ITV's upbeat plans for grand prix coverage from 1997 onwards were revealed at a spectacular reception at the Honorable Artillery Company in London last night attended by FIA vice president Bernie Ecclestone and a host of F1 luminaries including representatives of all the British based teams.

More than 450 guests heard Marcus Plantin, ITV's network director, admit that the channel made its reputed bid for the grand prix contract after being highly impressed by the excellent ratings gained by their rivals at the BBC.

He added that he hopes that the quality of coverage provided by ITV will encourage at least five million BBC viewers to change channels en masse.

ITV say they will begin presenting the Formula One season in March of next year and intend to show qualifying sessions and feature programmes on each grand prix - as well as providing saturation coverage of the actual race itself.

The network believes that it can present better, more detailed and imaginative presentation than BBC has been able to manage over the past few years. Furthermore, it does not believe that advertising breaks will harm the flow of the presentation. In that connection, ITV has examined the possibility of ten one minute ad breaks or five two minutes breaks during the course of a grand prix.

"Any missed action will be followed up immediately after the break," said Ian McCulloch, operations director of Laser Sales, one of ITV's three sales companies.

"Having studied the business of lost action, although people think that they currently see everything that takes place - and that advertising breaks will spoil the coverage - the fact of the matter is that they don't. We have to get the message across that it is true that ad breaks will deprive them of that coverage because, as things stand at present, so much of the time is spent simply concentrating on a single car circulating in the lead.