F1 fans upset that they can't watch pre-season tests fundamentally misunderstand the sport

Verstappen, bahrein, testing, 2025, red bull — Photo: © IMAGO

Pre-Season Testing

F1 fans upset that they can't watch pre-season tests fundamentally misunderstand the sport

This isn't F1, it's a tech demo

Chris Deeley

Monday 26 January 2026 12:57 Updated: 15:47

10 F1 teams will gather in Barcelona this week, bringing most of the grid together for the first time since Abu Dhabi in December.

As you probably know by this point, there won't be any live footage broadcast from the five days of running in Catalunya. Some people are very upset about that. I think those people are weird.

Pre-season testing is fundamentally, and deliberately, unbelievably boring. This is about a handful of cars just trundling around a circuit for hours, making sure everything works properly. They aren't going out and pushing the limits of their new toys, or getting tangled up with each other; they're just calmly and methodically figuring out what works and what doesn't, and what's transitioned from the wind tunnel to the real world.

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Putting aside for a moment all the reasons that pre-season testing isn't a TV broadcast event (teams testing concepts they don't necessarily want all the way out in the public domain yet, the idea of keeping the pressure off the drivers and engineers as they get comfortable with their new machines, et al), the appeal of watching the test is what, exactly?

The Barcelona F1 test will not be televised

This isn't a viewing experience for 'F1 fans', because it doesn't have any of the component parts that make F1 interesting. There's no competition, there's no drivers pushing to the ragged edge, there's no racing. It's a tech demo for incomplete tech.

It's also, frankly, not even a viewing experience for F1 writers either. You know what we learn from pre-season testing? Absolutely nothing. Maybe we're reassured that the cars all still have four wheels, and that the driver still points forward. Teams deliberately obfuscate their true pace until the tyre blankets come off in Melbourne, and that's more than a month away, so you learn...nothing.

The only things that can be learned from testing are the those that are dug up by the journalists who are present at the track and having conversations – on the record, off the record, or on background – with team personnel. That's great, but it's also necessarily not a TV spectacle.

'Why shouldn't we be able to watch pre-season testing?' is a question that's been asked a fair bit the last week or two. I think that's the wrong framing of the situation.

Why should we be able to watch pre-season testing? It's emphatically not intended as a viewer experience. Would you also like a few cameras set up and a little commentary booth inside the factories while they work in the wind tunnel? Little webcam set up outside each factory entrance? Where does the content machine end?

Pre-season testing is not for you. It's for the teams. You don't have some inherent right as a fan to watch what they're doing and, no, it's not 'good for the sport's publicity' to bang the full five days on Sky Sports F1 for a handful of people to mine it for social media content.

It's actually still, to some of us, baffling that Sky make a whole production around free practice sessions on race weekends. Until they took over the coverage in the 2010s, the idea was absolutely bizarre. Why, unless it's your actual job, are you spending two hours on a Friday afternoon watching drivers dial in their setups and not actually compete with each other? Do you not have work to do? School to go to?

I'm sure I'm not just being an old man about this – I'm 34, for chrissakes. I'm pretty sure it's not about just seeing the sport through a professional lens either. I've been an F1 fan since I was a kid. My dad would wake me up in the early hours so we could go downstairs and watch races from Australia and Japan when I was five or six years old, with our big old 90s headphones plugged into a splitter in the TV so we didn't wake the rest of the house up.

I watch races when I'm not working. Hell, I watch NASCAR races in the middle of the night when I'm not working on them. I watch highlights of old races fairly regularly, whether I watched the race live or not. I do this because I'm a racing fan, and I always have been.

I don't watch a single practice session when I'm not being paid to do it, because that isn't racing. Televised practice and testing sessions aren't racing, they're content. Absolutely value-free content, in the most derogatory sense possible, for the sake of a channel having something on that isn't a re-run or dead air.

If you're annoyed that you can't spend 20-odd hours next week watching test runs that teach you nothing, that don't challenge the drivers, that contain absolutely nothing reminiscent of an F1 race except for the fact that there are cars and drivers present...I don't understand you.

You could go for a walk, or read a book. You could cook a nice meal. You could have a nice game of cards with a friend. You could do any of these things, and a million more, and they would be something. Watching F1 testing is nothing. Please love yourselves a little more.

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