Power ranking F1's best TV commentators and pundits for 2026

We’re coming up on three weeks since the last F1 race, and this weekend is bare again. Are you starting to miss it yet? Some of us have been able to replace Saturday qualifying with Saturday ‘watching your non-league football club lose in stupid ways’ but for others, this is a horrible drought.

Still, if you can’t have what you want, imagine what you want. What we want is F1 on TV, and we’ve imagined it so hard that it made us think about all of the faces and voices we see and hear on race weekends.

Since it’s the law that sports writers have to power-rank things once they think of them (trivia: it came in under Cameron, but nobody on the right or left has proposed repealing it yet), it’s time to power rank F1 commentators and pundits!

Disclaimer: This isn’t an exhaustive list, because GPFans Towers is a very Sky-heavy environment. Also very British. We don’t know who calls races in Estonia, and frankly it’s none of our business. We’re sure they’re competent.

This should go without saying, but these rankings are entirely subjective, and entirely relative. These people are fundamentally all good, professional broadcasters, which is why they keep getting put on TV for us to talk about. Good? Good.

F1 HEADLINES: Hamilton title boost as ex-FIA steward addresses accusations of bias

Tier 1: Turn the volume up to listen more closely

Ted Kravitz, Bernie Collins, Martin Brundle

This trio are about as close to irreplaceable on an F1 broadcast as it’s possible to get, so we’re going to take a minute to pay them the respect they deserve.

Martin Brundle’s 30 years behind the mic have made him feel more like the voice of F1 than anyone since Murray Walker. That quality is hard to replace in its own right, but it’s far more than just a familiarity play. Broadcasts without Brundle on them feel about 15% more likely to miss something important, and 15% less likely to prompt a message from a team/FIA comms official to someone at Sky complaining that he’s gone in too hard on something when irritated. That, as we’ve discussed before, usually means he’s doing something right.

While we’re here: it’s a testament to his broadcasting nous, talent, and brass balls that he’s able to make his gridwalk borderline must-watch TV. When Sky put absolutely anyone else in that role, it’s unwatchable.

From a man who Sky struggle to replace on his weeks off to a man they don’t even try to replace. Ted Kravitz’s post-qualifying and post-race Notebook shows don’t just dip in quality when the man himself is at home or on holiday, they just...don’t exist. Sky have, correctly, determined that there’s just nobody else on staff who can conduct half an hour of live monologuing on the move while actually providing fresh information and reporting in the process.

Between that and his ability to dig out just about any sub-plot that’s going on on the pit wall or in the garages during a race, Kravitz is a frenetic ball of excitement and pure love for the job. Brilliant. The man’s also never found a simile he didn’t want to tear down to its constituent parts and rebuild, which is a quality that a certain newsletter appreciates greatly.

The third member of this trio is much newer on the scene than her two cohorts, but no less impressive for it. In a sport’s media environment increasingly concerned with style over substance, Bernie Collins cutting through with incisive analysis hearkening back her recent days as Aston Martin’s head of race strategy. Former drivers are ten a penny in the Sky team, which makes it all the more noticable when Collins is called upon to look at things from a different angle.

It’s a real breath of fresh air when she’s able to cut across some wild speculation about pit strategies and technical decisions and provide concise, definitive clarity. Sometimes we want less drama. Sometimes we just want someone who knows what they’re talking about. Increasingly, Collins has stepped into that role on race weekends.

Tier 2: ‘Oh good, they’re here this weekend!’

Harry Benjamin, Alex Jacques, Naomi Schiff, Jenson Button

Two lead commentators and two analysts here, so we’ll cover off the comms guys first.

It’s really hard to be a lead commentator on live sports, man. Talking while trying to keep track of half a dozen things at once, with a producer talking in your ear half the time is hard. You’ve got a plan for what you’re going to talk about? Congratulations, Lando Norris’ car just diarrhea’d oil all over the front straight on the second lap and that’s all ruined. Hope you’ve got more plans in the locker.

It’s a job of preparedness, focus, and flexibility. Alex Jacques and Harry Benjamin are two of the safest pairs of hands in the game right now, and they help everyone around them shine.

Among those around them are Naomi Schiff and Jenson Button - both with vastly different racing CVs, but both with excellent and earnest delivery styles for the sharp insights they bring to each race weekend.

Really, this is a charisma vote. There are a handful of other pundits and analysts who can provide a similar level of insight, but few who deliver it as easily. That’s a rarer skill than you’d think.

Wildcard: The Jacques Villeneuve Tier

No idea. You want to put Jacques Villeneuve the pundit into a conventional ranking system? The man is so profoundly Québécois that he is completely unplaceable in this sort of thing. This is less a ranking, more a throwing up of the hands and going ‘well, he’s not boring?’

Tier 3: Affable and inoffensive

Jolyon Palmer, Anthony Davidson

This pair of former F1 drivers are perfectly good analysts and broadcasters, but they also feel very...safe. You won’t see people angry at them on social media for their spicy takes on air (sorry if you’re a person who is mad at one of these two on social media and you’ve been ignored here), and their points are usually about right. Sometimes a broadcast needs people who seem nice enough who say things that are basically true. It’s just hard to get very worked up about them, for better or worse.

Tier 4: Look, maybe I’m wrong

David Croft, Karun Chandhok

This may very well be a mixture of familiarity breeding contempt and everything outlined in the ‘commentating on sport is really hard, and this is a relative judgement rather than absolute one’ caveats above, but the David Croft-Karun Chandhok pairing has begun to grate slightly.

Chandhok is probably a little easier to reason out in this case - because he’s in the unenviable position of being compared to Martin Brundle when he’s in a two-man booth with Croft, and that comparison does him no favours.

He has interesting insights from his driving days and clearly makes a concerted effort to stay plugged into the mood and news of the paddock, which is to his credit. However, he and ‘Crofty’ are pretty excitable personalities, and appear to rub off on each other in a way that sometimes gets them five miles down the wrong road when Brundle would’ve put his hand up at the T-junction and said ‘uh, no, I’m pretty sure it’s a left here actually’.

And next...David Croft has had a great career as an F1 commentator, and hopefully will for a long time to come. He’s earned his status in the sport, and various accusations of bias or unfair commentating hurled his way are pure daftness (and if you had a robot commentator who never had an opinion, you’d hate it). However, when you spend 20 or so weekends with someone a year – practice, qualifying and race each time when it’s your job – you start to pick up on certain habits and tics that they have.

You know what? It’s not the dad jokes. It’s not even that he feels the need to explain the dad jokes every time (I know! The Luke Littler wing goes 180...degrees!).

It’s something I’ve taken to referring as ‘social clip commentating’ (or sometimes ‘promo commentating’, I’m not a man to stick to my convictions).

It sounds exactly like this.

NOTE: This post was originally published on the GPFans Substack, where you can embed audio. You can't do that here, so this is a link to take you there in order for you to have context for the following paragraphs. It's a 15-second clip. You can do it.

It’s a minor event - first decently quick driver over the line to set a qualifying lap goes fastest, because that’s how linear time tends to work - which will likely mean absolutely nothing by the end of the session. Hell, by the end of the next 60 seconds. But despite that, all of the vocal cues are telling your brain that this matters. It feels exciting, and it sounds GREAT on a pre-race hype reel...the one time in 20 that it actually is the pole lap and the producers can just clip the pre-caveat section.

The thing is, despite the flippant name, I don’t really believe this is just a clip-farming tactic. It might work out quite well for the social team that it turns out that way, but it’s rare that Croft comes across as anything other than the kind of man who’s genuinely excited that something big might have happened. A man who dad-dances at weddings and laughs out loud in the cinema. I don’t think that any of the above is done for cynical reasons, at all.

But.

It gets wearing. Quickly. To borrow a scale from Bryan Curtis of The Ringer (and specifically the Press Box podcast), Croft hits a vocal 10/10 probably two or three times the average qualifying session, and multiple times a race.

The direct result is that when a genuinely extraordinary and important thing happens - Lewis Hamilton punting Max Verstappen at Copse in 2021, Lando Norris running into Oscar Piastri in Canada last year - it falls somewhat into the mix, because there’s no higher gear to shift to. When everything is worth shouting about, nothing is. If it’s your first race weekend, it sounds amazing. If it’s your 30th, it’s background noise.

Hamilton sending his title rival into the wall at 180mph on the first lap is a 10/10. Someone putting themselves on provisional pole with more than half a qualifying session left is a 5/10. Personally, I would prefer it if Sky’s main man adjusted his internal sliders accordingly. It could restore the Sky booth to its former glory in a snap.

Tier 5: Idiot?

Chris Deeley

Read him on GPFans.com and the GPFans newsletter, and listen to him from time to time breaking down races and big F1 news on Track Radio. He thinks he’s smart enough to critique people who have been on national TV since he was in primary school.

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