Less swearing? FIA wants F1 to reverse its usual team radio priorities · RaceFans

It was once a standing joke among Formula 1 race engineers that if they wanted to tell their driver something on the radio but ensure the crucial information was not played out on the world feed for all to hear, there was only one thing they had to do:

Swear.

Whether many of them actually did bookend their vital set-up chatter with enough profanity to make Guenther Steiner blanch is unknown. But what is clear is this approach wouldn’t work today.

Wheel-to-wheel racing action may get overlooked in favour of tiresome crowd shots, but you can’t accuse F1’s television director of allowing fans to miss those all-important F-bombs (see the transcript below for an example).

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem is not a fan, however, and admitted this week he has urged F1 to tone down the bad language (or, as some mystifyingly insist on calling it, ‘language’). “They say the ‘f’ word how many times per minute?” he asked.

But here’s the thing: If you’re watching F1 via the world feed alone, as the vast majority of viewers no doubt do, you wouldn’t necessarily be in a position to know. F1 may broadcast team radio clips which include swearing, but it is invariably ‘bleeped’ out.

Which begs the question: What exactly is there to get offended about here? Playing the drivers’ messages out but censoring the inappropriate language is a reasonable balance which F1 has adhered to for years.

For those who want to hear what the drivers have to say unfiltered, F1 TV’s onboard camera channels exist. But even this is no longer completely free of censorship.

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Since last year FOM has censored some team radio messages on the onboard camera feeds. Significantly, these messages are not ‘bleeped’ but erased entirely, so the viewer has no way of knowing if they have missed something.

FOM routinely resorts to this after a driver suffers a crash. Both Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz Jnr’s radio feeds were muted on their onboard feeds following their penultimate lap crash in Baku last weekend, although their radio clips were subsequently broadcast over the world feed. How much of what they said was censored, if any, is impossible to tell.

But as FOM is already censoring drivers’ messages in two different ways, surely no further limits are needed? This is another example of the FIA’s recent preoccupation with telling drivers what they can and cannot say.

Punishing the use of discriminatory language and preventing abuse of FIA staff is justifiable. But the FIA has also threatened drivers with sporting penalties for making political statements – in reaction to their expressions of support for important issues such as the climate and equal rights – and vastly increased the fines it can impose on them. That is far more troubling than drivers expressing their frustration by uttering an expletive.

Verstappen’s Hungarian GP radio transcript and portions broadcast on world feed

Max Verstappen’s complete team radio communications from the Hungarian Grand Prix is transcribed below. The portions highlighted in yellow show what was played on the world television vision and how it was edited or censored. FOM played six of the seven swear words used by Verstappen on the world feed, all of which were ‘bleeped’.

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