F1 fans yearn for the days when commentators were willing to drop the suffocating diplomacy

Jacques Villeneuve talking to Sky Sports — Photo: © IMAGO

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F1 fans yearn for the days when commentators were willing to drop the suffocating diplomacy

It's tough to admit, but sometimes being mean is actually a good thing

Chris Deeley

Thursday 23 July 2026 12:27

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“He should know he’s there, he’s leading the race, and...look at this idiot.”

Here’s a challenge for you: name a single current F1 commentator or TV pundit who would say this on air about a driver in 2026, with the accompanying weary sigh.

No? No, we couldn’t think of one either.

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That, for the record, was James Hunt talking about Andrea de Cesaris at the 1990 San Marino Grand Prix when, instead of moving his Dallara out of the way to let leader Nigel Mansell lap him, he cut across the nose of the Ferrari and nearly sent the Brit out of the race.

You want to know the fun bit about that piece of commentary? The quoted section up top was the nice part.

“It really is a disgrace that he’s allowed to continue to interfere in Grand Prix racing,” Hunt continued, “and apart from spoiling the race for drivers out there, he spoils it for us spectators.”

The Nice Guys

Something has shifted in the way that modern commentators and analysts talk about drivers, and it’s quite telling (and not a little bit discouraging) to interrogate the reasons for that.

Maybe modern F1 commentators just happen to be nicer than James Hunt, and that’s why we don’t hear drivers’ ongoing careers called ‘a disgrace’? That might be part of the equation, but don’t forget some put-downs from the sport’s other legendary driver-turned commentator Martin Brundle.

The highlight of those came at the 1998 Monaco Grand Prix weekend, when the camera cut to the Tyrrell of Ricardo Rosset pointing in the wrong direction, before lurching into a gap in the barrier for no clear reason.

“I hate to say this,” Murray Walker said, “but a lot of people here are really debating whether Ricardo Rosset is Formula 1 material.”

A deeply unamused Brundle? “Well, that’s a fairly short debate Murray.”

Nearly 30 years later, Brundle might still be the man who would come the closest to saying something similar on air (apart from maybe Nico Rosberg?), but it’s hard to imagine it being accompanied by the agreeable laughter he got from his old commentary partner. Actually, it’s hard to imagine his current commentary partner David Croft teeing him up for the line in the first place.

The root cause is pretty simple. Put aside any armchair accusations that a number of members of the current media pack are too desperate to be universally liked in the paddock to truly criticise anyone significant (or anyone friends with someone significant, or anyone who’s breathed the same air as someone significant), and think bigger.

The main broadcasters, Sky Sports and F1TV, rely so heavily on their relationships with teams and F1 management now that they have to think very, very hard about who they offend. They’ll criticise a piece of driving, that’s still fair game, but they’ll hold short of saying ‘...he shouldn’t be allowed to drive in grand prix racing, he’s got a mental age of 10 in the first place’ because that’s the sort of thing that means the team won’t be putting up one of their drivers to ride a bike around a circuit with Karun Chandhok in three weeks’ time.

(I’d have gone with ‘doesn’t have the talent God gave a paving slab’ or something similar, but the line above is word for word what Hunt said about Jean-Pierre Jarier at the 1983 Austrian Grand Prix.)

James Hunt was not known for pulling his punches on the mic

This sort of thing happens every time a sport and the people covering it become too closely entwined – and that’s more true of F1 than more than most, because of the relatively small media apparatus and how much Sky and F1TV rely on having good relationships up and down the paddock. It’s not that they’ll be wilfully dishonest to protect relationships, but diplomatic wording of criticism is just second nature now. That is a sensible professional decision. It’s also very boring.

We understand, really, that there’s a certain amount of air that needs filling on TV channels, and that video targets online have to be met. F1 fans as a whole would happily give up the chance to see a 20-minute clip of Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto playing Snap with Simon Lazenby if it meant that, once or twice a year, we’d hear something like: “He should certainly have a short suspension for that, and for being himself he should have a permanent suspension.”

Sports commentary – even criticism – doesn’t have to be mean-spirited in order to be funny. Hunt in particular crossed that line sometimes (‘mental age of 10’ probably counts), but some of his harsher criticisms of De Cesaris, or his ‘bulls***’ response to Rene Arnoux’s complaints that he was driving badly because of F1’s switch away from turbo engines, were at their heart just good, honest takes from a man whose opinion rightly carried some weight.

So here’s a plea to F1 commentators that will never come true as long as TV companies believe that drivers and teams should be active participants in the way that they’re covered:

Just be bitchy sometimes.

A couple of times a season, just disregard your career of carefully diplomatic prevarications and the little voice in the back of your head asking ‘will this come back to bite us later?’, and just say something real and unfiltered. It’ll feel amazing, and when you say nice things about drivers elsewhere in the broadcast it’ll actually carry some weight. If you’re nice about everyone then being nice doesn’t matter, but if you’re willing to get your claws out a bit then it means a lot more when you start to purr.

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F1 Martin Brundle Sky Sports F1 David Croft James Hunt Murray Walker