This year is the first year that the American Free Media Group took over the operating rights of F1. As the saying goes, the new official took office three times. The Free Media Group has carried out many drastic reforms on F1 as soon as it started. First, it replaced the new F1 logo, and then decided to use children to replace racing girls, as well as upgrade the safety of racing. Free Media Group tried to use various methods to improve the viewing of F1 and the development of the event itself.
Faced with the economic pressure hosted by F1, Sepang Circuit announced since the end of the 2017 season that F1 will no longer host the branch race of in Malaysia , but this does not matter to the Free Media Group. After all, the F1 hosting locations in Asia now have more important China, Japan, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Azerbaijan.
On the contrary, after Malaysia withdrew from the F1 stage, Free Media Group added the two matches between Germany and France. As the core of F1 technology, Europe is still the center of F1 development. Therefore, from the current determined calendar, Europe accounts for 10 of the 21 sub-stop games throughout the year, and the other 6 games are arranged in Australia, the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil respectively.
For the start time of the 2018 F1 season, Free Media Group has also adjusted the start time of the F1 race. In order to attract more TV viewers, F1's competition schedule in Europe has been postponed, and the final start time was delayed by 10 minutes. Because the competitions in the past have always started at the hour of the day, the purpose of this is to allow TV stations that start live broadcasting the competition from the hour of the day to have an extra 10 minutes to warm up the competition.
In addition, F1 also mentioned in its official statement that the competition will try to avoid conflicts with the 2018 World Cup. For example, the French Grand Prix started at 16:10 pm local time, avoiding the World Cup group stage between England and Panama.
For Chinese car fans, there is also good news: CCTV 5 will re-broadcast the F1 event this year. This is also the fact that CCTV once again puts live broadcast of F1 on the agenda since it left F1 live broadcast in 2013. In the past five years, local TV stations mainly broadcast F1 competitions in the form of live broadcast or recorded broadcasts. In 2014, LeTV Sports began to exclusively broadcast F1 in the field of digital media. However, since LeTV encountered a major financial situation, it has become more difficult for Chinese car fans to watch F1 live broadcasts. They can only watch live broadcasts of foreign TV stations through the Internet or other channels, and it is also difficult to hear Chinese event commentary.
Since the renewal of the F1 China site, F1 Commercial Director Sean Bletches has visited China to contact many potential partners and redeploy F1's publicity in the Chinese market. CCTV's live broadcast of the event is more important for the development of F1 in the Chinese market. However, although the development of F1 is not something we should worry about, the most realistic thing is to be able to watch the live broadcast of the game for free again.
2018 season F1 calendar
