u/Grizzly2302

The TV direction was atrocious again this weekend. The first half of the race could have been salvaged by showing literally any of the midfield battles (yes, even AM and Cadillac duking it out for last place) but instead we got ~30 laps of the frontrunners doing nothing. Virtually no helicopter shots of the city, no footage from the garages or the pit wall, just the same trackside camera shots of the same few cars over and over and over again. They didn't show Stroll stopped on track, almost all of Antonelli’s overtakes were picture-in-picture, and it felt like they barely even showed the cars piling into the pit lane when the safety car came out.

I follow F2 and F3, and those TV broadcasts feel completely different. If there's an incident, even just a back marker stopped on track, they usually cut away to show it. We see midfield battles and when something does get missed, it's shown on replay. And the replay actually shows the action.

My point is, if they can do it for the Junior Formulas, they could do it for F1. So why are they choosing not to? What's more important to F1 than racing?

Oh, right. Money.

Why were there no helicopter shots of the city? Because you can't see advertising boards from that far away. Why aren't the camera operators following the action properly? Because they've been told to keep the advertising boarding in shot. Crucially: why aren't they cutting away to midfield battles anymore? Because the more the broadcast deviates from the fixed shot-by-shot of the front pack driving around doing nothing, the more likely they are to accidentally give one sponsor less airtime. If, by pure coincidence, nothing happens in front of the Qatar Airways boards in Baku then what did Qatar Airways pay for?

F1 has to find ways to make more money, deliver more growth, take up more space, and if their audience boom is slowing, they have to wring more margin out of what they have.

This desperation for growth is what drives the hyper-monetisation of everything from sport to social media to supermarket aisles; every inch of real estate your eyes fall on is an opportunity to sell advertising space. Think 2mins of unskippable ads in an 8min YouTube video. Think news sites with two lines of article for every four ads on your phone screen. Think Instagram feeds where every third post is sponsored. It you're asking more sponsors for more money, you have to deliver them the eyes of your viewers, and this is why F2 and F3, with their smaller, less lucrative viewership has been spared from F1’s broadcast nonsense.

F1 has always been a commercial venture but there are millions of viewers, teams and drivers who love it as a sport, and I'm gutted that even in the years I've been watching, F1 have been so quick to gut their own product in the name of profit.