Turning the airwaves blue

As F1 looks to ways of improving the show both for TV viewers and spectators at the track, it has been suggested more than once that teams should open up their radio transmissions both to broadcasters and spectators with scanners, as they do in NASCAR.

BAR team principal David Richards said at Indianapolis: "I think that one-lap qualifying [due to disappear from Silverstone onwards] would have been significantly improved if you had an interface from the television into the car on the slowing down lap and you could get the immediate reactions from a driver about his lap. I don't think we've made the most of single lap qualifying and the way it is presented."

The natural extension of that is to open up radios during the race too, but Eddie Jordan said with a smile: "All ideas are good, put them on the table, but I'm not sure that we would want to hear some of the things that are said during the middle of a race. Some of the stuff is pretty basic, to say the least! Would it have parental control?"

Jaguar Racing's Tony Purnell, however, suggested that F1's needs are more basic, but in a very different sense.

"I certainly support opening up the radios, but it's tickling the edges. I think that to make grand prix racing more entertaining we just have to do something to make the cars overtake more easily because fans want to see bunches of cars and overtaking. We just don't have that, and we need to."