Sky has today announced its team for the 2012 F1 coverage and the main chaps seem awfully familiar.

David Croft has jumped ship from BBC Radio 5live and has taken up the Martin Brundle role of lead commentator.

Martin Brundle himself will be the eyecandy of the new coverage and in the commentary box will be being David Coulthard next year.

Ant Davidson will be commentating on the bits that the big boys can’t be arsed.

Ted Kravitz will be Ted Kravitz.

Natalie Pinkham will carry on being Tony Jardine

Steve Rider will be Jake Humphrey AND Eddie Jordan.

No one has been confirmed as Eddie Jordan’s Shirts… yet.

In terms of coverage it does actually sound all quite good, with full showings of all sessions, more in depth analysis, getting to see things like the drivers parades and those other bits we always moan about not seeing as well as lots of promises of new innovations and technical wizardry.

So who is left at the BBC? When he’s not off doing the Olympics or whatever else needs a furrowed brow we presume that Jake Humphrey will carry on with his diminishing group of ‘friends’ watching and, what with their names not being mentioned today DC and EJ are probably staying put.

But will DC commentate on his own? Not likely. Unbelievably it’s already being rumoured that Jonathan Legard or James Allen might be back in the shitseat which leads us to conclude that Sky have paid for their BBC coverage to make the Sky £10 a month F1 channel more appealing to us.

Today I took part in an awkward Press conference over the phone with Brundle, Croft and Kravitz alongside a host of other F1 podcasts and websites. I had one serious question and one silly question lined up, but due to the weird vagaries of a conference call I only spoke up to ask

“With Eddie Jordan not being announced, can you confirm there’ll be no bad poetry at the start of the shows next year?”

I don’t think they found it funny…

2011 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Kevin and Terry manage to be rude to an entire country, the holocaust, the memory of Sir Jimmy Saville, Massa’s face, culling dead weight drivers, Sky Subscribers and barely get round to mentioning another dull Abu Dhabi GP.

2011 Japanese, Korean & Indian Grands Prix

Another impromptu break and the boys are back to discuss a two times world champion, a desperate rubens, a sad lewis, Rowan Atkinson’s funny face, Massa’s language and The Ever Present Issue of Sexy Drivers

Sorry folks, the championship winning Japanese podcast is a bit delayed, we’ll bundle it with one about Korea.

Force India, which has now been confusingly dubbed Sahara Force India after a buyout from a chap called Sahara India Pariwar (and not from the African desert (which sets 2012′s confusion post-lotusgate to be people pointing out that Saraha isn’t in India)) has unveiled its new logo.

And it doesn’t auger well for Jordan-Spyker-Midland-Sahara-Force-India team to be investing much in the coming seasons as it was clearly just done in Word…

…they’ve not even picked a nice font or anything.

So, we would guess that Sutil will stay for another 32 years.

2011 Singapore Grand Prix

The first night podcast takes place in Kevin & Terry’s busy schedules as they reluctantly realise that this year is a bit, well, boring…

Vettel’s in the lead, Massa’s got a nark on, Kimi might be back and they are sleepy

2011 Italian Grand Prix & Catch Up

Kevin and Terry fleetingly remember the races they’ve missed and soon get back into the swing of calling people cunts as they recap the German, Hungarian, Belgian and Italian Grands Prix, as well as the Sky falling in on F1.

Hello, Terry here.

Sorry, you’re probably all wondering where the hell we’ve been, no podcasts, no witty tedious blog posts, not even any live tweeting of races.

Well, I’d like to say that when F1 took its summer break we slept through the alarm and missed the races, figuratively waking up with that ‘oh shit’ feeling.

But thats not true, the snooze button may have been activated, but it was busy other lives that got in the way.

Kevin has been up in Edinburgh, the thing that usually kills this podcast in the summer and despite lofty plans of skyping a podcast we never quite got round to it.

And I’ve been off working and, dare I say it, taking a holiday. I was in Berlin for the last race and struggling to find anyone that cared despite Schumacher/Vettel in the news. And then finding wifi to tweet about the fact no one cares was a mission in itself.

NEVER FEAR though, dear podcast listeners, we’ll be back next week for an Italian GP podcast and a bumper catch up of the 300 races we’ve missed.

Probably…

As I write this there are news reports flooding over twitter about Jenson Button being in a serious car crash as reported on his official website:

Text states:

“Jenson Button, 31, is in a critical condition after being involved in a serious accident. Jenson was taken to Budapest’s AEK hospital where he is undergoing medical attention. It’s unclear what injuries Jenson sustained during the accident at this time.

Jenson’s team is in contact with the FIA and currently discussing whether he is able to race tomorrow at the Hungaroring.”

After a minute or two of confusion I started to smell a strong whiff of bullshit. BBC News 24 wasn’t reporting it and no ‘real’ F1 people were twittering.

Checking the news article showed a picture of the wrecked car, this was either a sick joke or the most brain dead/insensitive* press person deciding that a quick snap of the crash was needed to add a bit of spicce to an otherwise dull news feed.

Plus the car crash photo was in daylight, Hungary is only an hour ahead of London and if this crash did happen in daylight hours then something would have leaked by now.

The twitter world soon moved into action and within minutes the source of this photo was traced to this story on the Top Gear site (sorry, but you’ll have to try and ignore Richard Hammond’s smug face), dating from 2010.

At time of writing there is no other word from any official sources so I think it’s a fair guess that it’s a website hack (although my geeky self is impressed, it’s a flash site and they seem to have replicated it), or if it is true, someone on Jenson Button’s site thought the news article needed pepping up with an image from another crash to illustrate the point.

Either way I think a webmaster is getting fired tonight.

We’ll update this as and when, leave thoughts/info in the comments

*I’m aware that if this does turn out to be true then using a phrase like brain-dead might be more insensitive.

UPDATE: PS: At least its not this joke again…

UPDATE 2: All a hoax, his management have confirmed.

and the BBC is now reporting the story… as a hoax.

Relax everybody

What larks!

The BBC and Sky have announced that the F1 coverage will be split between them from 2012, or rather, Sky have announced they’ll be showing all the races and will be throwing meagre scraps of coverage to its poorer cousin, sharing in the same sense that a bully ‘shares’ his victims sandwiches.

Obviously there’s uproar from all of us without a sky box, including Martin Whitmarsh who thinks this breaks a fundamental thing in the concorde agreement (that secret document that has what’s in it discussed so often that by deciphering the last decade of F1 news we can probably assemble the whole thing) as it says F1 should be free-to-air.

I’m sure some people will point at the BBC licence fee as a paradox of this.

But the deeper question is whether this will happen at all? Bernie has announced it by holding a big surprise party of a press release. And if there’s one thing F1 fans know is that if Bernie says something is happening then it probably won’t.

Either there’ll be a massive 6music style uproar (I like a good twibbon) and the BBC will keep it all, or there won’t be and Sky will have their way.

The BBC will say it’s like Wimbledon, no one bothers to watch the other tennis tournaments, and they all basically work towards the world rankings like a championship. Or the FA Cup final, or other Blue Riband (hang on, isn’t that a type of wafer?) events. And in truth there’s probably a point there. Yes, *we* all get up at 3am for the Faraway and Dull Grand Prix, but most don’t, most will be happy with highlights and a spot on BBC Three’s 60 second news.

So what next?

My main concern is that if this does happen then the biggest victim will be the lack of consistency over coverage. Will BBC and Sky share presenters/commentators? Doubtful. So will Brundle, DC, EJ et al jump ship to the higher money, leaving Jakey-Wakey to talk to Jonathon Legard in an empty room (that’s a recurring nightmare of mine, btw). Will BBC coverage slowly degenerate into the days when it was a segment on Grandstand like the old Mexican Grands Prix or will The British Grand Prix become more of an event, like a Wimbledon?

FiveLive will still broadcast all races, so will this become the new de facto coverage to keep that consistency, or will Crofty be moved to fill a Brundle shaped BBC hole, or make his own home at Sky?

As ever there are more questions than answers right now, and if I know one thing about F1 is that the end result won’t be quite what we expect.

Leave your views in the comments, I think this might get messy.

But in the meantime I’m off to get a sky subscription, and to see if there are any jobs going for the new coverage…