Well there’s not much anyone can do about that. The FIA is it’s own thing, they concern themselves with running the race in a safe manner and with adherence to the rules by all parties. They don’t go out of their way to inform the media about what they are doing or why.
What does that have to do with anything? For almost every other major sport, commentators are either on site and/or have a team with them which informs them of additional detail and info as the game takes place. Nobody at NHL headquarters said "hey let's make extra provisions to make sure TSN commentators get an inside track". That happens because the teams prepare to cover the games does a better job.
For F1 is like having an expert buddy come for a visit to watch the race with you, they only know and react to what you see on the main broadcast. There is little value to that after a few years watching when you basically already know what they are going to say about it and they have no additional value/info to offer
There is a data channel where things like yellow flags pop-up right away. That’s also what the graphics on screen are based off. As well as the driver tracker that might show someone as being stationary. So everyone knows about the flag right away, but the reasons might only be known to the marshal that called the flag at that specific location.
Well they may not bother checking because they RARELY say who/what caused a yellow flag until shown on the broadcast. This is specially frustrating for the quick spins where the yellow flag lasts only a few seconds. To boot, the broadcast is getting worse and worse (this year it has been abysmal) so sometimes it takes 10 mins before they actually show what happened "back then"
As for F1TV they also have a whole team. They have people listening in to the radio calls, monitoring driver cams, looking at the data and analyzing stuff. They also have boots on the ground doing driver interviews and talking to liaisons in the teams and with the FIA. They are finding out stuff as fast as possible.
Well, they do not seem to feed that info back to the commentators AT ALL. For example, in yesterday's race during the red flag, commentators said it could be a Safety Car rolling start OR a stationary start, it was up to the officials to determine... and we all found out what it was when we saw it happening. It does not seem anyone in the reporting team knew what the decision was even though it must have been known a few mins before it happened at the very least
It can get annoying during a red flag where the FIA isn’t forthcoming with what they are doing. But they are focused on making sure everything is in order and getting shit done. So I can understand talking to the press is a low priority at that point. And a group of workers inspecting the road or a barrier often tells us enough about what’s going on.
Again, I am NOT talking about the FIA issuing a report to the press, that never happens in any sport in real time.
I am saying that if there is a crash they don't show right away (which makes sense and I know why they do this), I would expect the commentators to say something like "we have a collision between Speed Racer and Driver X, waiting on details" even if it's not shown on the broadcast. Instead we get a "there must be some collision to cause this red flag".
In Hockey for example, a sport where a ton of stuff happens in the blink of an eye, commentators will say "that's a high sticking from X on y" even though we could not see it on TV, we just see some collision between players and the whistle to stop the game. Sure, sometimes it takes a few mins for the replay to show us that but the commentators are well placed (and seem to have bionic eyes) to see what happened and tell us in advance
you know Monaco is bad when the there isn't enough to show to get a 10 min vid