So what did you all think of the new qualifying rules? I was sceptical before the weekend, but now I'm actually quite impressed. Friday is now massively more interesting for spectators (definitely worthy of televising) and the main qualifying was far more interesting to watch. Some of the spectacle of 18 cars rushing out in the last five minutes is lost, but I think that's more than offset by having action to watch in the first 30 minutes. Viewing an empty track used to be a little boring!

The Minardi twist was a lot of fun, although I'm sure they won't be able to get away with that for long!

Rob
(The have to be some F1 fans here, right? If not, sorry, go back to whatever you were doing!)

I'm one!

Yeah... qualifying is more interesting now that they have ONE lap. Not sure if McLaren enjoyed it though! I like how they can't touch the cae until 2.5 hours before the race!

They also have to start the race on the fuel they had at the end of qualifying, so not all teams will have shown their hand today. If Ferarri are that quick on a full tank then its season over! Especially since its last years car! Should be interesting!

I'm not so convinced. I only tended to watch the last 20 minutes of qualifying before and it tended to be quite exciting, with new fastest laps coming every 30 seconds or less as the hour closed.

Today was much less exciting to me, you have to wait 2 minutes between each new time.

The biggest loss to me however is F1 Digital+. I was in heaven last season, paying my six quid a race (with a season ticket) for quality coverage. But Bernie pulled the plug this year so I am back to ITV.

The world feed that ITV use just does not compare to the Bernievision feeds from last year. Add to that the dire pap that the ITV team surround the coverage with plus the advert breaks and watching is just plain painful.

I am seriously considering not watching many races this year. I will give the first couple a go and see how I get on.

I'm desparately hoping that Bernievision will be back in some form next year.

As to the rest of the rule changes, we will have to see. I am very pleased to see driver aids on the way out, some of the other don't seem to make as much sense.

So now it's all over, what do you think of the result?

It was quite an interesting race, but I'm not sure that it had much to do with the new rules through. Good to see that the other teams have caught up a bit on Ferrari. Very odd not to see someone in a red outfit on the podium somewhere.

As expected the ITV coverage was awful compared to last year's F1 Digital+ coverage. If I every met Jame Allen on the street I would have to resist the urge to strangle him. Why do they feel the need to fill every second of the broadcast with either Martin or Jame talking ? If there isn't anything interesting to say about the current bit of footage then shut the [censored] up !

Thankfully I was watching my Sky+ recording of the race so skipping over the ads and the drivel before the race was easy. When it comes to watching the races live I'm going to try listening to the Radio5 sound and watching the ITV pictures, time to dig my old OnDigital box out and tune it into Freeview...

The race was fantastic, it had every element you could want - great tactics, failed tactics, crashes, errors, recoveries, pit drama, and no Ferrari on the podium It's great to see my team of choice get 1-3 and it serves me right for being unfaithful and putting MS on my FantasyF1 grid!

I think I may be the only F1 fan in the UK who thinks the ITV coverage is pretty good. I didn't sign up for digital last year because I like the ITV commentary, and couldn't find any info at all on who would be commentating for Sky.

I also Tivo'd the race to skip the ads, although the breaks were so short I probably spent more time over shooting and backing up a bit.

Rob

I think I may be the only F1 fan in the UK who thinks the ITV coverage is pretty good. I didn't sign up for digital last year because I like the ITV commentary, and couldn't find any info at all on who would be commentating for Sky.

Trust me Rob, if you had seen the F1 Digital+ coverage you would understand why people think the ITV coverage is so lousy.

The basic footage was so much better than the normal feed, because they had many times the number of cameras than the local broadcasters that supply the feed for ITV. I was very funny to have Martin and James going on about how brilliant the in car shots were. On the digital service last year one of the 8 sub channels was dedicated to showing in car shots throughout the race and all those fancy cameras were available on all the cars.

I watched a few races on ITV as well last year to compare. So often some major event would occur where the host broadcaster didn't have a camera, or while ITV were on an ad break. When you were hearing Martin/James say "we hope will get to see x in a minute..." we on the digital service saw the event from three camera angles 30 seconds ago. It really was that bad.

I'm really not looking forward to those races where the host broadcaster is not up to much. At Brazil it tends to be particularly hopless and the Italian races the screen is filled with red cars all the time, even if something else is happening...

The commentry was also far better on the digital service. Martin Brundle is excellent and Tony Jardine can be quite interesting, but the rest of the team are so awful (though I suspect Louise could be decent given half a chance).

On the digital service you could effectively chose between two commentry teams throughout the race. You had the pundits in the studio, there were normally three of them, but who it was tended to vary race by race (though Damon Hill popped up fairly regularly). The studio team spent didn't comment on each and every event in the race, but tended to go off on more wide ranging discussions about F1 and the world in general.

The other commentary team focus on commenting on the detailed events in the race. One of the commentators was John Watson, I'm not sure who the other one was (Ben someone or other I think). The difference between their commentary and Martin/James is that they assumed that you were already a fan of F1 and knew what was going on.

The actual main supposed selling point of the digital service of being able to switch cameras wasn't actually that important to me. To be honest I spent most of the time on the same camera anyway. I would quite happily pay 6 quid a race for a digital service that consisted simply of a single channel, with the footage of the quality I had last year and the ability to switch the audio between the studio and John Watson, oh and no adverts.

If the rumours are correct and something like the digital service returns next year then make sure you see at least one race on it...

Because you mention the quality of races from other countries, how do you rate the broadcast from Australia? even if much of the coverage is done by imported crew, it seems, from your description, that it is still better than some others.

You guess correctly, the Australian broadcasters usually manage a decent quality of coverage. If they behaved the same as some of the other host broadcasters we would have spent our time watching the Minardi team all day...

The host broadcaster for Australia actually changed this year, but they managed the same quality as previous races (given the resources available to them, i.e. the lack of cameras compared to last year's digital service).