Were you surprised to read Ross Brawn’s comments that the British TV coverage of F1 is not good enough? On one level, seeing as I had understood him to be friendly with the presenters, yes. But on another, of course not. He was the technical director of a multi-championship winning team. I don’t think there was anyone on that grid who had more information available to them at any one time. As Alex and I have long since known, though, the TV coverage is simply not enough to follow a race. At the very least, you need to be viewing the live-timing from F1.com. But there is more out there, much more, that could help: the telemetry, for instance, and accurate pit-timings would ease a lot of confusion. When watching it on TV, I often feel the commentators are as lost as me – when really they should be guiding us through what is happening.

The question is, though, are Ross Brawn’s comments aimed at British TV in particular, or TV in general? It could be possible that, working for Ferrari, he has seen a lot of Italian TV coverage, and generally approved – I believe they normally show every session of a weekend live, for instance. Anyway, what all of this points toward is a very strange picture we couldn’t have imagined 5 years ago: Michael and Ross sitting on a couch watching F1. Surely we should ask them to join sofaF1?