Why F1 is selling fans short on TV

Formula 1 cars are fast. Even a few years ago, when many claimed they weren't, they were seriously quick by any measure. In 2017, they are the fastest cars ever around conventional road courses. The problem is, they don't look that way to many of those watching most of the time.

At Copse during the British Grand Prix weekend, cars were taking the right hander in the neighbourhood of 180mph. That's a corner taken two-and-a-half times faster than you can legally go on any road in the country Silverstone is in. Not that you'd have known that while watching the television coverage - which many of those viewers have to pay serious money for.

Even trackside spectators can sometimes find it difficult to pick out the speed. Silverstone does have some excellent viewing positions, but it also has some less impressive ones. By necessity, often the crowd is some distance from the cars, and it's the same problem for television viewers with cameras often located in far from the optimum places to capture speed.

At Copse, the turn in does grab you on television, but the prodigious apex speed less so. This isn't helped by one of the most frustrating paradoxes of racing cars that often the faster they are, the less obviously they move around and the slower they look.

The classic Silverstone example is Ronnie Peterson drifting his Lotus - far slower than a current car, far more obviously spectacular. And contrary to the belief of many, using crossply tyres and less advanced machinery to slide a car in that obviously dramatic manner is not actually harder than keeping a contemporary car close to in line on the limit.

The problem of how much the cars move around is one for another day. But the question here is why exactly F1, and motorsport in general, can be so bad at translating one of the key selling points to those watching. There is some low-hanging fruit here for F1's television coverage to work on.

For example, if you were watching the British Grand Prix, how many times was there a graphic on screen telling you a car's apex speed at Copse? Or any other corner for that matter. This data is available to those putting together the broadcast, yet is under-used.

Wouldn't it be interesting, say, to be able to compare the apex speeds for Lewis Hamilton, Valtteri Bottas, Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel on a given lap? So not only do you understand the speed better, but also who is doing what.

Then take corners such as Maggotts/Becketts/Chapel. I watched there during Friday morning practice at Silverstone. A spot at the entry to the fast, five-part left/right/left/right/left sequence is among the most spectacular locations at the British GP venue.

The DRS detection line, which is the spot where the gap between two cars is assessed to decide whether or not they can use the DRS on the Hangar Straight, is at the entry to the corner. Wouldn't it be great to have that as a timing line, with another timing line just off the sequence?

Sometimes I have timed such sections by hand from trackside, and the results can be interesting. Wouldn't you have liked to know how Hamilton and second-placed Raikkonen compared through there during qualifying?

And while there are four speed traps on F1 circuits, one at each sector end and the main speed trap, why not tell people how quick drivers are going at key points through that sequence? That would be ideal for television.

Even for trackside watchers, why not put up a little display that tells you the time it has taken each car through to cover that sequence? This would all add to the enjoyment at the same time as emphasising that these cars are going spectacularly quickly.

It was interesting that the cars were most obviously spectacular through that part of the circuit when they were at their slowest. On Friday morning, during the first runs, most cars were thumping the ground hard and sending sparks out. As time went on, that happened less and less. The cars were quicker, but there was less to grab the senses.

Again, this emphasises that quicker is not fundamentally more spectacular. It's great that the cars are faster than they have ever been, but you need to ensure that is conveyed to those watching. There's also untapped potential in onboard cameras and, in particular those mounted on drivers' helmets - both need to convey the kinds of loads that that these cars are under.

Recently, IndyCar has taken the lead on what it calls 'visor cam', with a camera mounted just above the driver's eye-line in the middle of their helmet. Onboard videos from this position appear on its official YouTube round from every race weekend, and occasionally they are used in the races too.

Look back to an onboard, over-the-shoulder, shot of an F1 car from the 1980s and it looks savage compared to today. Yes, part of that is down to the cars, but counter-intuitively it's as if the onboard cameras are too good today at stabilising everything.

There are other things that can be done using the television coverage that could work very well. Sky Sports F1 has, for some years, done side-by-side onboard analysis comparing first and second in qualifying. These are excellent. Fellow UK broadcaster Channel 4 does something similar, including a graphic that shows how the gap between the two cars is increasing or decreasing at any moment.

But remember when the defunct Formula One Teams' Association was at its strongest, before Bernie Ecclestone's divide-and-rule tactics led to it falling apart as various teams scrabbled to sign up to the best commercial terms they could get? One of the ideas it proposed was the so-called 'line comparison'.

This overlaid two cars running through the same corner, and while the line element was interesting it was actually the relative speed that was fascinating. This apparently wasn't the work of a moment to generate, but you won't see a better illustration of how braking later doesn't make you faster than a shot comparing Raikkonen and stand-in Ferrari team-mate Luca Badoer taking a slow corner in Valencia in 2009.

Badoer braked later and harder, and early in the comparison he was actually ahead. Then as the corner progressed, Raikkonen pulled ahead and blasted away, carrying higher speed when it counted and getting a much faster exit. Such shots were generated a handful of times, but where are they now?

Television viewers have come to expect a certain level of sophistication from sports broadcasting. When you watch cricket, you expect the ball-tracking HawkEye function to be used and in football you take it as read that there will be goal-line graphics that show whether or not a ball has crossed the line.

But in F1, while effort has been made to improve the graphics, there doesn't seem to be the will to maximise the opportunity. This isn't helped by the fact that, unlike the Sky Sports' coverage of football or cricket in the UK, the sporting action itself isn't produced by the television company, but done centrally.

So this means it falls to F1, specifically the much-vaunted Formula One Group, to find those gamechanging improvements as part of its 'world feed' that is provided to paying broadcasters. The ideas above - more speed figures, shorter timed segment comparisons, comparative overlays - could be dropped into broadcasts and add so much enjoyment for those watching.

If you're in a relatively dull phase of the race where things are pretty static, it's a great toolbox of such on-screen devices to dip into. If the racing is spectacular and every time you look at the television something is happening, then you don't need to use these tricks, but at other times it's a great way to bring F1 to life.

This doesn't mean you need to weigh down the viewer with data. You pick out the relevant information and present it in a digestible way not just to give whoever is watching what they need to understand what they are watching, but also to bring back that wow factor.

It's essential that the sole priority isn't just to cover the circuit with a relatively low number of cameras and to ensure that those who have paid for trackside signage get plenty of screen time, although since F1's change of ownership there are signs that the latter is becoming less dominant in how the track action is shot.

With the right will, such changes (and there are many more ideas that could be incorporated) could be made with relative ease. While the problems of the cars require a much longer-term approach, this is about making the most of data that is already available to those producing the television coverage. In fact, the extent of live data from the cars that gets piped into those producing the main feed is absolutely unbelievable.

It's not that F1 has completely ignored all this. We can see speeds sometimes, g-forces are indicated, the reaction time at the start graphic was first used in Austria. This is all positive, but right now it all feels a little bit ad hoc. The surface has been scratched well, but it's time for a deep dive into what is achievable.

After taking pole position for the British Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton attempted to explain the feeling of driving these cars. Tally what he says with what you're seeing on television, and from some vantage points even from trackside, and you have to ask if F1 is doing itself justice.

"It's unbelievable, it's like an F-22 Raptor fighter jet with the speed we go through these corners," said Hamilton. "Today, through Stowe we're doing like 140mph, through Copse we're doing 180mph - pretty fast.

"Try to imagine what that's like and times it by 100."

And there, in a nutshell, Hamilton has explained just how big the difference between what he feels and what everyone else in the world can see. It's never going to be possible to exactly replicate the feeling, even with some advanced VR in the future, but F1 can certainly find ways to do a little better.

Perhaps with a little more resource diverted in that direction, F1 could produce cutting edge race coverage that raises the bar and showcases grand prix cars better than ever before.