Singing our way to Spa

On Thursday morning at 7.30, I was genuinely standing outside the Houses of Parliament hitching a lift to Spa. The slight cheat, of course, was that I knew a certain Martin Brundle would appear at any moment in his E-type Jaguar, looking like Kings Lynn's answer to James Bond. He was a demon on the Brussels bypass!

I've seen plenty of messages on Twitter from you guys saying you enjoyed our little road trip. If you missed it, I've uploaded it onto the blog below, and amazingly, as I write this blog, I've yet to see it myself!

You might be wondering why. On race morning, usually at about 10am, the whole team of presenters, including David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan, get together, have a meeting and watch all the VTs (pre-produced films) in the show. However, the drive-a-thon was such a big job that the producers and editors hadn't finished putting it together by then.

I'd usually get to watch it on the little screen that Roger the monitor man faithfully carries around the pit lane. But we began the show walking live through McLaren with Martin and, as the garage is a tight squeeze at the best of times, the monitor was waiting at the far side of the garage.

While it was being transmitted on live TV we could hear the elements that had been chosen through our earpieces. We were cringing at the singing. Hope your eardrums survived!

To give you some idea of the effort the guys in the edit suite went to last weekend, this is what they filmed and edited since we arrived in Spa just for the race show: the driving piece, the Rubens Barrichello 300 GP's interview , the Jenson pre-race interview , the story of qualifying, Mark Webber's pole lap, and what we call the 'closer'.

That list doesn't even take into account the stuff we did on Saturday. There was even more 'VT' in that show and if you missed it, the build-up to qualifying can be watched on the iPlayer until next Saturday.

It's the closer that really blows my mind. During the race the guys are watching loads of different feeds from the FOM director who controls the race, also nike shox tl looking for other shots that tell a story, picking a good music track. And most impressively of all they get it all cut together for the end of the show - it makes standing next to EJ and DC seem a doddle!

Perhaps on Sunday the 'closer' mission wasn't as hard as usual because they had stacks of incredible shots to play with. One of the things we'll all benefit from massively when F1 joins the high-definition revolution is how dramatic the on-track action will look.

Just imagine what the collision between Jenson shox footwear Button and Sebastian Vettel would look like in HD - Button's prone McLaren puttering out steam after Vettel had buried his nose cone into its sidepod. When F1 does become High Definition, it will become even more of a must-watch event, and we're continuing to talk to FOM about when that might be.