Like a swan cruising across a lake, a Formula 1 TV broadcast might give the impression of seamless grace… but, below the surface, the legs are paddling hard. GP Racing delves behind the scenes with Sky Sports F1 to see how the magic happens
WORDS OLEG KARPOV PICTURES
It’s Friday morning, three minutes into the planning meeting for the final round of the championship. The Sky Sports F1 production team are briefing their colleagues on the day’s programme – but a momentary distraction causes a brief pause.
“Can you note that down?” asks Simon Lazenby – a presenter who has been with the Sky team since it started broadcasting F1 in 2012 – as he turns to GP Racing. “Terrible production,” he jokes, and leans back in his chair, satisfied to have provoked a burst of laughter in the room. The first, but by no means the last, joke directed at an outsider allowed into Sky’s field operations centre in the TV compound area of the Abu Dhabi circuit.
On-site producer Tommy Herz and his colleague Jess Medland, who is in the meeting remotely from the London base, are going over a 21-page second-by-second practice day coverage plan – copies of which have been handed out to everyone by Sky’s director of F1 Billy McGinty.
It resembles to some extent the engineering briefing setup of an actual F1 team. There’s many monitors feeding back the picture from the track – F2 practice has just got under way – and various timing screens. A proper intercom system is in place, connecting those at the track with the UK staff, who are also seen on one of the screens.
The biggest difference from an engineering debrief is just that it’s a bit more relaxed. “It’s not as structured as it would be in an F1 team,” explains Anthony Davidson, one of the many Sky presenters to have seen the sport from both sides, as driver and pundit. “For them, it’s down to the second – if the meeting is to start at 12:00, that’s when it starts, not a second later, and everybody waits for their turn. Here anybody can open their mic and talk, even if it’s just for a joke. It was funny when Bernie [Collins, former Aston Martin strategist] joined us this year, she’d shush anyone who spoke out of turn.”
In addition to McGinty, Herz, Lazenby and Davidson, the on-site meeting also includes all the other key figures in the weekend’s coverage – commentary duo David Croft and Martin Brundle, reporter Rachel Brooks, presenters Ted Kravitz and Naomi Schiff, coordinator Emma Chapman, website correspondent
