Those of us left with just the BBC coverage find it harder to accept though Philip. It might seem good that the BBC at least kept half the races but for 85% of the F1 viewing audience in the UK, it's very watered down. You have to be very lucky to get the sky coverage here due to its extortionate monthly cost and as good as it is, not enough people are sitting down to watch it.

F1 has chosen to freeze out 4.5 million viewers in favour of a bit more money to give a product to a 600k select few. The fact it is quite a well presented product is largely lost because most f1 fans haven't a clue what is on offer. It seems like a lost market to me. To add to that, f1 has accumulatively lost 3 million viewers since this deal started. That doesn't strike me as very promising for its long term popularity.

If you've got Sky though, you don't need to care about that.