Just wanted to start a post to detail why Verstappen's forward facing camera wasn't available for those who don't know.
Since 2016 F1 has been able to pull live feeds from every car but they can’t have every camera on every car active so have to switch around the available angles on each car depending on which the director wants to use at any given time. This is the way it’s always been in F1 & other categories due to the bandwidth limitations of the system.
In the race today when Lewis started to get close to Max they switched to Max's rear facing camera which is something that is fairly standard to do in that scenario as that is the camera most relevant if there's nothing ahead but a car close behind.
They do have the ability to record the footage from every camera on a car to internal storage on the car but that can’t be downloaded until after the car is back in the garage after post race scrutineering. (As was done here for example).
The current system introduced in 2016 does have the capacity for upto 26 onboard camera feeds (In-case they get a full grid of 26 cars) to be live so they do have the ability to have 2 (Or more) cameras live on ‘some’ cars but again they can’t do this on every car & which angles are active on each car comes down to not only what the world-feed director wants to show but also what they want to display on the pit lane channel, F1TV onboard feeds or if they want to pull some footage from a particular camera for other reasons. The FIA only have access to the cameras that are live at any time. If a camera isn’t live they don’t have the footage until it’s downloaded later on.
That is again the way it’s always been & in fact it’s better now than it used to be as when the onboards were analog up until late 2005 only 4 cameras could be live at any given time (Despite every car carrying a camera from 2000) & when the system was upgraded to digital at the 2005 Japanese Gp that boosted the available number of onboards upto 9. It’s only been since 2016 that they have been able to pull live feeds from every car & F1 is still to my knowledge the only series that is able to do that.
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