Alpine and Sky Open the Driver Radio Before Austin's Practice Start

Driver-to-team radio is about as protected as anything in Formula 1. So when Alpine let Sky's David Croft talk directly to Pierre Gasly during the United States Grand Prix weekend, it was a real break from routine, and a first for the sport. The line was live, two-way and unfiltered, and it ran for about two minutes on track.

Why this line is so guarded

Alpine's IT race communications engineer, Rob Gulliver, put it plainly: the driver-engineer radio is the most sacred channel in the team. It's the most important, the most tightly controlled and the most closely watched. Giving an outsider free rein to speak to a driver is, in his words, a big deal.

That's why the moment was easy to miss. If you weren't watching Sky Sports F1's opening practice coverage at Austin, or following the international feed that carried its commentary, the post-flag practice start probably slipped by as routine. Gasly's instructions for the grid came from an unexpected voice.

Croft told him he was heading to the grid and asked for one burnout, a start from the right-hand side and "Strat 7" for the practice start. Gasly's reply was dry: "You've done your homework, I see. So good job."

The exchange was real, not staged. Croft had to hand over the actual start procedure, which Gasly described as the most nerve-wracking part of the exercise. After that, Gasly gave a brief assessment of the start and talked through the run towards Turn 1. He tried the inside line to check how bumpy it was ahead of Sunday's race start. The conversation had to end around Turn 2 so Alpine and Gasly could focus on the FIA's engine mode tests at the end of FP1.

Gasly later joked to The Race that it added workload. "It's definitely extra workload to manage when you've got Crofty in your ear, chewing your ear around the lap." He was happier with the result, though. "It was really cool. The first in F1, so I'm very pleased we managed to get it done. I think people were surprised, and it had a positive effect."

The whole thing lasted less than a lap. Still, it opened a window into a driver's practice session that F1 almost never offers. Here's the thing: the sport doesn't often let go of that channel, and the reason is less about the minutes involved than the principle.

Why the sport rarely tries this

Croft was clear that the teams need the start data. The grid start is the first real chance of the weekend to gather it, so nothing could be allowed to compromise that. "But we did want to bring as much as we possibly could to the viewers back home," he said.

Interrupting a team's process, even at the lowest-stakes point of the weekend, isn't something F1 does lightly. Other series have leaned on this kind of access for years. British Touring Cars and Formula E have both used driver chatter as a regular feature. F1 has its own precedent, too. In 1993, Murray Walker told Damon Hill he'd earned pole for the British Grand Prix, then moments later told him he'd been beaten. That was a broadcast touch, not a planned feature, and it shows how thin the line between entertainment and interference can be.

Gulliver admitted the decision took some trust. "It's a leap of faith that we're actually going to let someone else talk to the driver. But here we've all taken the view that it's very low risk. We can cut it at any time and regain comms." He added that the pace of an F1 weekend means he needs real confidence in the system. He was also nervous while it was happening: "I thought, 'Please make sure he answers, otherwise I'm in trouble!' Luckily it went off without a hitch."

How the link got built

The idea started with a conversation between Croft and Alpine's communications team. Alpine racing director Dave Greenwood took it up, put it to the engineering group and to Gasly, and nobody objected. Gasly saw little change in the work itself. "It's practice, I'm quite chilled and I know what I've got to do, so in terms of actual work done it was the same. And it got me a bit of a break from the voice of my engineer!"

The technical side was harder. Talks started during the previous triple-header and ramped up at Austin. Gulliver worked with Sky from Thursday afternoon until an hour before FP1, installing and testing systems alongside Sky's technical staff, including colleagues at the production side in London. "The complex hardware, the routing of audio and everything behind it to make this one-minute chat possible was humongous," he said.

The start instruction shows how spread out the chain was. It began with Alpine's engineers at Enstone. It went to Gasly's race engineer and then to Greenwood on the pitwall, who acted as the bridge to Sky. From there it travelled to the UK, into Croft's earpiece and finally out through his microphone to Gasly. All of that happened in a very short time.

Gulliver explained the plumbing. "It's an external input into the garage. Our internet provider has access to Sky, and we get a cable from our internet provider to us. That goes into a Dante box, which is a piece of audio equipment on Sky's side, and that hooks into our system. Then the complex routing of the driver audio to and from is the bit that takes time." Inside the garage, everything from the car to the external box ran through Alpine's own infrastructure and network. Sky only had to receive the audio line.

The team didn't start from zero. "Back in 2020 we used to do driver of the day, where they spoke to who won that, so I looked back at some of the old logic we had," Gulliver said. That system was one-way, since FOM already received Alpine's feed. Sky needed a two-way connection, which raised the bar.

The live feed also differed from the usual broadcast route. Team radio that reaches F1TV runs on a delay of several seconds, partly for censorship reasons. This exchange was fully live over a direct channel. Multiple meetings went into making sure it was handled properly. Sky also added a safeguard: Croft had to press a physical button to speak, so nobody could open the channel by accident.

Where it could go from here

Expanding access is a tempting idea, and it carries a clear risk of going too far. F1 has put more weight on fan experience in recent years and keeps looking for ways to bring fans closer to drivers. The question is where that closeness stops being useful.

The BTCC has regularly carried driver comms during formation laps and behind the safety car. That makes it the obvious template for a non-racing slot at a grand prix. Even so, the appetite isn't there yet, at least not from the drivers. Asked by The Race whether he'd take part in something similar during the race, Gasly laughed. "No, absolutely not! It still adds extra workload."

He pointed to the amount of work the cars now demand: switches, battery management, different strategies and modes, all on top of managing traffic. "Hopefully one day there's quite a lot less and we have the extra time to have a little chat on our inlaps or outlaps. Not at the moment!"

Croft shares that caution. Some moments between a team and its driver are sacred for a reason, and any broadcast addition has to earn its place. He cited Formula E's post-race communications as an example of something that's pleasant enough but can get in the way of a real moment of emotion. Live commentary shouldn't outrank a raw, unscripted reaction.

He was enthusiastic about the possibilities, though. "Would we love to do a formation lap? Of course. Would we love to do a chat during a safety car? Of course we would. But that is very tricky to do. The safety car is normally out there for a very good reason, and there's a lot of radio traffic going on during it." A slowing-down lap after the race could work, he said, but that's also when teams are busy with celebratory radio.

Gulliver framed the balance as "looking at where the risk factor is." That logic explains why Sky and Alpine repeated the setup before the race at Austin, with Martin Brundle walking alongside Gasly's car as it was wheeled onto the grid after a reconnaissance lap. "Halfway through a session, when they're going through a plan to try to pick up performance, is probably not the best time," Gulliver said. "But laps to the grid, formation laps, all those sorts of places, the stress is less and you know what you've got to do."

He sees pre-planning as the key. Communications engineers from other teams have since told him the stunt looked good, and he thinks the lap-to-grid window is where it can work. Pre-planned moments mean the team can drop in and out of the production link without Gasly hearing the chatter, and that gives them control over timing.

Croft said the Brundle walk and the Gasly exchange felt different from the usual driver features. "We've done many features where Martin has driven a Formula 1 car and talked us through it. But this time it was a current race driver at a race weekend, and it felt different." He's already eyeing the next step. "Maybe we'll do more in practice sessions, like talking to a driver in the garage while they're waiting to go out. I'm sure there's more we can do."

My read is that the experiment worked because it was small, scheduled and low-stakes. The next test will be whether the same care holds when the production team wants something bigger. For now, the grid-walk window looks like the most realistic opening, and the garage-waiting idea is the one to watch.