Watched the ITV F1 season review this morning, it was actually very good. They filmed it from testing at Jerez earlier this month.

Now, I'm watching Speed TV's F1 season review. So far, so good...

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I did't see the ITV review , but saw the SPEED TV review , which i thought gave an excellent review of happenings in F1 in 2007

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Speed TV did do a very good analysis of the 2007 season, slightly better than ITV's.

But which was more enjoyable to watch? ITV's, because it mentioned about other issues which happened too, not just the races.

Both were great tthough.

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ITV missed an opportunity to ask Brundle what he thinks of his current dispute with the FIA.

It was completely skipped over, yet it could mean we never see his grid walks again.

Journalistic licence is a very important part of democracy, and for Martin/Sunday Times to be sued for saying what most of the F1 Fans probably thought is a very bad end to the year - so why wasn't it mentioned?

Sean

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Supporting McLaren and Force India in F1 and Ralf Schumacher in DTM

I should think a lot of what he has to say is sub judice.

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Speed is life

I think ITV and Martin Brundle wanted to stay low-key on the subject, to avoid adding more fuel to the fire, which to be honest now is unnecessary personally.

I think Martin has made his point twice, the FIA responded. I agree entirely with what Martin said in his columns, but now's the time to draw a line under it.

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That's probably true.

Hey, I bumped into a mate of Ralf Schumacher's yesterday in the pub... he runs a sidecar-racing team locally but karted with Ralf many years ago... they still keep in touch...

We were both lamenting how little coverage anything but F1 gets in the UK...

Sean

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Supporting McLaren and Force India in F1 and Ralf Schumacher in DTM

Now that's interesting Sean, maybe Ralf can go and drive there again?

I think we are quite lucky with the motorsport coverage we get nower days. Sure if you've only got terrestrial TV your only limited to live F1, BTCC race 3, and some Nascar highlights.

But if you have Sky TV, then you have all the above, but including DTM, Euro F3, WRC stages, WTCC, FIA GT, ALMS, LMS, IRL Champ Car etc all live.

A huge improvement!

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You're telling me, 20 years ago there was no satellite/cable and only F1 had any sort of real tv coverage. I remember the Beeb would occasionally show Le Mans highlights, and they did show the rallysprint end of year type of thing, but by and large you followed other forms of motorsport through the pages of Autosport on a Thursday.

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In the Daily Telegraph, Kevin Garside made the well-received point that even if Mosley had criticised JYS's comedy music hall trousers, at least they remained round his waist, not his ankles...

Funny how times change, you can see almost every series on TV and live, and that's defintely a change for the best.

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I think that for the person who doesn't have Sky there's less motorsport than there was before.

I remember watching all sorts of racing live in the 90s on the BBC Grandstand... including BTCC, F1 and bikes. Similarly we'd get live Athletics on BBC2 some evenings, boxing on ITV and allsorts.

The truth is that sport has lost out completely in the terrestrial arena since satellite and cable came along...

We're sports fans, so we watch. But the majority of the population are now far less likely to watch many sports than they were years ago because they don't "happen upon it" like they used to do when surfing their 4 available channels in, say, 1988.

Sean

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Supporting McLaren and Force India in F1 and Ralf Schumacher in DTM

Yes your right, I think times have changed a lot. As you say, sport has lost out on terrestrial due to the rise of Sky Sports and Eurosport, and now Sentanta and others. Also, due to the rising popularity of digital.

Do I actually care that very little sport is shown on terrestrial TV?

No, because times change and soon everybody will have to have digital anyway.

Sky is brilliant, nearly sport is broadcasted.

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I disagree

Because "finding" skiing as a child on "Ski Sunday", turning on Grandstand on a Saturday to find out what was on (and ITV's "World of Sport" of course) and the Athletics/Boxing etc. on miscellaneous nights was how I DISCOVERED sport.

My generation looked up to folks like Steve Cram, Seb Coe and Steve Ovett as godlike figures, Nigel Mansell and James Hunt... not to mention Barry McGuigan and Frank Bruno and, of course, Torvill and Dean.

Nowadays you ask the average child who anybody is in sport (excepting, of course, football) and they look at you blankly.

And they wonder why it is so hard to find sponsorship.

We are privileged... we pay huge amounts of money to Sky to supply us with all these channels and we choose to watch motorsport but the truth is that is exactly what others are doing too.

So instead of "having to watch" motorsport before the football comes on, the football fan simply goes to the football and never discovers how exciting motorsport can be... and those who don't even like football, well they just keep watching repeats of "Lizzie McGuire" or "Friends".

It ain't like it used to be, mate.

And I think the lack of turnout at "Race of Champions" proves this.

Sean

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Supporting McLaren and Force India in F1 and Ralf Schumacher in DTM

Tell you what!

I'm going to tell Ralf's mate that I'll do him a website for a trivial amount and I will then make sure it gets huge search engine rankings... so when you Google "motorsport" F1 etc. will get lower hits than offroad sidecar racing.

How cool would that be? Offroad sidecar racing becomes the top sport in the UK search engine rankings...

Sean

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Supporting McLaren and Force India in F1 and Ralf Schumacher in DTM

I seriously doubt a comitted football fan would suddenly take a vaugue interest in motorsport though. I mean both F1 and BTCC are shown on ITV1, so that should give them a taster if they were going to be tempted in the first place.

The reason why I think Sky is so great is because it allows us motorsport fans to watch channels soley based on that, you get a deeper analyis of what's going on. Same for football fans too. If it was all on terristial you'd get coverage which appeals to beginners and the general public, not very in-depth.

Compare ITV's F1 coverage to Speed TV's coverage, because Speed is a cable channel in US they are allowed to go into much deeper analysis, its created for like-minded racing fans. ITV has to appeal to the general public. And thats the exact reason why think ITV need to put there digital channel's to better use, rather than putting repeats of Coronation Street and other programmes.

We could see the live practice sessions, for example. And thw whole race weekend could be more concentrated on the die hard fans.

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