If the fingers-in-the-air guesstimations are correct, Apple’s new five-year deal to carry Formula 1 on its streaming platform is worth around $140million a year.
Now, imagine a world in which broadcasting grands prix on TV was considered irksome and even damaging to the business.
Bernie Ecclestone remains a polarising figure, but it was he who turned F1 from a niche sporting category into a cash cow with a global footprint, and he did it by going against prevailing wisdoms of the time. Indeed, those who remember him solely as the guy who kept F1 off social media and told the youth demographic to take a hike until they could afford a Rolex are overlooking his history of swashbuckling innovation.
Viewers tuning in to coverage of the 1953 British Grand Prix would have been more likely to see horse racing from Ascot
Photo by: Autocar / Stringer
The early days of F1 on TV
Filmed coverage of motor racing predates widespread television ownership, dating back to the days when the only way to watch the news was to go to the cinema. There, the main picture would be preceded not by exhortations to buy noisy comestibles at the concession stand, but by a supporting package including newsreel footage of recent events, including sports.
In the postwar era, national broadcasters became more ambitious as more households bought televisions. Despite the primitive technology available, they began to dabble in producing more extensive live sports coverage, as well as highlights packages. Until videotape became more widely available during the late 1950s, these were usually produced by training a film camera on a screen showing the live footage (a process known as telerecording) and then cutting the film manually.
It’s difficult to establish definitively which races were broadcast, when and how since not all the footage remains extant. TV listings in various countries give a guide, but there is no guarantee that shows proceeded as billed. Film stock degrades if improperly stored, can be lost or stolen, or otherwise vanish into private collections, while early videotape was so expensive that programmes were routinely wiped after broadcast so the tapes could be re-used.
The Radio Times from 12 July 1953, freely available online via the BBC Genome project – you’ll have to click through a disclaimer saying you may encounter old-fashioned and offensive content – gives a snapshot of how UK viewers might have got to see live coverage of grand prix racing. Or not.
This was the British Grand Prix meeting, held on a Saturday of course, so as to preserve the bucolic country peace on Sundays. Depending on whether the races actually aligned with the planned slots, at 10am viewers would have been able to see Stirling Moss beat Eric Brandon and Stuart Lewis-Evans in the 500cc F3 support race, with commentary by Raymond Baxter. Then it was off to the main sporting business of the day – no, not the British GP, but the horse racing at Ascot.
Grand prix racing was a much lower-tech enterprise in 1953, and not just because the championship races were for F2 cars
Photo by: Autocar / Stringer
Between the King George VI and the Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the Princess Margaret Stakes, and the Sandringham Stakes, the schedule cut back to Silverstone at 3.30pm, 4pm and 4.35pm for “excerpts from the International Sports Car Race”. Later on, after Reginald Tate played the lead role in The Quatermass Experiment, at 10.35pm there was “a telerecording of some of today’s racing at Silverstone”.
It’s believed grand prix racing made its first live appearance on Italy’s national channel, Programma Nazionale, on 13 September 1953 with three visits to Monza interspersed with cuts to other programming. Whether the live slots coincided with the dramatic last lap where Alberto Ascari made a rare mistake and spun out of the lead is unknown.
Coverage of races in their entirety did not come along until much later, as the cost of equipment came down and more TV channels came into being. Co-operation between members of the European Broadcasting Union gradually led to more races being shown to international viewers, facilitated by satellite relays after the launch of Telstar 1 in 1962. But complete seasons? Forget it.
Ecclestone gets a grip
Individual race promoters, usually national motor clubs, held much of the commercial power until Ecclestone and Max Mosley unionised the teams under the Formula One Constructors’ Association to fight for better terms in the mid-1970s. There was no central prize pot: teams negotiated individually for ‘starting money’, in effect an appearance fee based on their power to generate ticket sales.
The prevailing opinion among these clubs – usually superintended by blazer-wearing old buffers – was that televising races was a horrendous idea on the grounds that ticket sales would suffer. Why pay to attend when you can watch the race at home, for free?
Surteess sponsor would lead to broadcast headaches
Photo by: Motorsport Images
So, races continued to be broadcast on a piecemeal basis, with no commitment to cover entire seasons, although some national broadcasters would perhaps slot more races into their schedules if a driver from their country was doing well and had a high public profile.
For some state broadcasters – and even commercial ones – the prominent sponsorship on F1 cars was problematic; famously, the BBC packed up its cameras at the 1976 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch when John Surtees refused to remove the Durex condoms logos from his cars. Even the ITV network got sniffy: at the height of James Hunt mania, coverage of the British Grand Prix that year was tucked into a short slot in the following weekend’s World of Sport show.
‘Auntie Beeb’ would ultimately get over itself and screen the dramatic season-ending Japanese Grand Prix, the first F1 round outside Europe to be broadcast live by satellite. But this race also provided a sharp lesson that Ecclestone would factor into his thinking as he annexed F1’s commercial rights: when the start was delayed owing to bad weather, it left broadcasters carrying the live feed having to fill ‘dead air’.
Beyond the battle between Hunt and Niki Lauda for the world championship, which ushered F1 into the headlines and nudged many broadcasters into taking more of an interest, 1976 had a broader commercial significance as the first season operating under a new system of payments to teams negotiated by FOCA. This would metastasize into a longer political battle between FOCA and the FIA over commercial matters that the governing body’s president, Jean-Marie Balestre, tried to settle in 1980 by extreme measures.
The 1976 Japanese GP was the first race outside Europe to be broadcast via satellite
Photo by: Ercole Colombo / Stringer
At the FIA’s conference in Rio that April, Balestre proposed – and pushed through – the termination of the existing arrangements for the drivers’ and constructors’ championships, to be replaced as of 1 January 1981 by the FIA Formula One World Championship. FOCA’s response was to threaten a breakaway world championship of its own and its act of brinksmanship succeeded as the various parties came to the table and formalised a fresh commercial settlement known as the Concorde Agreement.
As part of this, the FIA granted FOCA the right to negotiate TV contracts. Balestre thought it was better to have Ecclestone inside the tent, pissing out, than vice versa – but he had vastly underestimated how lucrative the TV contracts could be once packaged properly. So too did the teams, then mostly run by the people whose names were above the factory doors rather than by large corporations.
These individuals were generally interested in commerce only insofar as it paid for the important bit – racing – and they had little appetite for the risks and faff associated with negotiating global TV deals. But this was what turned Ecclestone on: he loved the deal, the dance, the sleight of hand. Not for nothing had he once been one of the most famous car dealers in the UK, a man who would draw other wheeler-dealers from all corners of the country like moths to a flame, desperate to best him in a bargain.
So the teams permitted Ecclestone to set up the innocuous-sounding Formula One Promotions and Administration company (FOPA, later Formula One Management) to act as a vehicle for all this squalid commercial tradecraft and its associated risks, in exchange for a cut, while they got on with the important business of racing.
As a consummate card player, Ecclestone was well acquainted with the truism that the house always wins. Now he was building the house.
Bernie Ecclestone set up the Formula One Promotions and Administration company while the teams focused on racing
Photo by: Motorsport Images
Package deals
Ecclestone successfully pulled together the threads and began to sell the newly reminted world championship as a package, negotiating deals in which broadcasters committed to entire seasons rather than screening individual races on an ad hoc basis. But his influence would grow beyond this.
There’s a story about Ecclestone’s days as owner of the Brabham team that may or may not be true, but people choose to believe because it’s so beautifully illustrative of the personalities involved. It’s said that the window of Gordon Murray’s design office had Venetian blinds that existed in an almost permanent state of entanglement, Murray being a gifted engineer with a preference for an unstructured way of working – and little interest in keeping the office tidy.
Ecclestone, on the other hand, was compulsively neat. When he ran a motorcycle dealership his product always sat in neat echelons. So, the story goes that one day he grew tired of being repeatedly triggered by the Venetian blinds and sent someone in to straighten them out and then concrete them in place.
True or not, this is the level of neat-freakery Ecclestone began to impose upon the entire F1 paddock. For the purposes of presentation, all trucks had to be parked neatly in a line, all facing the same direction. Ecclestone pushed teams to have proper motorhomes rather than untidy-looking tents. Trackside signage – sold via an ever-increasing rate card – was similarly uniform.
Weekend timetables were standardised, punctuality enforced on start times. Except in extreme cases, there would be no keeping broadcasters waiting. Through the 1990s he began to take production of the world TV feed ‘in house’ to ensure consistent quality, pushing out the local broadcasters who had previously taken responsibility for it (with the notable exception for a long time of Japan and Monaco).
Production of the F1 world feed went in house during the 1990s
Photo by: Motorsport Images
As global interest in F1 grew, so too did Ecclestone’s power and wealth. The price of the TV contracts went up, sometimes by a staggering amount. When the commercial network ITV outbid the BBC for the British broadcast rights from 1997 onward, it agreed to pay over six times more per year – £14million as opposed to £2.3million – than before.
You always had to be on your toes when dealing with Ecclestone, as ITV’s production team discovered when they went to FOM outlining how many paddock passes their crew would require, only to be told that passes hadn’t been included in the deal and would cost more.
The shift in broadcaster was controversial at the time but ITV’s coverage – though it included ad breaks – was transformative. The BBC might have made the middle eight of Fleetwood Mac’s portmanteau track The Chain iconic as the theme tune to its long-running F1 show, but often the coverage was shoehorned in around other programming and given little love. Commentators Murray Walker and Hunt didn’t always have a budget to travel to races, and some rounds in far-flung time zones were presented in hybrid format, with a rapidly put-together highlights package jump-cutting to the final laps presented live. If rain at Wimbledon meant matches were played over the middle weekend, the poor old French Grand Prix would be demoted to a highlights slot on BBC2.
ITV brought an immediate upgrade with longer programmes covering both qualifying and the races, along with more pundits and a more polished look and feel. But it ended up overpaying in the 2000s and was caught out by the global financial crisis, triggering an exit clause in 2008, which led to the coverage briefly returning to the BBC – at a cost of £40million per year – until Sky moved in and acquired the rights from 2012 onwards.
Formula 1 had a dedicated channel on Sky from 2012
Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images
The value of that deal, in which Sky devotes an entire channel to F1 and covers every session per weekend along with other bespoke programming, is widely reported to be £200million per year, although its remit covers several territories.
In this context Apple’s purchase of the US rights for $140million per year, up from incumbent broadcaster ESPN’s $90million, is entirely in keeping with F1’s trajectory into telephone-number figures.
And just as ITV and Sky significantly improved the breadth and quality of the coverage, Apple is expected to push much harder than ESPN, which has shown peculiarly little interest in F1.
F1 Digital Plus: too much too soon?
Ecclestone arguably made just one mis-step (in terms of F1 on TV at least; the passing around of the commercial rights like a tray of cakes would take up an entire book on its own). As part of the ongoing process of taking the world TV feed ‘in house’, Ecclestone invested heavily in digital technology in the hope of establishing a separate pay-per-view enterprise, which would offer fans a higher tier of coverage, with separate commentary and in-car channels.
F1 went digital at the turn of the millennium
Photo by: BMW AG
Initially offered in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, via the DF1 channel in 1996, F1 Digital Plus widened its reach to Italy, Spain and France, then eventually the UK via Sky in 2001. It was a remarkable step up from the standard feed, although cynics claimed that FOM had deliberately made that less appealing by giving it less pacy editing and reducing the number of in-car shots.
Customer take-up was poor, though, and no further national pay-TV platforms came forward with offers, while the existing ones reached for exit clauses in their contracts. Hardly surprising given that the asking price in the UK alone was £12 per race, which would be considered steep in 2025, let alone 2001.
Producing the extra coverage required a huge and expensive dedicated on-site facility, staffed by around 200 people, so by 2002 Ecclestone canned the experiment, concluding he had probably jumped into this field too early.
Fingers burned, Ecclestone maintained an aversion to new technology – indeed, anything in which customers expected a product for free – until Liberty Media acquired the commercial rights in 2016 and, not long after, clamped the gold watch on his wrist and escorted him off the premises.
We want your opinion!
What would you like to see on Motorsport.com?
– The Motorsport.com Team
