F1 Fanatic

@PM, I totally agree.
I’ve never liked Croft, but luckily last year I didn’t see many of the Practice sessions live. He gets far too excited and doesn’t give Brundle a word in edgeways- you can’t even hear the cars over his 60-second tirades of shouting.

Also agree with Mag, the post-race coverage was terrible. They had a couple of interviews which were interesting enough- can’t fault them there- but that’s about it. All we got in the way of analysis was a brief montage which really didn’t tell us anything.

I know the BBC have been criticised for being too light-hearted and “jokey”, but their post-race ANALYSIS was much more in-depth. We got the interviews with Horner and Whitmarsh, but also got plenty of slow-motion replays from lots of different angles of significant events. And to top it all off, Jake, DC and EJ always made it entertaining- Sky can’t even do this.

EDIT: The BBC’s analysis was so good that often even drivers and team principles being interviewed seemed genuinely interested in it.

Agree with others about post race. Really wanted to see the action, but snippets from world feed suggested not brilliantly clear. With an extra half hour they might have got the details from all the drivers involved.

As others have said, Sky’s post-race coverage was inexcusably poor. Simon Lazenby needs to (sorry for the vulgarity) grow a pair: the moment in the McLaren garage where he whimpered ‘hey guys, quick word?’ was awkward to say the very least – I would have expected a lot more from a man chosen to head up Sky’s F1 coverage. Compared to Jake Humphrey, of whom I wasn’t the biggest fan, he really doesn’t have the charisma or the bravery to take advantage of impromptu situations and interviews.
Anthony Davidson’s SkyPad wasn’t used enough in the post-race analysis, and there wasn’t enough analysis overall. What’s worse is that the production team had three advert breaks which should have allowed them to plan their content better and come up with some better race highlights to talk about, but they failed to do so for the most part. Instead we got a totally confusing ‘sounds of the race’ package which didn’t really do what it said on the tin.

So, in terms of post-race, the BBC in 2011 definitely has the edge over Sky, but it remains to be seen what the BBC can do live post-race in 2012 with their different crew and smaller budget.

I think Crofty, although obviously good, does need to calm down. He’s been a radio presenter for a long time, and the last thing we need is him ‘doing a Legard’.

He needs to remember he’s not on the radio, and that we can see what he’s looking at. He also made a fari few driver/car misidentifications and talked over or in front of Brundle a little too often.

But that will come with time, I’m sure.

@th13teen

I find it amazing so many people do not seem to like the Sky Coverage!

I think a lot of people went into the Sky coverage deciding it was going to be bad because they were angry over the move to Pay TV.

The adverts wasted a lot of the 1.5 hrs after the race, which is unacceptable as we are already paying to watch it

To be honest, I don’t understand why people are getting worked up over the adverts. They have adverts on all of their other channels including the other Sky Sports channels, I’m not sure why they’d have adverts on all of those channels but not the F1 channel. The adverts don’t come on that often, they’re not mis-timed, they’re not very long and they don’t come on during qualifying or the race. I don’t see why people want to complain about that. It’s as if you’ve never seen adverts on any other channels.

I’m pretty sure if the BBC ran adverts on their channels, they’d put on adverts on the F1 coverage also. Adverts are part of television, Sky make income from running adverts. That’s just my opinion anyway.

I hereby take back my words about Croft, the transition to TV has suited him. Not really fussed about not having more hours of analysis than there was racing.

Surprised to see so many minor quibbles posted, guess I just don’t care about those things.