have been very similar to the quality of Ch 4's coverage - stand-out on Saturday, and similar in quality to 2004 on Sunday.

I liked the theory that was mooted recently regarding Ch 4 using Saturday to target the super-F1 fans, and Sunday to appeal to a more general audience. I didn't see all of Saturday's coverage (trying to put a baby to sleep!) but it seemed to be better than we had with the BBC, let alone Sky. Sure, this weekend had a lot to talk about, but this is not uncommon with F1!

There was a real focus on the back of the grid - there was a featured filmed at Enstone about Renault, interviews with Sauber, Manor and Force India, an interview with Charlie Whiting and also the first chat I'd seen with Jock Clear in a Ferrari uniform. Absolutely superb, and a breath of fresh air - god, it's frustrating that the F1 channel doesn't feature these guys in any depth.

But wow, was Sunday different or what - this wasn't coverage aimed at generalists, it was coverage aimed at Channel 4's accountants. The only filmed feature was DC on the track with Max Verstappen, and there was no real analysis of Rosberg's lift (someone said Sky had some FOM analysis) nor the 107% issue. The 2 pundits + presenter added little value to the show, and the whole hour felt like lightweight, similar to the olden days when Brundle took the weekend off and we all knew we were in for a snoozefest. A poor gridwalk (waiting for ages to speak to Verstappen again, and then not having any questions prepared) and rubbish racing made things worse. Ben's commentary was good, but there was nothing to really discuss - though DC was obsessed with Rosberg's pre-start rocking and Max's smoking tires. Post race coverage would have benefited from working out what had happened about things we didn't know, rather than repeating what we did. What was the story with Force India's pit stop / Raikkonen's start / Kyvat etc. etc.

Not sure Sky's was much better, really.

The "Daniel Ricciardo does League Of Their Own" behind the scenes footage was handy cross channel promo material for Sky but largely drivel. Herbert asking uninteresting questions on a truck, meh. If there is any decent analysis (as you say about the Rosberg lift, or discussion about the mysterious Longbow rescuers of Sauber discussed on the Saturday) it's either glossed over way too quickly to really get into it, or it's spoiled by getting Herbert to rhubarb about it.

Brundle's gridwalk from the back of the grid is good for a bit of variety and generally easier to get to speak to some drivers, but apart from that and a slightly odd but quite funny Kravitz-interviews-Vettel-and-asks-slightly-weird-questions the Sky buildup was as phoned in as it ever is.

To be honest, this was overblown badly it has to be said last night by a few on social media.

In fact I can't see a single mention of it on @C4F1's Twitter so they probably didn't think there was nothing worth talking about where that was concerned.

Agreed with the rest, there is a clear difference between the tone of Saturday's and Sunday's programming.

You know it was a bad race when Crofty even says it without even trying to shoot everyone down.

My fav bit of the race was when Martin handed over to Ted on one occasion, Ted pops up with a "Oh, Hiyyya Martin.... How are you doing?"

When was the last time a car was excluded from racing by this rule? At a guess, not since Fred Bloggs Bangers turned up to try their hand at quali back in the 70s. Not an issue, especially on a drying track.

Alex Yoong in 2001/2002, top of my head. HRT's too a few years back I think in the modern era twice.

The original 107% rule was only brought in in 1996! F1 presenter Alex Yoong suffered a lot from it, as did the HRTs (RIP) in 2012.
Yesterday, there were were two issues - one was that 5 or so people had their qualifying times removed, and lined up in FP3 order instead (technically) - their qualifying times were shown though in the pre-race run down by FOM though. The other issue was that a clear rule affecting another 5 people was ignored as to do otherwise would be nonsensical. It's not often that a clear rule is ignored and common sense used in F1!

Of course, this whole discussion is academic as the qualifying results stood, and I wouldn't advocate dumping any planned content to discuss it. But as virtually the whole hour of build-up was people standing around talking amongst themselves as though the need to fill an hour's airtime had come as a surprise, then I would have thought it would have been brought up.

I think it's a good idea to have a more generalist approach on the Sunday by Ch 4, but this is not what they did today. I can only hope something had gone wrong and their planned content had disappeared, but I fear it was just a lack of effort. Surprising as Saturday's show was really top-notch, one of the best we have ever seen in the UK.

Both HRTs at the 2012 Australian Grand Prix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/107%25...ule_violations

I'm surprised that was 2011 and 2012. There was at least one year where they'd done no testing before the event, so really should never have been allowed in.

It would have been ridiculous to apply the rule after the torrrential rain of Q1. Was it mentioned on the TV? I stuck with C4 for the weekend, but did watch Ted's Notebook and only read of it online.

I thought Edwards and Coulthard did well on what was a dull race and a qualifying session with long periods of nothing happening. But C4 on the whole was poor as usual; Karun talking to Charlie Whiting the only worthwhile part.

The years where they did no testing before the event were 2011 and 2012...

AFAIK, the only mandatory testing the car needs to pass is crash testing.

Although by the next races, both were within 107% or had done times within 107% in practice.

In previous years, if someone can't set a time within 107% simply because the session was disrupted by rain, they almost always waive the rule - and they have done in previous years too. So I don't see why this is suddenly a talking point... I guess because of the sheer number of cars affected.