Pole position: Australia's F1 champions

It feels almost ridiculous now, but for 15 years, the Tasmanian village of Longford hosted some of the fastest cars on the planet. The 7.24 km circuit was made up of public roads that went past a country pub, under a railway viaduct, across a wooden bridge over the South Esk, and somehow convinced Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill, Bruce McLaren and Jack Brabham to come down to a sleepy town near Launceston and race on them.

This footage from 1964 starts with a hand-drawn map of the lap, complete with corner names like Newry, Tannery, Long Bridge, Mountford and Pub Corner, and then drops us straight into the cockpit. We see telegraph poles a metre off the racing line, weatherboard cottages flicking past, an open-faced helmet bobbing in the corner of the frame. Longford hosted the Australian Grand Prix in 1959 and 1965 and a round of the Tasman Series every year from 1964 to 1968, before closing in 1968 because the cars had simply become too fast for the scenery.

It opens on a newspaper page. ‘BRABHAM, THE LAUGHING CHAMP,’ shouts the Saturday Evening News Magazine. ‘Will Jack be ace of aces?’ The next clipping answers itself – ‘HIS WORLD CROWN’ with a beaming Brabham and a sub-deck about Sebring, a Cooper-Climax, and a man pushing his car across the finish line because he'd run out of petrol. That's the story the episode wants you to know; in December 1959, Jack Brabham became the first Australian to win the Formula 1 World Championship, and he did it by jogging behind his own broken car.

Memoirs, William Carty's 1965 series for Cinesound, caught Brabham mid-career; two titles already, with a third yet to come the following year. The clip has the funny tone of a retrospective about someone who isn't finished, with the footage cutting between Brabham being shoved off the grid in his Cooper, a young Stirling Moss grinning under an open-face helmet, a small motorboat thumping across a rocky bay, and Brabham in a Dunlop suit collecting yet another trophy.

Carty films the racing and the boating in the same way – the way of a man who likes loud engines and fast things.

Bob Talbot's 1973 documentary opens on a close-up of a tyre, and from there it pretty much refuses to show us the race. Sunday Symphony is more interested in the man calling the action over a rotary phone, in a driver gulping water from a glass bottle with his hair stuck flat to his forehead, in the dead bugs splattered across someone's visor.

The Tasman Cup ran between Australia and New Zealand from 1964, and by the early 1970s, it had 5-litre V8s thundering around Sandown, Surfers Paradise and Warwick Farm, with crowds banked up on the grass. Talbot and his cinematographer, Gordon Bennett, clearly weren't interested in covering it like a sport. They linger on the Ansett-liveried Team Elfin like it's a piece of furniture they like the look of and hold on a sunburnt mechanic in a yellow Shell cap until we start wondering what he's thinking about. The result is something distinctly Australian, a spectacle that’s both serious and a great laugh all in one.

For 11 Novembers from 1985, Adelaide threw a Grand Prix that nobody quite believed was real, F1 cars belting through actual streets in actual suburbs, kerbs painted in the colours of a kid's lolly bag, the Royal Adelaide Hospital just up the road in case anything went wrong. (Which, in 1995, it did – Mika Häkkinen had a near-fatal crash in qualifying and got an emergency tracheotomy at the trackside.)

This Channel 9 broadcast captures the 11th and last of those races on 12 November 1995, with the frenetic energy of the race so strong it makes your palms sweat. The 1995 Adelaide Grand Prix was a race of attrition – David Coulthard hit the pit wall while leading, Schumacher and Alesi took each other out a few laps later, almost every front-runner crashed, broke or collided, and Damon Hill ended up lapping the field twice to win by the biggest margin in F1 since 1969.

What's interesting about the clip is how little of that chaos shows up in the mood, as Murray Walker and Jackie Stewart call the race in their usual register while Ken Sutcliffe anchors warmly. The broadcast plays the day as a celebration even though the race itself isn't really one, which is part of what makes it worth watching three decades on. It's a city throwing one last party for something it never quite believed it had.

After more than a decade in Adelaide, the Australian Grand Prix returned to Melbourne's Albert Park in 1996, on the same lakeside streets that had hosted F1 races in 1953, 1956 and 1958. Nine Network's Wide World of Sports covered the weekend and used the occasion to do some serious looking back. They could have welcomed the Grand Prix home with a montage and Murray Walker voice-over. Instead, the broadcast lets the people who were there in the 1950s tell us themselves what it was actually like, placing us as the audience firmly in the passenger seat and along for the drive (with just a lap belt in the early cars!).

Speaking to camera about the early Albert Park meetings are 1950s chief scrutineer Arnold Terdich, commentator Cam McLaren, owner-driver Gib Barrett and course marshal Patrick Pender, who was hit by a car at the 1956 race and was on crutches for seven years afterwards. Their recollections bring an intimate look into the birth of the sport no commentator could match. When asked if they were ‘daring young men’, Barrett corrects the interviewer flatly. ‘No, we did it because we absolutely loved it.’

The clip throws us into reverse and into the past, with riotous colour footage of the progression of the sport from its humble 300 horsepower engines to the jet speed engines of the modern day. The first-hand memories of the men who were there in the early F1 days gives a real weight and adds a personal touch to the history of the track, where legendary names like Jack Brabham and Stirling Moss wrestled their wheels to victory and defeat before screaming crowds of fans. The broadcast makes the case that Albert Park was always the right home for the Grand Prix, and that the new circuit is simply part of an older Australian tradition.

The 1996 race was won by Damon Hill in a Williams-Renault (the same driver who had won the final Adelaide GP four months earlier). Commentary came from Murray Walker and Jackie Stewart, with Eddie McGuire, Barry Sheene and Ken Sutcliffe on the local desk.

There's a particular kind of sportscasting that only really works when the person on screen has earned it, and this Network Ten piece featuring Mark Webber from the 2015 Australian Grand Prix is one of them. Webber, retired from F1 little more than a year, walks us through the Albert Park pit lane and shows us the small, unglamorous details of a Grand Prix weekend that a regular sports commentator would have no way of knowing about. The yellow markers painted on the concrete and what they mean for a pit crew. The choreography around the Mercedes garage as Lewis Hamilton's car is warmed up. The reason a particular tyre or angle matters.

For more than a decade, Webber was one of the faces who built F1's modern mythos in Australia, with nine Grand Prix wins, a long stint at Red Bull, and, of course, his famous feud with Sebastian Vettel. Seeing him share his expertise with the audience that used to cheer for him feels less like a champion retiring than returning, ready to pass on what only he could know.

There's a moment in this 2024 NBN News bulletin where the camera lingers on a hand-painted sign above a country karting timing tower – ‘The Home of Oscar Piastri’, in McLaren orange, next to an ad for a demolition company called 1300 2 DEMOLISH. It's the entire idea of Australian motorsport captured in one shot.

Piastri's first Formula 1 victory the night before is the fifth instalment in a national story, placing him in a line that runs through Brabham, Jones, Webber and Ricciardo.

The clip moves from Piastri leading lap 68 of 70 at the Hungaroring, to the podium with the Australian flag flying between two Union Jacks, to Piastri himself in his orange overalls, looking quietly stunned. Then the report goes home, to a sit-down with Piastri's mother, Nicole, at the family kitchen table, a trophy parked next to the fruit bowl, a reminder of the humble beginning for someone now anything but, much like the story of F1 in Australia.