The World Touring Car Cup will stop broadcasting the first race of the weekend from this year, saying the approach did not meet its expectations.

The championship will return to broadcasting all races live on the Eurosport TV platforms from this year, and focus on producing clips and features for social media, although practice and qualifying will continue to be broadcast on the social media platform.

WTCR implemented the approach for its inaugural season, after it had been used by the now defunct TCR International Series, which had broadcast all its activities on YouTube and Facebook Live.

“The live Facebook transmission has been a huge disappointment,” said WTCR promoter Francois Ribeiro.

“It’s very difficult. Facebook is a media, but how it works for live broadcast, and the best way to experience how it works, is to experiment with it. I heard ‘Francois, if you put this on Facebook you will have one million viewers’. The truth is, we have done very creative stuff, with clips with the drivers as the promoters of the championship, and we’ll continue to do this, but the live broadcast has been nowhere near our expectations, so we have decided to stop this,” he added.

“We’ll keep going with the practice and the qualifying, that’s fine, but the three races will go back to linear transmission, as I can’t explain to teams, sponsors and manufacturers why I have to penalise them when we have 50 million viewers per event on TV, and then give them a maximum of 100,000 live on Facebook. So from 2019, we’ll use social media for the narrative of the championship, but not the live broadcasts.”