Sky Sports F1 are to broadcast five Classic races before every race weekend throughout the 2013 season, The F1 Broadcasting Blog can confirm.
Starting in Australia, the channel will broadcast a mixture of extended highlights and full races, depending on the timeframe that the particular race falls within. The schedule for Australia is as follows:
– 1994 Australian Grand Prix (extended highlights)
– 1999 Australian Grand Prix (full race)
– 2003 Australian Grand Prix (full race)
– 2007 Australian Grand Prix (full race)
– 2010 Australian Grand Prix (full race)
The above races will air from Saturday 9th March to Wednesday 13th March, the timeslot being 20:30 to 22:30 on all five days.
One of my gripes last year was the lack of Classic races, which was due to Sky Sports’ lack of material in their own archive. Between 2009 and 2012, BBC were lucky in that they had Formula 1 material before 1997 in their archive, therefore their Classic races series’ was mainly based on that timeframe, whereas Sky were not as lucky meaning they were restricted in what they could do – unless they went to Formula One Management (FOM) to request footage.
Nevertheless, it is a great move to see that a dedicated channel will have significantly more content during the week than what was present in 2012. Five Classic races is just the right amount, any more and there would be overload. I’m happy with five, personally. Some of the choices for Australia are not ‘obvious’ choices, for example 1999, but it saves races for future years, which is good.
Motorsport Broadcasting 
Will the 1999 race use the pay per view feed or the terrestrial feed that ITV showed
I would imagine ITV as I doubt any English commentary exists with the PPV one.
That would be a little disappointing but somewhat understandable… Just out of interest if you go into YouTube type in formel 1 premiere you get a link to watch a selection of races with German commentary using the pay per view feed… Malaysia 2001 is a good one to watch 🙂
I would watch Malaysia 2001, but at the same time I may be watching it a month tonight. 😉 With the classic Murray and Martin commentary.
Yeah but the pay per view pics of that race made it look way more dramatic lol
Further to that… I wouldn’t mind seeing 2002 again.. Sky showed that live on the pay per view channel
Yeah, agreed. Good thinking by Sky though not to ‘blow’ all the great Australian Grand Prix’s this year and to spread the load – ie. I personally would have picked 2002 and 2006 instead of 1999 and 2007, but can see the logic in taking some of the ‘lesser’ profile races shall we say.
As you say, Sky should have been doing this last year from the word go.
The BBC have been showing classic races in the run up to each event since they acquired the rights from ITV. For the classic races that were covered by ITV, they showed those with ITV commentary. Don’t know what took Sky so long.
I’d still like to see some original content on the channel.
Looking forward to them. Hope they show late 80s into 90s great decade. with some great classic tracks
I’ve been shouting for classic races all 2012! glad they seen sense.
I missed the classic races, good to see this news.
At least they’ll be easier to record now than when they were on that marvel of 21st century obfuscation, The Red Button
Now is there any chance Sky will list them all using the same Series ID so I can set a series link instead of missing half of them because I couldn’t be arsed to crawl through the EPG….
Not sure about the series link, but I do know that the schedules at the moment have it on every day at 20:30 from Saturday 9th March, so the scheduling is consistent (ie – not hidden away).
I should be grateful they didn’t go for the full Australian GP experience and air them at 4am I suppose…
3 weeks!
Ah but of you plugged a DVD recorder into the sky box you could record red button content 😉 although setting the timer for it is an issue lol
Just wondering whether these are repeated or if they are one off showings
They are repeated – as far as I can see each race is shown twice.