[Tyrrell]

The Sprint Race is not broadcasted live due to constraints on the time broadcasters can give to A1GP.

Assuming no problems with Safety Cars or worse, red flags, even if we ran the Sprint immediately before the Feature race we'd still be looking at live programmes running for at least 3 hours which is too long for many. With the best will in the world, each broadcaster has only so much time that it can devote to A1GP.

Both races were shown live in season 1 and it did cause programming issues when races ran over. Remember the time A1 Team Japan crashed on the Safety Car laps in Indonesia?

The change for season 2 when the Sprint race was run earlier (and shown 'as live') has helped enormously (the race is longer too). Sky Sports in the UK show the Sprint race in its entirety. The viewer misses none of the action and unless they choose to go on-line and peek at the result beforehand, they won't know how the race panned out until they watch the broadcast.

I accept that the most avid A1GP fans will want all the action live, but the way the broadcast works now is I think a very good compromise between entertaining the fans and keeping the television networks on-side. The more
network friendly A1GP is the stronger the probability of more broadcasters wanting to show it.