Harrison with Ringo Starr with Nelson Piquet in the Brabham-BMW pits before the 1985 British Grand Prix
Grand Prix Photo
Tucked into the middle of a 1977 interview that’s mostly about life, cars and bikes is a throwaway line from George Harrison that reads less like a rock star’s small talk and more like a prediction about Formula 1‘s present.
Asked by motorcycling legend Barry Sheene whether he had any strong feelings about the sport, Harrison didn’t talk about a driver or a car. He talked about television.
“I also reckon car and bike racing gets poor coverage in the media, both television and the newspapers,” he told Sheene in an exchange published by Motor Sport in the September issue, out now.
“Racing is something we British are very good at and I think it is about time it got more exposure. There is a huge potential audience who don’t realise how great it is.”
He wasn’t hedging, either: “I’m sure if the people were educated to it by having more opportunity and see and understand it, the audience would be terrific.”
He thought the sport was sitting on an audience it hadn’t found yet, simply because nobody had shown it to them.
It’s a good line in isolation, and it’s a better one once you know what happened next.
Two years later, the BBC took over exclusive UK broadcast rights to Formula 1 and Murray Walker became the voice British viewers associate with the sport to this day.
Coverage that had been patchy highlights through the 1970s grew steadily through the ’80s and into live, full-race broadcasts by the early ’90s.
Harrison didn’t live to see where that road eventually fully led as he died in 2001, but the pattern he described – casual interest turning into real fandom the moment the sport is actually put in front of people – is the same one Formula 1’s American expansion has run on more recently.
Exposure is what grows an audience, as Harrison described trackside in France in 1977.
What makes the observation more than a novelty footnote is who was making it, as Harrison wasn’t a celebrity being walked through the paddock for a photo opportunity.
Harrison with Mansell in 1994
Grand Prix Photo
By his own account in the interview, he’d been going to races since childhood in Liverpool, remembered the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, and had spent 1977 quietly working his way around the calendar under his own steam.
One of his songs in his Thirty Three & 1/3 album includes a reference to the Tyrrell P34, F1’s most famous six-wheeler.
“After Long Beach I went to the Spanish Grand Prix and two weeks later, of course, I went to Monaco where we met up again,” Harrison added.
“A week later and I am here at my first bike grand prix, which is really great. So, I am a kind of motor sport groupie at the moment.”
Harrison’s television comment is closer to an argument than an anecdote, and it’s one the sport has spent the decades since more or less proving right, twice – once when the BBC deal took hold in Britain, and again more recently in the US, on the other side of an ocean and a streaming revolution he never saw coming.
The George Harrison of the interview would probably have found nothing surprising in an American teenager discovering Formula 1 through a Netflix binge rather than a race weekend.
