Of course you would as you are too busy anyway looking out for spelling mistakes on the graphics and admiring the CGI adverts.

OK, so just to be absolutely clear, the reason you get F1 is pretty much solely just because you've been watching it for yonks. I'm pretty sure the same principle would apply to GP2, Formula E and Moto GP.

Anyway...returning to our scheduled programming...is it time for practice yet!?!?

2 days and you get your reward

I've watched a large amount of GP2 &races since 2008, still doesn't thrill me. It's just not the same without a constructor's championship IMO.

For pay-TV refusniks and 19.2°E afficionados, FP2 is live on n-tv (not Sport 1) this year. They will be showing FP sessions throughout the season. I imagine a summary of FP1 followed by FP2 either live or delayed.

http://www.n-tv.de/mediathek/videos/...e17217706.html

Surely you could award constructors' points yourself and pretend. Excitement guaranteed.

He retired from racing five years ago.

Yeah but there's no technological development throughout the season though.

Whisper Films tweeted pictures earlier of Steve Jones and Mark Webber in a helicopter saying that they were 'ready for the weekend'. So that suggests that Webber is part of the team this weekend, which I suppose isn't very surprising given it's his home race. Wonder whether there will be anyone else or just SJ, DC and Webber- which is actually a pretty strong team- assuming Jones has a decent start.

So assuming nobody else joins Mark Webber as pundit it will be...
Host: Steve Jones
Pundits: David Coulthard and Mark Webber
Commentary: Ben Edwards and David Coulthard
Pits: Karun Chandhok
Paddock: Lee McKenzie

You seem to come up with 7162 different explanations for why you watch F1/any other form of motorsport and some of them seem to contradict each other. Can you just do us a favour and do a definitive list that we can refer back to every time you say "I watch this for that reason" and "I don't watch this sport for this reason" etc.

With regard to the camera's and stabilisation - Its necessary because the image would be close to unwatchable! There was a reason giro-stabilisation was created for military chopper-camera's and then used by police and then TV/Film - Is because what you're seeing needs to be stable enough to make out something half decent.
I don't want to see a shaky as **** shot of Lewis trying to overtake Nico because i won't be able to see it properly and while i don't claim to speak for the masses - Im sure most would feel the same!
The sport in general needs to sort itself out and add excitement. Quite how, i don't know but shakey onboards won't fix it.

@FOM Fan, dude, learn to take criticism and mate, please learn when to just stop.
2 straight pages of back and forth. I almost gave up with this thread again because of it.

Now, back on subject -
Any idea of C4 will be using the 5.1 soundtrack unlike the BBC or is this gonna be a Sky-only surround-sound season again?

Oh I dunno, I'd say he did most of the season last year

Just scroll on past, works wonders..

See Daily Mail did themselves proud (not) in the Driver's conference. Did wonder what they were doing there, hardly a goto motorsport reporting outfit.
Mind, there were some other sloppy questions from others about calling the car after a pizza and why Seb does not do social media.
Would much prefer a more race orientated press conference.

Lewis is worse than Bernie for giving vague answers to questions. "I don't think this new halo device", What would you do to change it then Lewis? "I dunno man..."

But that's Bernie.
Did enjoy the Bernie interview with Rachel last week. When you sit him down, he tends to open up more, like those ones with Brundle in previous years.

1997, so you were 6 when you started watching F1?
In 1971-1973 (a few more years older than when you first started), my first real memories of F1, we were watching in B&W, it was 1973 that we and most of my friends got our first colour TV at home.
Do remember putting up some posters and a calendar of Fittipaldi, our big hero then, probably more to cover up my Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet wallpaper that Id grown out of by then..
Would have been limited to Grandstand quick highlight type reports for most races and a few other shows on TV (many that would have been too late for us to watch anyway) or missed, no recording then!.
We did also get an occasional highlights sports show in Saturday kids cinema.
Not sure we ever got any F1 reports in Beano and Dandy.
We certainly never read the papers as kids then, but our Dad's would occasionally give us picture cut outs or wall charts from them.
We did have a lot of trading cards, cereal packet toys/info, not sure top trumps was quite there then, but they did give some of the more technical descriptions of the cars.
So think yourself lucky you have so much now, and you certainly seem to like your social media, so really struggle to understand why you do not understand other forms of motorsport, its out there in droves.

As for Formula e that you have mentioned a few times, I would say the technical side is perhaps one of the best explained and detailed out there from the series themselves, the build up, app and website and the commentary is the best out there in my view of explaining some of its more unique technology.
For GP2/3, which I really enjoy, I find exciting, also good commentary with good driver technical guest commentary and its very easy to understand what is going on during the race and as far as the championship goes and that is without ever looking elsewhere for info like many of us I expect.

Shhhh!

None of the listings show DD listed for any F1 coverage this week on C4.
Think I remember reading on here that they have never used it for any of their racing coverage either.
But that may change when they have the live races.

When you're younger though, you don't care about the details, you just wanna see fast cars going round. I didn't understand what qualifying was until 2003! (Before then I thought it was just another race, same as on Sunday - that set the grid for Sunday).

Still, as i've got older, I want to understand things, more, like Why something happened, not just the how.

What confuses me about Formula E (and F1 tbh) is how the ERS systems work - like can the drivers deploy the extra power recovered, at the push of a button, or is the extra performance 'always there', or what? Also with Formula E, i was watching the On-screen graphics and I was struggling to get what the KwH feature was? it was going up & down all the time, and I didn't get how that related to the cars performance on track, surely the motors had the same power? Or is it just the same as the driver's throttle (in which case - why don't they just put an indicator of how hard the driver has his foot on the accelerator...?)

I've realised now, that on the Formula E graphics, the battery % indicator is the equivalent to a cars fuel level, i.e. it's going down all the time and when it gets to 0% - they're out of fuel so to speak. But i've never heard the commentators explain all that. And so it confuses me, and so I understand it less, therefore I don't enjoy it cos it's meaningless to me.

I'll reiterate a point yesterday FOM Fan about taking a break. Rather you post something decent, in less amounts than the tirade/constant posting of little substance in recent pages. It means mass-scrolling by or mass-muting you by posters.

Seems like 2014 Deja Vu

I disagree - the more I explain, the more people (hopefully) understand my point of view. I'm not having a go at anyone, we're all entitled to our opinions

Somebody needs to explain what the battery % indicator means? Have you never had a mobile phone or laptop?

Sky's seemed to be using the clean feed for the re-broadcast of the 2010 Australian Gp last night, Was really hard to keep up with what was happening without any on-screen graphics.

Indeed, but repeating them so much more than anyone else drowns out the thread. It'd be good if there was some way to limit the thread to one post per day per individual to make it easier to read, more intersting, and dramatically adjust the signal to noise ratio.