Rachel Brookes has left the Sky Sports F1 team (Image: Getty)
Rachel Brookes has announced her immediate exit from Sky Sports F1 in a statement on social media. The 51-year-old was a popular member of the broadcaster’s coverage and interviewed drivers before and after races for the last 14 years. But just days before F1 returns in Spielberg for the Austrian Grand Prix, Brookes has confirmed she will not be part of Sky’s coverage this weekend.
She confirmed she will remain within the world of F1 in a statement which read: “After many years at Sky I am moving on to exciting new ventures and looking forward to what comes next. I have left the Sky F1 team but F1 still has my heart & so I’ll still be involved in it. I’ll keep you posted, in the meantime see you at Silverstone!”
Brookes had been a regular on Sky’s F1 coverage since they took the rights from BBC back in 2012. She became a recognisable voice on race weekends as one of their main reporters. The reason for her departure has not yet been made clear, nor have the specifics of her next role.
It comes after Brookes, speaking on the Road to Success podcast weeks ago, admitted she never planned to go into the world of TV. “I never wanted to be a presenter,” she admitted. “When I was little I wanted to be a radio presenter. I did that and then up until 2005, I was on a radio station in Southampton. Then talkSPORT were looking for people to present during their ad breaks on camera.
“My friend was doing it and said, ‘You should come up and do it’, so I went and did it and we literally just had to fill in the ad breaks. We had no script, no producer, we had people in the radio gallery and they were in our ears but we were all really young.
“They were saying the most random stuff while I was live, they’d say stuff in your ear while you were reading out all the latest sports headlines. They’d say ‘There’s a spider on your shoulder!’ while you’re reading these sports headlines, to try and throw you off. It was the best training you could ever have! I really enjoyed it.
“Then I went to Sky Sports and I’d spoken to the boss for five years at the time before I got an interview with him. I went back to talkSPORT and quit the next day. This was 2006, 20 years ago.”
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Rachel Brookes in a Sky Sports F1 interview with George Russell (Image: Getty)
Brookes also revealed the extent of the abuse she suffered after interviewing Max Verstappen at last year’s Spanish Grand Prix. She asked the Dutchman if he deliberately crashed into George Russell after her Sky colleague, Nico Rosberg, suggested so during commentary.
Brookes said: “I got a lot of messages from people in broadcasting, in sports broadcasting, saying: ‘Well done for asking the question.’ Because nobody else in that pen that day asked him that question.
“And even my colleagues said they wouldn’t have asked that question, because they’d have been too scared to ask it. But then the fans, the social media side of it, was horrendous. I got people telling me I should never be able to have children because I’m a bad example.
“I got the most horrific stuff you could imagine. And this is from a lot of these profiles with dads with kids with daughters and things like that, where you just look at it and think: ‘Take a step back. It’s a Formula One race. It’s sport.'”
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