When Martin Brundle received the letter saying he was awarded an OBE in the King’s New Year’s Honours List for 2025, happiness was inevitably the overriding emotion.
Though there was a sense of relief too that it was for services to motor racing and sports broadcasting and not just sports broadcasting.
For F1’s increasingly young and diverse audience, Brundle is the icon of the grid walk and not the driver who raced in the sport from 1984 to 1996 and achieved nine podium finishes.
‘I never wanted to be a broadcaster,’ Brundle tells Mail Sport. ‘I was so angry because I wanted to be on the grid in 1997 driving for Jordan and I ended up working with Murray Walker on TV. As the cars went to the grid, I was like “Stop, you can’t go yet. I’m not ready!” Here we are, almost three decades later and weirdly, my entire motorsport career seems to be a fact-finding mission for my broadcasting career,’ he says.
Even now, he sees himself as a driver who does a bit of television but of course, Brundle is highly accomplished in front of the cameras with his multiple RTS Television Sports Awards for best Sports Pundit merely an indicator of the 65-year-old’s standing amongst peers.
Walker’s advice in 1997 was simply to let Brundle know that ‘we are here to inform and entertain’ and it’s a mantra that Brundle still lives by when he has the mic in hand.
Martin Brundle has revealed his relief his OBE was for motor racing and sports broadcasting
The F1 icon is set to begin his 41st year in the sport as both a driver and a broadcaster
Brundle has been catapulted him into the consciousness of the TikTok generation through his viral gridwalk interviews with the likes of Real Madrid and France football Kylian Mbappe
He has had stints at ITV and BBC and has been a fixture on Sky Sports’s F1 coverage since 2012. Brundle reveals that he is on live television for approximately 100 hours a year.
But it is the 15 minutes before a race when he is tasked with interviewing anyone from drivers to actors to footballers that have catapulted him into the consciousness of the TikTok generation, even though he refuses to have the app on his phone.
‘The grid walk actually really annoys me because that’s what I’m known for now,’ Brundle admits.
‘The whole thing is still a mystery. I won a lot of races as a driver and was on the F1 podium. I was World Sportscar Champion, winner at Le Mans, beat Ayrton Senna a lot of times in F3 – I was a reasonably handy racing driver and I’m a reasonably handy commentator but all I’m going to be remembered for is getting ignored on the grid by the Megan Thee Stallion and other people I’d never heard of until that moment.
‘It’s quite a funny thing but I can’t knock it – heading towards 66, I’m lucky to still be in live sport and that’s why I was pleased with the OBE because it wasn’t an OBE just for gridwalking.’
28 years since his first rodeo, Brundle still refuses to watch them back.
‘It’s not my natural habitat to interrupt people, and be cheeky and rude because that’s what it’s become. I know when I’ve done a decent job or embarrassed myself in front of millions of people. I can’t bear to watch it even though I really should. But in my heart of hearts, I know when I’ve done well.’
The viral tales are aplenty from mistakenly thinking Paolo Banchero was Patrick Mahomes to famously getting an interview with Kylian Mbappe by telling Mbappe’s bodyguard ‘I’m in charge around here.’ Not to forget referring to Joe Jonas as ‘one of the Jonas brothers’ as he tried to figure out which one he was speaking to.
Brundle admits frustration at becoming known for gridwalks despite his success as a driver
He finished on the podium nine times in Formula One and was a winner at Le Mans
Brundle famously mistook basketball player Paolo Banchero for NFL Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes at the Miami Grand Prix back in 2022
The Sky Sports presenter admits ‘it is a funny thing’ that many fans will remember him for being ignored by the likes of Megan Thee Stallion, pictured, during the gridwalks
‘You have car crash moments and inevitably, the difficult ones like Machine Gun Kelly end up going viral. The biggest shock I had was interviewing Florence Pugh, who was lovely. Often, you’re Googling before to see what people look like but when I saw her on the grid, she had a pink buzz cut and that’s not what I was looking for,’ he says.
‘More and more so, we’ll get a list and photographs – for example in Las Vegas, we had 72 A-listers and 62 in Miami. There’s so many I haven’t heard of but they’ve got 100 million followers on Instagram and I find that intimidating,’ he stresses.
‘With the Patrick Mahomes incident, I carry a longer lead for American races because their athletes are so tall and one of the three people in my ear told me it was Patrick. I’m not going to rinse them but I realised as soon as Paolo (Bancheros) looked at me and started talking that it wasn’t Patrick.’
‘I remember Stormzy saying ‘You’re a G man’ and looking it up to see if that meant something nice. Ultimately, if you try to make these things happen, they won’t. So you’ve got to be yourself and eventually you’ll get kicked off because someone better will come along.’
But for now, that thrill remains and for as long those 10 to 15 minutes of unscripted, unrehearsed live television keep him on his feet, there is no sign of stopping soon.
‘The only thing that gets me as excited as racing is the grid walk in those moments when they cue me up,’ says Brundle. ‘It’s still nerve-wracking and about 30 per cent as exciting as driving on the grid, which is quite high because racing is a massive thrill.’
Time with drivers on the grid is less frequent now but there is one moment that still lives fresh in the memory.
‘Back in the day, I remember talking to Mika Hakkinen just before he became World Champion in Japan in 1999, he says. ‘It’s a unique sporting opportunity – you’re not going to run out to the middle of Wembley or on to Centre Court just minutes before action and be like ‘Roger, Roger’. We have this special access to athletes literally moments before they perform. I guess all of the nonsense with other people is a means to an end really.’
Brundle admits the grid walk is a ‘massive thrill’ and still a ‘nerve-wrecking experience’
The presenter believes other sports are desperate to have the age and range of audience of F1
Brundle is pencilled in to work on 16 of the 24 races during the 2025 Formula One season
That 1999 season had 16 races, while this season will have 24. Brundle is pencilled in to work on 16 of them though he insists there is no sign of fatigue yet.
‘If you go back to the era of Stirling Moss, they had eight races a season and you’d send the cars on boats across the Atlantic. Even when I was racing in the 80s, we had 15-16 races. I thought there would be fatigue with so many races but I haven’t had that feeling yet because there’s so much to talk about these days,’ he says.
‘Far and away, the biggest thing I’ve seen in 40 odd years is Netflix’s Drive to Survive, which has moved the sport along in terms of awareness and everything is going skywards. Other sports would kill for the audience we have and the diversity of that audience. The average age of viewers has gone down 10 years and we’ve finally cracked America, which energises sponsorships.
‘A lot of sports keep the same audience, which gets older and older. Some older people say it’s too showbiz now. In my day, I don’t know if the likes of Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet, Ayrton Senna and Keke Rosberg would have bothered with Drive to Survive. They were big characters and household names too back then but the sport was a lot more dangerous and more gladiatorial,’ Brundle adds.
Aside from the viral gridwalk moments, it is one of the things that still intrigues him the most about the changing dynamics of the sport.
‘The drivers now are like a great big boyband really. That confuses me and old guys like me. How can you be best friends and race each other wheel to wheel? But they’re nice kids, good characters and what you see is what you get with Carlos (Sainz) or Lando (Norris) or George (Russell) or Charles (Leclerc). They’re all approachable, media savvy and they do Formula One proud,’ he says.
And so to Melbourne, for the start of the 76th F1 season and his 41st year in the sport.
Brundle admits he is confused by how this generation can get along well while competing
Brundle reveals he likes to mix and match on the grid to serve F1’s broad audience of fans
Any preparations for the first gridwalk of the season I ask?
‘We’ll just try and stay sober on Saturday night,’ Brundle says. ‘I like to mix and match it because we have a real broad church of an audience – you have viewers that know more than we do, others that are casually interested and others who just end up watching on a Sunday because it’s raining outside.
‘The aim is to try and give everyone something without talking down to people or angering them and the gridwalk is the same. You’ll know when I’m in trouble if I’m looking for a ‘Martin’s Random Person’ which I call an MRP with five minutes to go, because then anything can happen.’
Either way, stay tuned.
Sky Sports is the exclusive home of Formula 1 in the UK & Ireland. Don’t miss the start of the 2025 World Championship live from Melbourne, Australia, March 14-16th, only on Sky Sports and NOW.
