Ted Kravitz: “I want to make everyone feel like F1 insiders”

Ted Kravitz has been pounding the pit lanes in Formula 1 for the past 23 years in his role as a TV reporter.

In that time, he has witnessed all the big moments first hand: controversial races, thrilling victories, the trauma and tragedy of major accidents, the tears and raw emotion of championships won and lost.

But as he quickly admits, it’s not about him and what he has seen but rather what he has relayed to us, you, the fan, in those high-intensity moments. He has one job.

“It hasn’t changed too much in this otherwise fast-changing F1 world,” says Kravitz. “From broadcaster to viewer, we are there to inform, entertain and bring people from their screens to as close to the action as possible, to make them feel a part of it.”

Now he has gone a step further and written a book: F1 Insider Notes from the Pit Lane.

It’s an ideal way for F1 fans to get their fix ahead of the 2026 season, as Kravitz picks through the stories behind the stories, just as he has done first for ITV, then the BBC and since 2012 for Sky Sports.

“F1 Insider’ as a title is a bit of a joke,” he explains, “because it’s not me: I want to make everyone, the viewers, feel like F1 insiders.”

Kravitz was a radio reporter in his native London and an F1 fan when he pitched himself for a job at ITV after the channel won the rights to cover F1 in the UK from 1997.

“They needed a junior researcher and tape logger who could sit and watch races, write down everything that happened with a time code and have a good enough memory to know where all those shots were,” he recalls. “For an F1 fan, it was not the hardest job in the world.”

The transition to front of camera wasn’t planned, he says: “It only happens once in 50 years that Murray Walker retires. He stopped at the end of 2001 in my view a few years too soon. James Allen was the pit reporter and wrote the book on how to do it based on his experiences in Indycar. He had made the role for himself. So when James replaced Murray, they needed someone who could try out for pit reporter. Because of my background in radio and already being part of the production, I was given a go.”

For regular F1 watchers, Kravitz is now a firm fixture, and a popular one at that. His priority, of feeding live and useful info to the main commentators during practice, qualifying and the race, remains at the core of what he does.

“That’s what you will be judged on by your audience,” says Kravitz. But the extra features he films over race weekends, and most notably the Ted’s Notebook show, has elevated his profile.

The informal downloads to camera in bustling pits as busy teams pack up around him are now an F1 staple.

Despite being there simply to say what he sees, Kravitz has on occasion stoked the hornet’s nest by expressing a take on F1 matters that hasn’t been appreciated by all.

Most famously, Red Bull briefly boycotted Sky Sports F1 on the back of Kravitz stating that Lewis Hamilton had been “robbed” of an eighth world title at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix which in his book he describes as “perhaps the most significant and important moment of my time in F1”.

What was it like to become the centre of the story? “Much less dramatic than everybody imagines,” he says.

“Sky Sports F1 backed me up, because I hadn’t actually said anything that was a rogue view or hadn’t been said many times before by other people. But it had been clipped up, circulated and seen by people within Red Bull. It reignited the Abu Dhabi controversy a year after it happened.”

The brief boycott took place “in the middle of the 2022 Mexican GP weekend when Red Bull had been answering questions about their accepted breach agreement with the cost cap”, recalls Kravitz.

“It had been noted by people not by me that it was a useful distraction from that. All the questions that [team principal] Christian Horner got on the Sunday were about ‘we’re not going to talk to Sky, because we’re not happy about something Ted said’ rather than the breach agreement.”

Upsetting teams, drivers and fans is part of the territory. You need a thick skin. “I had pretty good teachers and role models in this regard,” says Kravitz, citing Walker and Allen.

“As long as you are honest with your audience and you clear your mind of any kind of influence, whether it’s from teams or groups of fans, that’s the only way to do it. The moment your thinking is clouded by the thought ‘am I satisfying everybody?’, you will barely be able to function. I hope there is not too much criticism. Murray dealt with a lot worse.”

Kravitz is already looking forward to the 2026 season and what promises to be a more complicated racing spectacle, with cars built to new technical regulations.

He’s excited by the prospect, rather than nervous: “As Murray said to me, F1 always finds a way of reinventing itself every year, whether it’s new rules, new drivers, new teams. It always finds a way to be fresh.”

The toughest driver to interview

Building a rapport with racing drivers is key for a Formula 1 TV reporter and unlocking proper answers from Michael Schumacher taught Ted Kravitz the most about his art.

He says: “As James Allen pointed out to me, you are effectively asking for favours when you approach a racing driver for an interview. It won’t make them or their car quicker.

“That’s why Michael Schumacher demanded excellence from his interviewers in order to give a good answer, just as he demanded excellence from his mechanics and engineers. When you did get a good answer from him, that was very satisfying.

“James tipped me off about Michael: ‘Think about what you are going to ask him.’ If you just said ‘targets for the grand prix?’, he’d just say ‘to win’. I’d often watch people fail before me in the interview pens, and it might take a couple of races for an interviewer to get back into his good books.

“Also, if you showed you understood things from his point of view, he’d give you a better answer. And that has been the same with all drivers since.”