Martin Brundle grid walks are an F1 institution, but it is time to retire them

Martin Brundle is a Sky Sports TV pundit — Photo: © IMAGO

Sky Sports F1

F1 Analysis: Why the time is right to end Martin Brundle grid walks

Thanks for the memories, Martin

Chris Deeley Editor

Experienced sports writer covering F1 and other motorsports since 2023

Monday 21 September 2026 09:45

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The 2026 F1 season is the 30th since Martin Brundle first did his famous grid walk segment for the TV cameras. Sky Sports should really use that as a convenient, numerically satisfying moment to retire it for good.

This is not a call to change the format a bit, or give him a hired hand/bouncer to move him through the crowds faster. It’s certainly not a call to hand the segment off to someone else on Sunday afternoons. This is an all-or-nothing proposition, and at this point it’s time for ‘nothing’.

Things change with time. Back on his original grid walk at Silverstone in 1997, Brundle was just months removed from his own F1 career behind the wheel and eager to show he belonged in his new role with the legendary Murray Walker.

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He did that, and the grid walk followed him from ITV to the BBC, and then to Sky Sports in 2012, getting bigger and better along the way. He went from struggling to find anybody to talk to in his first edition - he ended up chatting with former team-mate Rubens Barrichello - to quickly being chided for not talking to drivers within a year or two.

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Times have changed since Grid Walk No. 1

Celebrities began to orbit around him rather than vice-versa, and Brundle quickly became the absolute master of the grid. In his domain, he was just as important as any Hollywood star or platinum-selling singer.

The further away that gets though, the less the drivers seem to welcome the conversation. "Now,” Brundle said earlier this year, “they just look at me like I'm a double glazing salesman or something, or an insurance salesman with his foot in the door."

It’s hard to put an exact date on when things started going stale, but you wouldn’t get much pushback in these parts if you tabbed the 2020 COVID season and the Drive to Survive explosion as the beginning of the end.

After a year away from having packed grids, things were always going to come back different. The DTS explosion supercharged that. F1 being truly trendy for the first time in its history brought a lot of people to the grid who couldn’t have picked Brundle out of a one-man lineup, and the skyrocketing number of blank expressions when he approaches for a quick soundbite is becoming quite hard to watch.

Brundle grid walks are an F1 institution.

It would be easy to make this a conceptual, old man gatekeeper complaint about the sport’s newer fans, but this is the direction that the people who run F1 have actively chosen to move in.

It kinda doesn’t matter if you want to see a rainy race at Donington in front of 8,000 people, with Brundle interviewing three Coronation Street actors and a thick footballer. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

Brundle himself looks increasingly fed up with the whole process, even if a fed up Brundle is still absolutely streets ahead of anyone Sky get to fill the spot when he’s got the weekend off (another tick for ‘kill the segment entirely, don’t replace him’), and that’s honestly no surprise. The man himself despises the whole thing!

“There’s a reason why I’ve never watched back an F1 gridwalk in a quarter of a century of doing them. You have no idea how much I dislike doing them but somehow those crazy moments have defined my professional career. Oh well, that’s the way it is.”

You don’t have to take our word for it. That’s directly from the man himself on Twitter in 2022.

Sky Sports have a concept that’s 30 years old, predicated on talking to drivers who no longer care and celebrities who look at the red and blue microphone as if it’s a dead rat with Turbo Herpes, hosted by a 67-year-old man who seems visibly bored of the whole experience and openly dislikes doing it.

The grid walk was one of the great pieces of the F1 TV experience for easily two decades, but the sport has moved past the point where it’s a viable and enjoyable piece of television on a remotely consistent basis.

Let Brundle get back to doing what he does best: calling races, and occasionally using his truly impressive determination to talk to someone who actually needs to be talked to.

If there’s one person I want to see following Mohammed Ben Sulayem down the pit lane, asking awkward questions and brushing off his security detail, it’s Martin Brundle.

If there’s one person I want to see interview a masked social media ‘DJ’ influencer five minutes before an F1 race...actually, if I ever want to see anyone do that, please euthanise me. I’ll thank you for it.

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Chris Deeley - Editor

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