F1 TV captions three languages. Here's how to watch in yours.

It's Sunday at Monza. The tifosi are on the banking, and you open the F1 TV commentary picker looking for Italian.

There's a handful of languages in that list, and yours isn't one of them. So you take English, and spend two hours watching a strategy argument you can't follow.

Here's the short version: F1 TV builds captions from its own commentary booths, in English, Spanish and French. Nothing in that system translates between them. If your language isn't one it broadcasts in, there is no setting that will caption the race for you — it has to come from a tool on your side of the screen. On F1 TV that comes with one asterisk the rest of the internet won't tell you about, so this guide ends with a test you run once, on a quiet weekday.

What captions does F1 TV actually give you?

Three languages, and only for the commentary it produces itself.

F1 built live transcription into its broadcasts years ago, and it's a serious piece of engineering — trained on motorsport vocabulary, with a human checking the text before it goes out. Sessions get British English, US Spanish and French. The support races get fewer.

The detail that matters is easy to skim past: each of those is a separate transcript of a separate commentary booth. The Spanish captions come from Spanish commentary, not from English carried across. Nothing translates.

That's why this isn't a missing button. It's a missing layer. If you speak Italian, Korean or Arabic, there's no toggle that could work, because no part of the system was built to turn one language into another.

And the subtitle menu doesn't always work

There's a second problem, and it's the one that makes people think they're doing something wrong.

On some browsers and devices the F1 TV subtitle menu is unreliable — empty, or listed but producing nothing on screen. Viewers have documented it with screenshots, and no cause has ever been published. There's no setting that fixes it, which means that even viewers who are covered by those three languages can find themselves with nothing.

If you're deaf or hard of hearing, that's the whole race gone. It's also the reason to have a plan that doesn't depend on the player at all.

Bring your own subtitles — with one asterisk

The alternative doesn't involve F1 TV. Your computer is already playing the sound of the race. A captioning tool in another browser tab can listen to that same sound, transcribe it, and translate it as it goes, about a second behind the commentators. It doesn't matter what the player offers, because you're never asking it for anything.

That works on almost everything you stream. F1 TV has one complication: it's protected content, the same way a film on a streaming service is. That protection is designed around the picture. What it does to the sound isn't documented anywhere we could find, and it's the sort of thing that varies by platform and by browser.

So we're not going to tell you it works on F1 TV. We're going to tell you how to find out in a minute, on a day when it doesn't matter.

To be clear about what this is: a caption overlay draws text on your screen. It isn't a recording, and we're not going to explain how to disable anyone's protection. You're not copying the race. You're reading what's being said over it.

The 60-second test

Run this on a weekday, on any on-demand video with people talking. Not at five to three on Sunday.

1. Open F1 TV in Chrome or Edge on a computer, and start something with continuous speech.
2. Open your captioning tool in a second tab and start a session with tab audio as the input. Newey runs as a web page, so there's nothing to install.
3. Pick the F1 TV tab, and tick "Share audio." Miss this and the result looks exactly like a blocked stream: video playing, captions blank, no error anywhere. Rule out your own slip before blaming anything else.
4. Watch for half a minute — the picture as well as the text.

You'll get one of three answers. Text arriving and video still playing: you're set. Text arriving but the picture goes black: the sound is reachable, the picture is protected, and you'll want a different route. Nothing after thirty seconds: the audio path is closed on your setup.

If it's one of the last two, you're not stuck. Sound played outside the browser isn't affected the same way, which is what Newey's macOS menu-bar app is for. And the free preview shows, press conferences and highlights that F1 posts on YouTube have no protection in the way at all.

Setting up for a race weekend

If the test came back clean, spend five minutes on a Friday getting it right.

• Set your two languages — the commentary you're listening to, and the one you want to read. Newey covers 60, and can show up to three at once.
• Park the captions in the lower third. The timing tower runs down one side and the strategy graphics along the bottom, so put the text where you can take both in without moving your eyes.
• Pin the vocabulary first. Driver names, team names, tyre compounds, "box box", DRS, undercut. Speech models fumble exactly these words, and a glossary is the difference between captions and confetti.
• Rehearse in practice. An hour of the same voices saying the same names, with nothing at stake.
• Decide about fullscreen now. A floating caption window disappears under a fullscreen player. Either watch windowed, or use the Chrome and Edge extension, which draws captions onto the page instead.

Then Sunday looks like this. The formation lap is rolling, the caption line sits under the timing tower, and the commentary box is arguing about whether the softs survive to lap eighteen. The argument arrives in your language a second behind them. When the pit wall does something inexplicable on lap thirty, you get the explanation instead of the reaction.

What to expect, and what not to

• Team radio is the hard part. Booth commentary is clean audio and captions well. A driver shouting down a compressed radio channel over an engine is the worst audio on the broadcast — wait for the commentators to repeat it, because that's the part that captions.
• Safety cars are chaos. Three people talking over each other is where any transcript blurs.
• Captions never beat the timing screen. They arrive behind the speech, and the speech is already behind the data. Take the gaps from timing and the why from the captions.
• From 2026, US viewers watch in an app. F1 moved to an exclusive US broadcast deal with Apple, so there's no browser tab to capture — on a Mac, the menu-bar app takes the sound instead.
• It's for following, not quoting. Anything you'd repeat, check afterwards.

When the picker doesn't have your language: Newey

Newey is a live translation captioning tool that runs in your browser. It listens to what a tab is playing and puts translated subtitles over the video, in any of 60 languages, about a second behind the speaker. For a race weekend that means a glossary holding this season's grid, and an extension for the moment you hit fullscreen.

Run it this Friday during practice. If it comes back clean, Sunday is sorted — and the same setup works on anything else you stream.

FAQ

Does F1 TV have subtitles?

Partly. It captions its own English, Spanish and French commentary, with fewer languages on the support races, and nothing translates between them. In any other language, nothing in the player will caption the race.

Why don't F1 TV subtitles work in my browser?

The subtitle menu is known to fail on some browsers and devices — either empty or producing nothing when selected. No cause has been published and no setting fixes it, so the reliable answer is captions that don't depend on the player.

Can I change F1 TV commentary to my language?

Only to one F1 TV produces itself. The picker covers a handful of languages, and new markets don't automatically add new ones — a service launching in a country doesn't mean commentary in that country's language.

How do I get F1 TV subtitles in a language it doesn't offer?

You generate them yourself: a captioning tool captures the audio of the tab the stream is playing in and shows translated subtitles over it. On F1 TV, run the 60-second test above first, because the stream is protected content.

Is F1 TV accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing fans?

Unevenly. The live captions are a real build with motorsport vocabulary and human review, but they only cover three languages, and the subtitle menu has a documented history of failing on some browsers. Viewer-side captions work regardless of what the player is doing.