MS: “I don’t want to count too much into betting, let’s stay on real
terms, and tomorrow we’ll know more.” [Exits with obvious relief.]
You could almost hear the leaves shrivelling on the trees, the tumbleweed
blowing through the paddock.
This is the reality of practice days on the F1 circuit, days when tight-lipped
drivers leave TV pundits with little to talk about but the geekery of
nose-cones, end-plates and gear-ratios.
Nothing against Pinkham, who is what my gran used to call “a brick”. And bear
in mind that it could have been even worse: what if the fastest driver on
the day had been Kimi Raikkonen, a man who makes Schumacher look like Peter
Ustinov?
But this is a tough ask for Sky. They have taken a sport whose business end
produces roughly 40 hours of head-to-head racing in an entire season, and
given it more than 1500 hours of programming.
It is a hugely ambitious project, which is bound to create a few longueurs in
between the moments of high drama.
It all stems from Sky’s core belief that there is always more to say about
sport, always more detail to tease out.
Certainly that was true in the early 1990s, when the BBC were running five
cameras at the average football match. But today there would probably be 20.
The whole business is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
The danger is that, by turning up our sporting microscope to maximum power, we
remind everyone what an odd business sport is in the first place.
I mean, here you are, on the sofa on a Friday morning, watching the following
exchange on the F1 Show. Georgie Thompson: “So what has surprised us today?”
Ted Kravitz: “The fact that we haven’t really learned anything.”
In Sky’s defence, Thursday night’s practice sessions were always going to be a
tough sell. At this stage in the season, there is no narrative of rivalry
established among the drivers, and no-one knows anything useful about the
cars’ performance.
As Christian Horner put it, in a vivid if unexpectedly laddish turn of phrase,
you have to wait until qualifying before “everybody pulls their trousers
down”.
The other problem is the question of which audience to address: casual sports
fans or F1 fundamentalists?
The latter group, who are surprisingly numerous, were surely lapping up all
the hints and rumours, not to mention a stats package which revealed that
the “FIA’s specified depth for a gravel trap is 25cm”.
For the rest of us, the best moment was the split-screen graphic that showed
what Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button were doing with their steering wheels
while going round the last corner of Albert Park.
Button could have been on his way to Sainsbury’s, while Alonso was fighting
his car as if it was a “frisky steer”, in the colourful words of commentator
David Croft.
Sky’s analytical team started well, with the smoothly articulate Damon Hill
already looking like the signing of the season. But they will be glad when
the racing starts and they have a little more material to work with.
In the meantime, Sky have thoughtfully provided us with that magic x30 button
to dip in and out of of the interesting bits.