Chris Alexander
27th July, 2013
There’s a lot of talk - in F1 circles at least - about F1 in America.
The Grand Prix of the Americas in Texas last year was a huge success. This is not a surprise as they had a great track, spent a lot of money, and lots of people went to watch it.
However, having got up at 5am today to watch the Hungarian GP qualifying (and Sky Sports not being available) I had to watch it on NBC sports.
Now I don’t really enjoy F1 on Sky if I’m honest - it’s too shouty and too many graphics and gimmicks (gimme the racing). NBC sports is far worse.
During the 1 hour qualifying session, there were 10 ad breaks. 5 of these were in the qualifying itself. So out of 45 minutes of track time, I reckon I saw 20-25 minutes tops.
Qualifying spoiler alert!
Additionally, the commentators didn’t really know what was going on - there was only one guy in the pit lane, the rest were somewhere in the US, and it showed. They claimed Paul di Resta’s last lap in Q1 looked good, where after sector 2 he was half a second off the 16th place time. They totally missed Hamilton taking pole (they only realised afterwards). They generally just stopped talking randomly - hugely frustrating.
Let’s hope we can get a connection to Sky tomorrow…