For Broadcast March 12, 2008

The ITV Sport team certainly scored when it signed Sony to an estimated £3m sponsorship deal for its 2008 Formula 1 motor racing season coverage, featuring the wunderkind Lewis Hamilton.

ITV got perhaps £500,000 more from Sony this year than from previous sponsor Honda because of the Hamilton effect: the young boy racer came out of nowhere to nearly take the title in his rookie season. His skills brought more core ABC1 males to ITV as part of a 41% increase in overall viewers on last season, and the fact that he is also nice to look at might even expand F1's demographic a bit. A £500,000 uplift on £2.5m would be a 20% improvement for ITV1, not bad compared with GroupM's forecast of a 5% improvement in the whole of TV sponsorship for 2008.

And it's not all hanging on Hamilton: with a number of English teams already in the quarter finals of the Champions League, chances are ITV will have another bonanza when football's biggest club final is staged in May. Last year, when Liverpool played AC Milan in the final, the audience peaked at 10.3 million.

Despite all this, ITV's "goals for" column may not out-score its "goals against" None of the home nations reached the finals of Euro 2008 this summer and audiences will certainly be relatively low. If that weren't enough, the BBC has sole broadcasting rights to the Olympics, which is bound to eat into ITV's sport audience. The Games will mostly be live in the UK's early mornings, and BBC1 and BBC2 will have 300 hours' coverage between them. So it's ITV's F1 and Champions League vs the BBC's Olympics and a boring Euro 2008. With one young man carrying so many of its hopes, ITV will be hoping that Hamilton maintains his remarkable form.