David Hill, 78, still remembers his first day working for Formula 1. In October 2017, he’d been hired by then-chief executive Chase Carey to help reimagine the racing series’s television broadcast. During five decades in Australian television, then at Sky Sports and, finally, at FOX Sports, he’d revolutionized how Aussie, British, and American viewers watched sports. The time-and-score chyron in the corner of the frame? That was Hill. The easy, breezy, slightly irreverent pregame show? That was Hill, too. He was also responsible for the glowing puck during NHL broadcasts; even Babe Ruth struck out ...
Hill was a TV lifer known for compulsive innovation — Carey, Ross Brawn, and the rest of the team from Formula 1’s new owners, Liberty Media, clearly believed the broadcast badly needed a shot in the arm. They brought Hill in as an advisor “to launch some innovations and enhancements to the programming package to really bring something fresh to the marketplace,” as Carey explained back in 2017.
While Carey and Brawn worked in a “plush, fantastic building in Piccadilly Circus,” Hill left his home in London and took a bus to a train to a cab to the broadcast’s much-more-humble HQ in Biggin Hill, right by the famous World War II airfield. The white-haired Australian leans back on his couch, one sweatpanted leg crossed over the other, and smiles easily as we speak. It’s the last day of spring, and we’re seated in a living room right off the pool in his gorgeous home up in the hills near Los Angeles’ Rustic Canyon. Hill tells me he didn’t want to come in on day one and blow everything up. The “traveling circus” that is the jet-setting F1 broadcast apparatus didn’t need a whole new cast. It just needed a facelift. “I understood that production had to go on. I couldn’t walk in and say, ‘You’re all bunch of fucking assholes,’” he says, “because I suspected that they weren’t.”
Instead, his hunch was that the Formula 1 team was so steeped in the world of Grand Prix that they’d simply forgotten the animating goal of any sports broadcast: to answer a question right as a viewer thinks to ask it.
So, the Emmy Award-winning Hill walked in, introduced himself, and made an ask: “I want you to debate and find the best produced race that you’ve got. I want everyone involved — audio, cameramen, directors, producers.”
Then, he told the team he wanted them to bring everyone into a screening room, press play, and only stop the broadcast when Hill raised his hand to ask a question. “If I don’t lift my hand, I will walk out that door and you’ll never see me again,” he remembers saying. “I’ll be back in two weeks, 10 o’clock Friday, and we’ll do it.”
Friday came and the team queued up their favorite race. “Here I am in this room, and I put my hand up and said, ‘Who’s that?’ They say, ‘Well, that’s Christian Horner.’ I said, ‘What does Christian Horner do?’ ‘Well, he runs Red Bull.’ And I said, ‘What’s Red Bull?’ ‘Ah, it’s one of the teams.’ They all looked at me as if a village had lost an idiot!” Hill says, starting to laugh. “But it was about asking why? I think about 12 minutes in they all started to realize where this was going.”
Where this was going was a full reimagining of the sport, led by Carey and the new owners at Liberty Media. The legendary former engineer and team principal Brawn, “the Einstein of Formula 1,” as Hill calls him, would rework the design specs, the rules, and much more to maximize excitement in the races. Sean Bratches—“a charge of electricity; he spins off ideas constantly,” says Hill—would bring Formula 1 into the 21st century from a social media perspective. And Carey, who had worked with Hill at FOX for years, had brought Hill on to create a broadcast that captured the kinetic energy of 200 mph supercars and delivered loads of information to invite a new generation of race fans into the sport. As Carey told Variety in 2015 when Hill left FOX to start his own production house, “For nearly thirty years, David has defined excellence in sports television in the same way Roone Arledge did in the 1970s and 1980s. David is a true leader, visionary and once-in-a-lifetime force of nature.”
So, with the blessing of Formula 1’s top brass, Hill could get to work on the issue at hand as he saw it. “If I was a 25-year-old male who was into cars, why would I suddenly go to what I previously thought of as effete, exclusive, not-for-me auto racing?” Hill asks. “Plus the fact that it’s on at five in the fucking morning on a Sunday!”
As expected, Hill’s style rubbed some traditionalists the wrong way. He was shaking up a broadcast that still looked strikingly similar to the one they’d grown up on. All of a sudden, there would be new camera angles and booming audio, stats along the side of the screen and picture-in-picture instant replays. Hill stresses that last point. “Hours would pass, dynasties would rise and fall, and finally the replay would be there,” he says, shaking his head. Now, he leans towards me and snaps. “The replay has to be there like that.”
Hill got his start as a journalist, spending a decade in print and then in front of a camera in his native Australia. “Then when I got sick and tired of being a journalist, because I got sick and died of the hypocrisy of politics, I was offered a job on a show called Sports Night,” he says. “I discovered, in sports, an honesty. In politics and economics, you can talk your way out of anything; in sports, you can either do it or you can’t.” He tells me journalism taught him two lessons he’s used in his sports television career: research quickly and thoroughly and let your ADHD be a motor. But Hill’s secret sauce is that he’s always been preternaturally willing to risk showing his ass to the world. He’s extremely self-assured—maybe cocky’s the word; it’s allowed him to take bold swings for decades.
Back when Sky Sports first got the Premier League in 1992, Hill was living in Notting Hill. He’d taken his two dogs out for a very muddy London walk and hosed them off before coming back inside. Then, he flipped on BBC to watch the Chelsea game. “It was twenty past three when I sat down to watch it, and it’s now twenty to four and I didn’t know what the score was,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘Shit, if I was at the game, I would’ve just looked across. And I’d also know how long it was to go.’”
So, when the first Sky Sports Premier League broadcast began, Hill placed a chyron in the corner that told the score and had a running clock. “My boss Sam Chisholm called me up on Monday and said, ‘That's the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Take it off.’ I said, ‘Yes, Sam, you’re right. I will.’ But I didn’t,” Hill says, grinning. “So the second week, he said, ‘The fucking thing’s still there.’ And I said, ‘Oh, shit. Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll get on that.’ And then he forgot about it.”
When his employer and fellow Australian Rupert Murdoch made the biggest bet in American sports broadcasting history, bidding $1.6 billion to snag the rights to broadcast NFC games from CBS in 1993, he brought Hill to America to rebuild televised football from the ground up. Hill quickly brought over his Premier League innovation, which was dubbed the FOX Box. It did not go over well with American viewers. “I got death threats about the score and time. Five of them. I had meetings with the FBI and the LAPD,” he tells me. “They said to take it seriously because there were no spelling errors. So I’ve always watched spelling bees and thought, ‘Hmm, maybe there’s a potential assassin there.’”
He’d arrived as an outsider with no understanding of the Xs and Os of the game, but his broadcast innovations—the FOX Box, and most importantly, the lighthearted, digestible pregame show—completely changed how we watch sports in America. In 2017, he became one of the most-unlikely inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
I’d come to Hill’s home hoping to understand where the ability to innovate in such a competitive and cutthroat industry came from. At one point, I share a quote from an oral history of the NFL on FOX that Bryan Curtis wrote for The Ringer in 2018: “We kidded David that he had 100 ideas a year, and the trick was to pick the six you could do on this earth.” Hill sits up straight and asks me who said that. When I tell him, Hill snaps back: “I fuckin’ fired him. He’s a c***.” He leans back again into the couch. “That’s what people that don’t get any ideas at all always say about me: ‘Oh, yeah, he’s got a million ideas, but none of them work.’ Yeah, fuck, they do.”
Hill says the reason he can keep coming up with new ideas that seem simple in retrospect is his guiding ethos: to answer the question right before it’s asked. He remembers watching soccer with his father, a semi-pro player, who would explain the little intricacies of what the players were doing on the pitch. “The whole trick is that you have to teach it. You never want to have a kid sitting with a parent saying, ‘Why is that happening?’ and the parent doesn’t know,” he says. “I’ve always believed it was my job to increase the audience and to lower the demographic.”
During his seven years at Formula 1, he did that in spades. This year’s Miami Grand Prix race lapped the former American viewership record, with an average of 3.1 million viewers watching ABC’s Sunday broadcast. Since Hill boarded the broadcast, “average viewership has essentially doubled from 554K in 2018 to 1.11 million in 2023,” according to an ESPN Press Release.
Obviously, Hill’s on-screen changes are far from the only growth factor: Netflix’s Drive to Survive and Formula 1’s push to embrace social media have both been massive catalysts. But Formula 1’s rise is another feather in Hill’s cap—to go along with helping launch Sky Sports, the NFL on FOX, as well as FOX’s coverage of the NHL, MLB, and NASCAR.
A year into his advisory role, the septuagenarian tells me he realized he’d need to find the person who’d run the show when he was gone. One day, as Hill and Dean Locke, then a director on the broadcast, waited for the train, Hill remembers saying: “Listen, before we get on the tube, why don’t we come have a cup of coffee?”
“We sat there talking for about two hours and got totally over-caffeinated,” Hill says. “I came back and I was talking to Chase [Carey], and said, ‘I think I found the guy.’”
Locke fully took the reins as Formula 1’s Director of Broadcasting & Media during last year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix. “David spent a lot of time listening to the ideas of the production team. Of course there were some he preferred over others, but he sat down with the individual team members to understand how things worked, and where there were areas for development,” Locke says of Hill. “All ideas were co-created with the team and David gave them 100 percent support including his famous passion and energy.”
2019 Canadian Grand Prix during Hill's tenure with Formula 1.
Hill’s most essential change to the broadcast came right when it began: the theme song. “The biggest problem I had was with the theme,” he tells me. “There was an unnamed producer at the BBC who was listening to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain.’ Around one minute, thirty seconds in, it starts with John McVie’s bass, and then Lindsey Buckingham comes in, and then the drums start. That was on the BBC and Channel Four forever!”
It was the desire to convince that theoretical 25-year-old car nut to give his niche sport a chance that led Hill to hire composer Brian Tyler for the job. Tyler composed the scores for the Now You See Me films, Iron Man 3, and Crazy Rich Asians, but he’s best known for his work on seven of The Fast and the Furious films. Obviously, for Hill, bringing Fast to Formula 1 perfectly fit his demographic desires.
He’d worked with Tyler a few years before, commissioning him to write the theme for the U.S. Open golf tournament, and invited him out to the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. “I didn’t fucking know he was a Formula 1 fanatic,” Hill says. When I ask Tyler about it, he recalls Hill explaining Formula 1 to him like he was a novice. “He had no idea he was explaining something to a person that was a fanatic,” Tyler says, laughing. “In fact, about a month or two before, I had written a letter to the editor of a F1 magazine that they printed!” Tyler tells me he used to get bootleg recordings of qualification sessions and practices that didn’t air on American television, which he would watch with his college friend. He also mentioned Hill took him out on the town after the race in Austin. “David, despite having some years between us, this guy is, like, non-stop,” Tyler says of Hill, who quickly made him feel like “a homie from back in the day” to use the composer’s phrasing. “You always know what you’re gonna get. He never hides or pulls a punch. There’s no BS.”
Given his fandom, Tyler dove headfirst into the task of reimagining the Formula 1 theme. And as you’d expect, Hill had some notes before he began. “My thought is that the theme has got to be impending doom,” he told Tyler. His reference points? The theme from Hill’s favorite film The Hunt for Red October and the Soviet National Anthem. “My number two daughter can actually sing the Soviet National Anthem in Russian,” Hill says through a smile.
The notes fit Tyler’s vision to a tee. His first year as a fan was the same season Ayrton Senna died, so the mix of triumph and tragedy was always what he wanted to capture. “The stakes are so high,” Tyler says. “The idea of these modern gladiators getting into these spaceships that are basically tethered to the ground by wings.” He stops to take a deep breath. “There’s just nothing like it.”
Tyler nailed the assignment, creating the new theme and recording it with the Philharmonic Orchestra of London at AIR Studios Lyndhurst, a former church-turned-legendary studio founded by Beatles producer Sir George Martin. I ask Hill why that kind of massive investment was worth it when Formula 1 had managed to use a random cut from a Fleetwood Mac song since 1978. Why get so obsessed with that relatively granular detail?
“That’s what television is. Television is a whole lot of little insignificant things that if you don’t look after them all, it doesn’t create that psychic reward you have when you’re watching,” he says. “So, it’s: what is your font? What is your music sting? What do your graphics look like? And how do you put them on?”
Hill explains that when he arrived, the engineers on the TV side were driving the ship. He let them continue driving, for the most part, when it came to the camera angles, getting the picture and audio to screens around the world, and making sure the traveling circus moved swiftly and smoothly from race to race. “I dealt with more PhDs than I’ve ever dealt with in my life,” he says. “These guys, the engineers, are just fucking brilliant.” But as a producer, Hill viewed his mission as making sure the technical brilliance translated to the soul of the viewer. “If brilliant engineering exists in a forest and no one sees it, how brilliant is it?”
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Tyler recorded the theme song with the Philharmonic Orchestra of London at AIR Studios Lyndhurst.
Ayrton Senna in the Loews hairpin during the 1989 Monaco Grand Prix.
Hill clearly had the power to put his stamp on the broadcast, but I ask if there were any of his patented big ideas that he couldn’t get on the air. He doesn’t hesitate, telling me the thing he could never convince the engineers to do was to let the in-car camera behind the driver’s head shake. “It looks like a video game because it’s stabilized,” he says through a grimace. Hill remembers telling Steve Smith, who created all the in-camera vision, to go on YouTube and look up a shot of Ayrton Senna driving in Monaco with the gearbox in his right hand. “I said, ‘That, to me, epitomizes what an in-car camera is, because it shows the athleticism required, the G-forces,’” he says. “Everything is in that shot.”
That shaky video is a window into Hill’s overarching vision for what a Formula 1 broadcast can — and must eventually — be. For the sport to become a blockbuster broadcast, he knows they need to find a way to put the viewer in the driver’s seat. The graphics in the chyrons can explain what’s happening, but if you can’t feel the danger and drama, it’s all for naught.
Now he takes me back to Monaco, explaining the moment that he believes should be Formula 1’s pitch-perfect kinetic sequence. “When they’re coming down through the tunnel, there is a chicane and then there’s a hard left,” he says. “And so they’re going to that full crack and then they decelerate coming down.” He looks off, a bit past me, toward a large pop art painting of two women by a pool that covers most of one wall. “So pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Then they’re slowing for the chicane,” he continues. “And then they put on the juice.”
Hill knows the way the gear shifts should sound and how the camera behind the driver should shiver over each bump in the old roads. It’s all as obvious to him as it was to put the time and score in the corner of the screen.
As Hill narrates the scene, it’s clear that he can see it all. And it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? So, why can’t everyone else see it?
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