The BBC director general Mark Thompson described the broadcaster's decision to split their live Formula One rights with Sky Sports from 2012 as a solution that offered the best possible value for free-to-air viewers in the UK.
Thompson made the comments during a recent hearing into the decision by the government's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
The hearing was called in order for the BBC to answer questions as to their reasoning behind the deal with Sky, which will see F1 disappear from exclusive free-to-air access for the first time ever.
From the start of next season, Sky Sports will show all 20 race weekends live on a new dedicated F1 channel, with the BBC showing ten live races and the rest in the form of highlights.
The move caused a wave of anger from UK-based F1 fans, who will now be expected to pay for a full Sky subscription to see every race live.
But in the hearing, Thompson insisted that the deal was the best value option for the license fee payer, with the BBC currently mired in a belt-tightening exercise.
"I believe that the arrangements that we have reached offer very good value to the licence payer, and the experience of Formula 1 on the BBC will still be very rich," he told the hearing earlier this month according to recently-released transcripts.
"The first grand prix next season, when this new arrangement starts - the Australian Grand Prix - will be live on Sky in the very early hours of the morning.
"There will [then] be a 75-minute highlights package in peak time on the BBC, which we would expect to reach many more people than the live coverage."
He added that the move to share the rights with Sky, rather than simply cancel their contract and open up a fresh round of bidding for the contract they secured in 2009, could have seen F1 disappear from free-to-air TV entirely.
"Talking about changing the arrangements in the existing contract and the extension of that contract, all I would say is that what we have done has guaranteed that a very large amount of Formula 1 will still to be free-to-air to the British public for many years to come," he rambled.
"Had we simply stopped the contract and decided to walk away from Formula 1 after that, there was a real danger that all of Formula 1 would have gone behind a pay wall."
As to why the BBC chose Sky over another free channel, he added: "We were quite clear that, to get the economics to work for us, it was going to have to be a pay partner.
"And [Sky] was the only pay partner, credibly, whom we thought we could involve in it - indeed, a pay partner who had expressed interest in this very topic of conversation previously.
"It was an example of a free-to-air pay partnership, which is not by any means unknown in the market."
The deal came under fresh fire from F1 fans when it was revealed that a rival bid from Channel 4 to take the whole contract from the BBC was not considered.
But Thompson defended the BBC's decision not to entertain that option, saying: "It seems to me that it was not required of us.
"And given that...what we were trying to achieve on behalf of the licence fee payer was a significant saving, actually keeping the confidentiality of the process until it was clear whether the thing was viable and whether all parties to it were happy, militated in terms of doing it the way we did it."
The BBC's first live race next season will be the Chinese Grand Prix on April 15th, by which point the 2012 season will already be two races old.
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