The Sky Sports News app for iPad is to get a significant redesign to coincide with the launch of the broadcaster's new dedicated Formula One channel. It's now called Sky Sports for iPad, and Pocket-lint has had a play with what the application has in store for F1 fans and from the looks of it, it's mighty impressive. 

Major caveat here before we get started. The application is awaiting approval from Apple and should, as Sky tells us, be ready in time for race day. Fingers crossed.

So you fire up the application and are greeted with either race preamble, stuff like news and features and then on race day, the actually meat of the app itself. Tap the F1 portal and you will be greeted with live race footage and a Twitter feed, which Sky curates, running alongside it. 

From here you can then select one of eight race feeds, including in car stuff and even the pit lane. Sky also showed us a demo of a feature coming later where you could watch up to three different feeds at once, something not yet done in an iPad app. 

The rest of the application is devoted to technical data. Say, for example, you want to see the position of every car on the track, well you can do that and follow them as the race is going on live. Timing as well can also be viewed live and you can follow individual drivers to see who is going quickest. That is about as far as it goes on tech data at the moment, so no braking or accelerating levels, sadly. 

If you are behind on the season's standings then the app has all the league tables built in as well. Constructors' championship data as well as drivers' can be viewed. We should add that all these features can be viewed while the race is being watched live, so you won't miss anything. 

If you do happen to glance away for a few moments and one of the Red Bulls should say crash out (hopefully), then Sky is going to be cutting together live highlights packages that you can then view instantaneously. This means they when using the app its virtually impossible to miss any part of the race. 

What we thought was going to be just there to complement F1 on the television looks like it might be a more interesting experience by itself. Better still, it works over 3G, so you can get all this on the go.

No word yet on an Android version or an adaptation of this for the iPhone, but Pocket-lint will keep you posted. 

For those who are interested, Sky's F1 coverage starts at 8pm tonight. 

What do you think of the new app? Let us know in the comments below ...