Popular Sky Sports F1 presenter confirms exit from broadcaster ahead of Austrian GP

Sky Sports F1 presenter Rachel Brookes has announced she is leaving the broadcaster. 

Brookes confirmed her departure from Sky Sports F1 in a post on social media on Wednesday afternoon, days before the Austrian Grand Prix. 

The 51-year-old Briton said she would remain involved in F1 and teased that she is “moving on to exciting new ventures”. 

"After many years at Sky I am moving on to exciting new ventures and looking forward to what comes next,” Brookes wrote on the social media platform X. 

“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 has been part of Sky Sports F1’s presenting team since it took over exclusive broadcasting rights in the UK from the BBC in 2012. 

Prior to joining Sky’s F1 coverage, Brookes had worked as a freelance reporter for Sky Sports News since 2009. 

Brookes recently revealed she received “horrific” abuse from online trolls following an interview with Max Verstappen last year. 

“I got a lot of messages from people in broadcasting, in sports broadcasting, saying: ‘Well done for asking the question’,” Brookes told the Road to Success podcast. 

“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 1 race. It’s sport’.

“But the stuff I got sent was horrendous, utterly horrendous. So I just closed my comments.”

Brookes asked Verstappen if he had deliberately driven into Mercedes driver George Russell at last year’s Spanish Grand Prix. 

Verstappen, who was handed a 10-second penalty for the incident, responded: “Does it matter?”

Brookes posed the question after 2016 F1 world champion and Sky Sports pundit Nico Rosberg suggested Verstappen ran into Russell on purpose. 

“There is no one better than a Formula 1 world champion [Rosberg] to tell me what could have happened in that moment,” Brookes added. 

“I’m not making a summary myself here, I’m literally relaying what our world champion on the team thinks.

“The reason I said that was because in Imola, just before, he had pulled off that incredible move at the start of the race.

“He had our commentators and our pundits open-mouthed at how fantastic his move was at the start of the race.

“That is what Max does, and Max can do. So to me, when he did what he did with George, it took some of the shine off, which is what I said to him.

“And I hate that, because he’s incredible, and he has those little moments that give people cause to criticise him, and it really frustrated me as a fan that had happened.”

F1 recently announced a major new extension for Sky Sports to remain the home of F1 in the UK until at least the end of 2034.