Will Buxton, the F1 pit lane reporter for American broadcaster, Speed TV, spoke to Infiniti at Monza about how F1 can finally crack America, the excitement of the 2012 season, how he became a journalist, and what he has in common with Sebastian Vettel.

   To listen to the interview, click on the image above, or download it here 

 

I decided I wanted to be an F1 journalist the week that Ayrton Senna died. I’ve always loved motorsport. I have recollections of watching red and white cars flashing under the trees – it must have been at Monza or Hockenheim – back in the late 80s when I was a kid. Senna was my big hero, and I bought my first copies of Autosport and Motorsport News the same week that he died.  The kids at school didn’t get it – they all liked football and didn’t understand why I was so upset about it - but what reading these magazines made me realise was that there were other people out there who felt the same way I did about the sport, and they were the journalists. That day, aged 13, I knew I wanted to be an F1 journalist.
 

The journalist, David Tremayne, helped me to get into the industry. I first got talking to him at the Autosport show one year many moons ago, when I asked him for advice on how to follow my dreams and he has been a mentor and friend ever since. He helped me out on my university thesis on the politics of F1, and gave me a job straight out of uni working for F1 magazine, 10 years ago. I had a couple of years out working as the press officer for GP2, when the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg were coming through the ranks, and then went back to journalism a few years ago. By chance, I was given the opportunity to do the live commentary feed for GP2 since I knew the series so well, and the Speed TV guys in America happened to hear it and liked it. Knowing they were losing the services of Peter Windsor to the USF1 project , they asked me to be their pit reporter. It was all a glorious mistake!
 

I think for F1 to be a truly global series in the truest sense, it needs a good home in the States. It really looks like the guys at Circuit of The Americas have done just this – they’ve created an unbelievable facility, compromising the best elements of existing F1 circuits. There’s a section there like Silverstone, a corner that’s like turn eight in Turkey  – I really think that it’s going to be great from a racing perspective.
 

For F1 to succeed this time around in the U.S, it needs to take lessons from the likes of NASCAR and Indy Car. It’s a bit of a cliché, but F1 needs America more than America needs F1, and it can learn a lot from the show and grandeur of the big American series. It shouldn’t be narrow minded enough to think ‘we’re F1, we’re the biggest series in the world, we’re coming to America and America will love us because of who we are.’ F1 is niche, and not the biggest motorsport in America, so we have to take notes on how to promote the sport better in the U.S, directly to the American public. With a second race in New Jersey likely to be added to the calendar in the next year or two, it really does represent a huge opportunity to finally ‘crack’ America if done right – we can’t let the opportunity slip through our fingers.
 

There’s been plenty of changes in F1 in the 10 years I’ve been working as a Paddock insider. For one thing it’s a lot more accessible, certainly for media in terms of getting interview time with drivers. There’s also a tendency to debut drivers much younger and earlier nowadays. We saw Romain Grosjean being banned for a race at Monza, the first such thing that has happened in 18 years – how much of that is down to stricter stewarding, and how much it’s down to these young guys coming into the sport without a great deal of practical experience and the incredible pressure they’re under to achieve everything in their first year or face being kicked out, I don’t know. There are certainly fewer chances given now than they used to be, and greater expectations on the drivers.
 

The 2012 season has been amazing and highly unexpected. I’ve loved the fact we’ve been coming to tracks not knowing exactly what’s going to happen in advance – whilst we can always expect the likes of Red Bull Racing, Ferrari, McLaren and Lotus to be challenging, there’s  still been plenty of surprises, with lots of different winners, lots of different make ups of podium placings, and just exceptional racing. From the first race all the way through, it’s been exciting, with great overtaking. One of the best of all time?  Possibly.  Certainly one of the most random!
 

If I could, I wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of DRS from modern day F1. I’ve never been a fan of it, perhaps because of my knowledge and love of GP2, where it’s all a lot more stripped down.  Call me a purist, but when you see a driver making a pass on track, you want it to be because he’s done it himself, because he’s had the guts to pull a move on a peer and complete it, rather than because of a technological boost.
 

I have a certain something in common with Sebastian Vettel. It’s a shared love of a small up and coming four-piece beat combo from Liverpool called the Beatles – the wider world may hear of them soon, ha ha! I don’t quite get to be invited back-stage at Paul McCartney gigs as Sebastian does however, whilst getting handed signed Hofner basses. Not that I’m jealous, not at all, ha ha! It’s nice that someone as young as Vettel appreciates ‘proper’ music - I’m just happy the drivers aren’t listening to Phil Collins anymore, as Mika Salo used to!

It says a lot about Sebastian that, despite the fact he’s one of the very few drivers who isn’t on Twitter, we know such things about him. It’s lovely that he’s very open about his life- his love of British comedy such as Fawlty Towers, and the fact that he’s been on stage at a Little Britain show – this isn’t something his team has told us for PR purposes, it’s just him. 

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