Why TV made Senna's qualifying laps look so fast

Fans don't have the luxury of watching Formula 1 cars trackside during the COVID-19 pandemic, so are indebted to TV crews to portray their spectacular performance. Fortunately, the team led by F1's director of broadcast is constantly innovating

Jonathan Noble Aug 16, 2020, 9:07 AM

Upd: May 1, 2022, 1:47 AM

When Carlos Sainz recently tweeted some footage of one of Ayrton Senna's qualifying laps from the 1991 British Grand Prix, it reignited some debate about whether television does the current generation of cars justice. After all, 2020 F1 cars are the fastest ever, with the greatest amount of downforce ever produced and engines that are on a par with those crazy turbo cars from the mid-1980s that could top 1000bhp in qualifying runs.

But, despite all that engineered insanity, modern high definition images and camera work executed by highly-skilled professional operators can sometimes conspire to take away the rawness of what the cars are like up close.

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Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.