The Gardeners' World Blog

Welcome to the first MotoGP blog which I’m writing at 39,000 feet on my way back from Shanghai, after Casey Stoner won a thrilling race in the China Grand Prix last weekend.

I’m BBC Sport’s TV motorsport producer and I’m going to start writing here regularly so I can answer your questions and comments – to start off with, I thought I’d deal with some of the issues that most frequently come up in the e-mails sent to our website.

A question we are often asked these days is: “Why don’t we broadcast MotoGP in widescreen?” All the broadcasters take their race coverage from the host broadcaster, Dorna, and they only offer this in 4:3 ratio.

I don’t know what other broadcasters do, but the BBC always transmit live sport as it originates, rather than zooming in to create a false widescreen, which can degrade the quality of the picture. The rights holders are currently experimenting with HD and hope to be able to offer race coverage in High Definition (HD) from 2008 or 2009, which will also mean you get to see the races in widescreen.