Sky F1’s off‑week just got busy: Lazenby vs Kravitz on the shelves, Button vs Villeneuve on the track
F1 pauses for breath before Baku, but the Sky F1 crew clearly didn’t get the memo. Two of the channel’s mainstays, Simon Lazenby and Ted Kravitz, have chosen the same day to publish their debut books, while Jenson Button and Jacques Villeneuve are dusting off their race gloves to square up at the Goodwood Revival.
Call it a double header: one on paper, one on proper old-school asphalt.
First, the book battle. Lazenby and Kravitz — who’ve been part of Sky’s F1 fabric since the broadcaster took over UK and Ireland rights in 2012 — both launched their first titles today, putting the long-time colleagues into a friendly head-to-head at the tills. Karun Chandhok helpfully stoked the rivalry earlier in the week with a photo of himself brandishing both, joking the pair “love each other so much” they released on the same day. Different authors, different styles, a shared timing line. It’s very F1.
If the paddock gossip has been dominated by contracts and technical upgrades lately, the timing is neat. With a week to go until the 2025 season resumes at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, the Sky team is keeping the sport front and center — only this time through stories and signatures rather than lap deltas.
And then there’s Goodwood. The Revival’s jewel, the RAC TT Celebration, will set a few pulses racing on Sunday at 14:00 local time, with Villeneuve and Button reunited — and very much competing — two decades on from their BAR-Honda stint. Villeneuve will wrestle the ‘Hairy Canary’ — a brilliantly named, very yellow 1963 AC Cobra — while Button will be in the famed “Cut 8” Jaguar-type. It’s one of those grids where the cars are characters and the drivers are more than happy to play their parts.
The Villeneuve-Button pairing remains one of the sport’s more intriguing snapshots. Back in 2003 at BAR, the then-23-year-old Button outscored his World Champion teammate by 11 points as the team took fifth in the Constructors’. Villeneuve was never shy about his standards — “I’ll respect Jenson once he goes quickly out on the racetrack,” he once shot back — but the Englishman had plenty of answers in the years that followed. He took the 2009 World Championship with Brawn GP after Honda’s withdrawal, and his 15 career wins ultimately eclipsed Villeneuve’s 11.
That shared history, wrapped in Goodwood’s period dress code, gives Sunday’s run a faint whiff of theatre. Both men are Sky F1 voices now and, in another neat bit of symmetry, Williams ambassadors too — Villeneuve rekindled ties with Grove earlier this year, while Button’s connection to the team that launched his F1 career has been steadily renewed in recent seasons. Expect firm elbows and warmer smiles.
As for Villeneuve, he hasn’t mellowed much with a microphone in hand. The 1997 World Champion recently turned his sights on Nico Rosberg, questioning the 2016 title-winner’s fire for racing after his immediate retirement from Mercedes. In typically forthright fashion, Villeneuve suggested Rosberg “had no passion for racing” after he’d achieved the target he shared with his father, Keke. Rosberg, for now, hasn’t bitten back.
If there’s a thread through all this Sky activity, it’s that the people who follow F1 around the world are just as restless between races as the teams they cover. Kravitz and Lazenby giving readers a peek behind the curtain feels timely; the Goodwood entry list reads like a mid-2000s fever dream; and the punditry never sleeps. The circus is on pause, not parked.
By this time next week, attention will be locked on Baku’s kilometre-long blast and the late-braking lottery down into Turn 1. For now, the stories come with bookplates and classic race numbers, and that’s no bad thing. F1’s present is always better when its past is alive and kicking — especially when the protagonists are still happy to keep score.
