Covering the world’s fastest motor sport across 24 race weekends is no easy feat. The twists and turns, come rain or shine, are covered meticulously by Formula 1’s production team week in, week out.

At the start of July, Motorsport Broadcasting was invited to F1’s revamped Media and Technology Centre as part of an F1 media day, giving us a glimpse behind the curtain. In the third and final part of our series, we look at the need for change and shine a light on the aspects which are covered remotely (to read parts 1 and 2 click here and here).

Sunday 20th November 2022. 13:00. The lights go down on another Formula 1 season, with Max Verstappen winning what, little did we know then, would turn into a period of Red Bull dominance.

As F1 bid farewell to Abu Dhabi and the 2022 season, and as the world turned its attention to Qatar for the men’s football World Cup, back home, the work was just beginning at F1’s Media and Technology Centre on the outskirts of London.

The new build

The building was revamped over the winter, beginning immediately after Abu Dhabi and finishing a few days before Bahrain testing. The changes support F1 in its sustainability aspirations, as well as enabling the organisation to be more flexible.

Speaking to F1’s Director of Broadcast and Media Dean Locke, he explained that the building in its previous state was no longer fit for purpose for the sport’s new way of working, with most of its production now remote at Biggin Hill, accelerated partly due to the pandemic.

“It was fit for purpose for how we did things before,” explains Locke. “We had a longer off season, so we did all our winter builds here, at that time we were travelling 60 containers around the world.”

“It was always on our roadmap to build something fit for purpose for remote, but COVID accelerated it like you wouldn’t believe. We were really keen to be the first international sport event up and running [post shutdown], and we built the remote operation in seven weeks [for Austria].”

Although COVID meant that the production went remote, the containers still travelled to the race track, something that has changed with the rebuild over the winter break.

“A lot of our technical roadmap is included in that so whether it’s new cameras, new replay systems, new team radio systems, new data collection, you’re still doing that but now you’re doing it in line with what we’ve done here with remote.”

The revamp aims to reduce internal silo working within F1, with “more cross conversations going on” between different teams now within the new building structure.

The building contains F1’s broadcast, media and digital teams, as well as engineering and commercial divisions, the teams working on a variety of areas, with over 30 edit stations active during a race weekend.

The facts and figures

• 500TB of data transferred each race
• 140 people working at M&TC
• 74 broadcasters across 180 territories
• 8 free-roaming camera operators on and off track

Source: F1

Locke’s team saw an immediate benefit of going remote. The team brought in two additional team radio stations between Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi in 2021, allowing them to capture the on-track drama that was unfolding between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen from all perspectives.

“We wanted to tell a better story, and it was all being told over team radio,” Locke says.

“We added the stations between Saudi and Abu Dhabi, which we couldn’t have done on the road because you’d need to get visas, get producers in.”

“But we brought that in between back-to-back races, which then paid dividends for the broadcast in Abu Dhabi. Trying to do that kind of thing while you’re on the road is very difficult but it was an easy thing to do [remotely].”

In-line with its outreach strategy, F1 has also opened up the building to stakeholders from the local community. “We’ve had three local schools in, and they were just blown away by the whole experience, and we got loads from it as well.”

From track to base

But how do the pictures, and the data, get from the circuit into people’s living rooms in over 180 countries?

From the perspective of the car, meet what F1’s head of on-board systems Steve Smith calls the “on-car computer,” weighing just over 1kg.

Housed on the roll hoop alongside the rear and forward-facing cameras, the device transmits the on-board pictures back to F1’s UK HQ. The device plays a sporting role too: it controls the DRS, it operates the cockpit lights (e.g., for when a yellow flag is waved), as well as supplying the car telemetry back to base!

F1 supplies the car performance data “as a service direct to the teams, its encrypted,” Locke emphasises, meaning that each team is not rigging up their own individual systems as was the case in yesteryear.

“We get an element of it that we can use in our TV graphics, for example on the heads-up display, which shows speed and g-force.”

Likewise, team radio feeds (including garage links) are supplied back to F1 and the teams from the same on-car device.

The way F1 receives the pictures from the cars racing around at up to 230mph has changed radically over the decades. “We used to transmit pictures directly from the car up to a helicopter that hovered 3,000 feet above the track,” Smith explains.

“It was then relayed back down to the broadcast centre [on-site]. That gave you a few problems with microwave link, when you’re going under trees or bridges. The iconic lap of Senna going around Monaco, most of the time the pictures are breaking up because it’s lost signal.”

Smith’s team changed the system in 2001, moving to a ground-based system where the “signal strength works like a mobile phone”, with up to 38 antennas around the circuit, allowing for two-way transfer with the cars.

“As signal strength drops out of one signal at one area to another, the picture moves, and this is why you can get pictures inside the tunnel at Monaco.” The pictures on the on-board cameras are transmitted by the antenna on the car to the sites around the circuit.

Smith acknowledges that there are still a few spots on the F1 calendar where the picture can disappear, notably on street circuits such as Baku due to the right-angled nature of the circuit with tall buildings.

Also coming back from the on-car computer is the audio, which F1 has been working to improve during the hybrid era. As revealed previously, F1 are exploring increasing the number of audio inputs to five in the future from the two that they have at present, building on the improvements they have already made.

“We mounted one of the microphones as close as we could get it to the exhaust, to try and make the sound more attractive,” Smith says.

“That poses a few problems in its own right. It lived in the bodywork before and now it lives outside suspectable to water, and putting it in the exhaust, it generates a lot of heat.”

To overcome the issues with using synthetic material near to the exhaust, F1 designed and built a new housing using Kevlar material.

As well as the on-board footage, there is the small matter of F1’s trackside camera angles and roaming cameras.

Although the cameras are on location around the world, whether at Spoon in Japan, or Copse at Silverstone, the engineering settings are all controlled from Biggin Hill, which Locke believes is a “really good” example of F1’s remote capability.

“We have a cameraman potentially in a different content in a different time zone. He’s zooming, panning, focusing the camera,” explains Locke.

“All the engineering for that camera, whether that’s the shading, the tracking, the colour contrast, that’s all done from here. I feel it’s a really good example that demonstrates that remote side.”

“They can’t step out to see if it’s raining, but they’re trying to match all those pictures [together] around the track.”

Aiding the cameramen is the fact that they can see the track feed with and without graphics, as well as textual information that can be put in the viewfinder.

“The Track Director PA can say we’re following this car,” says Locke. “First lap in Baku, they can’t hear the director very well, so we put text information in there, such as the driver, the team and the camera number they’re on at the moment.”

“Quite often the cameraman will sit on track mix, so he’s seeing the cut and then he’ll spot the two cameras in front of him, and he comes off it.”

In addition, the health of the devices, ensuring that they are working as expected is also controlled from F1’s Biggin Hill base.

Despite the move to remote on the engineering front, Locke does not foresee a future where cameramen are rendered redundant, arguing that the human element is still “dramatically important” to F1’s broadcasts.

“In my experience, the cameraman calls it best,” Locke believes. “They’re looking at that corner eight hours a day, they know exactly what they’re doing. Their instincts and reactions are incredible.”

“We only put remote cameras in where it’s too dangerous for a person to be. But we still have a person out there so they can clean the lens, they are part of that environment.”

“We could build a system that has a camera pan with the car, but I still don’t think you’d get that human touch of everything that happens within a Grand Prix. The human element of cameramen is dramatically important in our sports story.”

Locke cited the dramatic accident involving Romain Grosjean at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix as an example of the cameramen on the ground playing an important role in proceedings, more than what fans watching at home may envisage.

“The cameraman can call that through [accidents] very effectively to say, ‘you need to stay wide here’. Normally we cut away, we talk to race control and we only run the replay when we’re both happy that we’re able to run the replay.”

“We had the pictures of Grosjean jumping out of those flames, but we were checking for marshals, we were checking for our own crew, because it’s one thing Grosjean gets out, but what about other people as well.”

The critical role of the Event Technology Centre

To enable the data to travel to and from the circuit, there are two “geographically diverse” fibre links. All of the data travels down the two links, which can hold up to 10GB of data.

Everything you could think of from both a sporting and a broadcast perspective travel down the pipelines, which is why there are two fibre links, in case one of them goes offline for any reason.

“To get everything down those two lines is pretty impressive. We do a lot of compression, to make sure that we can get everything back here, while also keeping the latency down,” Locke says.

However, there is the rare occasion where both of those lines go down, which is partly why F1 still has an on-site production set up at each of the 24 race weekends.

Meet the Event Technology Centre (ETC). F1’s on-site home, which can take 5 days to construct from start to finish, plays a crucial role during a race weekend, ensuring that the footage transfers correctly to F1’s Biggin Hill base, as well as hosting F1’s Track Mix feed, which the director switches to if disaster recovery is activated.

“We’re able to distribute from the track and can switch within 30 seconds if we need to. That’s why we keep the Track Mix, which is the core of the platform, at the track because that’s still our disaster recovery,” explains Locke.

“The only things you’re going to miss at the moment are team radios, on-boards and limited replays.” In recent years, F1 has activated disaster recovery successfully on multiple occasions, showing why the system, and the ETC is a crucial role of F1’s broadcasts.

Up to 120 concurrent streams are sent to and from the event within the bink of a second. While the audio and video are in sync, the data relayed back from the car is not, however it is time stamped, allowing the team “to bring everything back in line.”

Once the production team has made the critical editorial decisions that they need to make for the World Feed and other downstream products within the gallery, the Master Control Room plays host to all of the feeds leaving, including the World Feed, on-board feeds and the different data channels.

Those feeds are then distributed to third parties, including Fire TV, Roku, the F1 TV app and broadcasters worldwide within 30 seconds depending on platforms for fans to watch worldwide.

What next for F1? This weekend, it is the Dutch Grand Prix, with another ten race weekends across four continents to go before the 2023 season draws to a close.

What was clear walking round Biggin Hill and speaking to everyone is that they all share one thing in common: their passion for Formula 1, and for producing the best content possible.

From my perspective, seeing it from the inside, has given me a new appreciation of the broadcasting side of F1, knowing the effort that goes into helping make it happen. So, to F1: thank you.

If you enjoyed this article, consider contributing to the running costs of Motorsport Broadcasting by donating via PayPal. If you wish to reproduce the contents of this article in any form, please contact Motorsport Broadcasting in the first instance.

Covering the world’s fastest motor sport across 24 race weekends is no easy feat. The twists and turns, come rain or shine, are covered meticulously by Formula 1’s production team week in, week out.

At the start of July, Motorsport Broadcasting was invited to F1’s revamped Media and Technology Centre as part of an F1 media day, giving us a glimpse behind the curtain. In the second part of our series, we look to the future as well as exploring the challenges F1 has faced in 2023 (to read part 1, head here).

Around the world, Formula 1’s production team is presented with new challenges every year, and 2023 is no different.

Changing circuits

Two new circuits are on the 2023 calendar: Las Vegas and Monaco. A confusing statement perhaps, given how Monte Carlo has been a staple of the Grand Prix calendar since its inception.

However, F1 has never controlled the World Feed broadcast for Monaco. That was until this year when F1 took over the responsibilities previously held by the local host.

Monaco was the last race to fall out of local control, a process that started nearly two decades ago, although as F1’s Director of Broadcast and Media Dean Locke highlighted, F1 were still supporting the hosts by “doing graphics, on-board cameras, and event management.”

Locke expressed his satisfaction with the coverage that the team produced for Monaco, the team relying on their experience over the past two decades. “I’m proud of the team for being aggressive with the coverage,” Locke tells selected media.

“It would have been very easy to copy the existing positions that people love, and just do them slightly better. Instead, we looked at Monaco differently and highlighted different areas.”

“When I saw the camera plan, I was nervous, but we showed it in a very different light. We kept some traditional cameras but moved others so you saw it in a different way. It still felt like a race, and it was a big deal, given the historic and traditional nature of the event. We wanted to do it justice.”

Negotiations on the broadcasting front went down to the wire, with final decisions around the usage of F1’s helicopter at Monaco agreed at the eleventh hour.

Unlike Monaco, whereby F1 already had a template to work with, the series heads to Las Vegas later this year with a blank canvas, a project that is posing many logistical challenges for Locke and his team.

“They are opening 13 parts of the track, making our cable infrastructure very difficult,” Locke says.

“It’s a night race on a Saturday, coming back off a back-to-back as well. No support races to practice on, the LEDs, and the partnership arrangements around there are quite tricky. I think all of Vegas will be very difficult.”

Locke and the team are heading back out to Vegas prior to the event in November to finalise key details, however the brief that his team has is clear.

“We’ve had a race there [in Vegas before], and it looked like a car park. There’s a good reason we’re going there, and that is to make it look fantastic. There’s a lot of pressure to make it look like what people think it should be.”

“How we position those cameras and show the extreme nature of Vegas is very challenging,” he believes.

“I remember looking at the original camera plan and I said ‘No, we’ve got to get higher.’ I remember doing recces in New Jersey, and everything was the backdrop to New York.”

“If you go to Monaco, there are certain buildings you want to show. In Singapore, we work closely with the tourist board. There are elements we want to highlight [in Vegas], whether they’re spectacular or part of the operation.”

Diversifying the audience

The inclusion of Las Vegas on the F1 calendar may attract attention from a new audience, Vegas one of many projects that F1’s broadcasting team is actively involved in.

The team has been supporting production of the new Apple film, with Brad Pitt one of the leading stars. The Apple squad filmed content during the British and Hungarian race weekends, before filming on some elements was halted due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

F1’s on-board team has offered technical advice around the shots that the film will offer. Locke is clear though that filming of the new movie must not interfere with F1’s day-to-day broadcast operations, a brief that has come from the top.

“Stefano [Domenicali] was very strict in what my brief was. There’s two things: there’s the World Feed, and then there’s the movie,” he says.

“We’re using our facilities to help them out, but they are still very separate and we’re briefing our broadcasters the same way. They’ve got their garage and things like that, but that’s not the story. The story is the race.”

Nevertheless, Locke is happy for his team to support the project, believing that the collaboration between the two parties will only help the movie.

“I think what is fantastic about the movie experience is that it’s using our footage. In theory, it will be the most authentic racing movie ever because of that,” he believes.

“Our 4K footage holds up so well that they’re interested in taking more from us rather than filming it themselves. Of course, it’s going to be complicated. Whilst it’s good they’re using our cameras now; we’re doing extra sessions now in between F2 and Porsche and things like that.”

“It’s still a very exciting project and we were very happy when we did some testing with our footage in Austin last year. They’re very interested in our graphics as well, because they want to make it look authentic.”

The film will help bring more eyeballs into the sport, building on the success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive. F1’s audience has skewed younger and more female since Liberty Media took control of the sport in 2017.

As part of the diversification effort, F1 piloted an alternative feed during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend aimed at kids.

Called F1 Juniors, the feed was a collaboration between Sky and F1, with young stars commentating on the Grand Prix. It utilised the same pictures as the adult broadcast, with bespoke graphics tailored towards a younger demographic.

Also making its debut during 2023 is the all-female F1 Academy series. The series fills the void that the W Series left behind, with the aim ultimately to increase female participation in the sport.

Series organisers faced criticism initially when it became clear that the 2023 season would not air live. Moving forward, races will air live as the series joins up with F1 from Austin onwards and into 2024.

Speaking to Motorsport Broadcasting, Locke said “We’re focusing now on the pre and post rather than the live race as much, and we’ve been taking those feeds from local suppliers.”

“Right now, it is about building the academy, building the individuals around that academy and telling that story, and then bringing that into the live feed when we take it over in Austin.”

“We’re building our own commentary and presentation team for it. It’ll be done by the people that produce Formula 1 as well, then rolling in next year, they’re going to be support to F1, so they will get all the bells and whistles they get from broadcasting with us.”

While F1 continues to move forward and produce exciting content, there is the small matter of what to do with all that content once it moves into F1’s vast archive, which also falls into the remit of the Biggin Hill team.

Some of the content, which has been digitised into 4K, is available for fans to watch via F1 TV, however the team is now getting into the “murky” world of support categories. “Do you spend the money digitising it? Do you get rid of it? It’s a whole different world,” Locke says.

Improving F1’s visceral sound

Since F1 moved to hybrid engines in 2014, the team at Biggin Hill have been working constantly to improve F1’s visceral sound, with the sport itself making changes to the exhaust over the years to aid this effort in response to criticism from fans and those inside the sport.

Each car has two audio inputs at present, however F1 are exploring increasing the number of audio inputs to five in the future.

“It is our intention on our next generation of camera to have five audio inputs,” explains Steve Smith, F1’s on-board team lead.

“Ideally, what we want to do is retain the Dolby surround sound indoors. You’d have a microphone inside the car to capture your true stereophonic sound, then you’d have two microphones at the front of the car.”

“So, when there’s an incident or when they heavily brake, you get that audio [from the two new microphones],” Smith adds.

The team are constantly experimenting and trying to push the boundaries of what is possible. The latest addition to F1’s World Feed, albeit in Formula Two has been biometric data, with the heart rates of drivers such as Theo Pourchaire and Frederik Vesti occasionally on display during races.

The biometric trials are set to continue in Formula Two after the Summer break, with the intention of rolling it out to F1 in the future.

One other aspect of F1 that has changed for 2023 underneath the hood is the way advertising and sponsorship boards are generated. Over the past decade, F1 has enhanced the boards through the use of ‘virtual advertising’: that is replacing or supplementing the real on-site sponsorship with their virtual counterparts.

For 2023, the team have brought in a new system using modern technology at base rather than flying kit worldwide, in-line with F1’s sustainability message as well. “It was a very good system [previously], but it was a lot of kit we were flying around the world,” Locke explains.

“It took feedback from the lens, from the head, from zoom and then plotting the graphics. We’ve moved forward to a new system, which uses image recognition and AI. It means we can put signage where we can’t put signage for various reasons, but also, we’re not painting a corner and then having to clean it up afterwards.”

Locke praised the versatility of the new system, stating that the Monaco tunnel “was a really good example” of a position where the team wants to highlight the speed, while also showing virtual advertising.

Having virtual adverts allows F1 to tailor the output depending on the region that the viewer is in, and also to change which partner is displayed in specific positions throughout a race weekend if necessary.

8K and drones remain question marks in F1’s road map

There are two areas where F1 remains cautious moving forward: 8K and the usage of drones.

Picture quality was one of the many subjects up for discussion as the F1 media fraternity descended on Biggin Hill. F1 moved to high definition in 2011, later than most other international sports, and recently moved to 4K and HDR (high dynamic range).

The next logical step would be 8K, which the Olympics explored in Tokyo 2021, but Locke believes that the future lies instead with content creation and personalisation.

“We sit down with a lot of the key broadcasters and say ‘what’s your technical roadmap for five years.’ We’re not hearing much about 8K,” Locke reveals.

“Our SD was really good, so it wasn’t a massive jump to HD for us. The jumps to both 4K and HDR though were impactful, both have been brilliant for F1. We hear a lot about Olympics being in 8K. You’re just being in a whole new world, if you start going to 8k.”

“I think it’s about content moving forward, about choosing and personalising your viewing experience. I think it’s something that we’re looking at and taking on a bit further.”

Other experiments by F1 have included the usage of drones in their live broadcasts, notably during the slower final sector in last year’s Spanish Grand Prix, although Locke was cautious about seeing them regularly during live F1 racing.

“There’s lots of rules around drone use generally. They’re slow, whereas our sport is too fast. They can only do 120 kilometres an hour,” Locke says. “Drones are fantastic for post-produced content, for example Motocross.”

“We’re a 4K broadcaster, so the picture quality [from the drone] has to match ours. Our events have too many people [on-site]. RF wise, it is a crowded area during a race weekend. All of that goes against us using drones. We’ve tried it and we trialled it and I think we’re just trying to keep up with technology.”

Certain scenarios may lean towards the usage of drones, including the drivers’ parade and formation laps “where the cars are slower,” Locke also citing one-lap qualifying as a potential use case for drones should the format return in the future.

Coming up on Motorsport Broadcasting: Going remote, the on-car computer and what is (and isn’t) controlled from Biggin Hill…

If you enjoyed this article, consider contributing to the running costs of Motorsport Broadcasting by donating via PayPal. If you wish to reproduce the contents of this article in any form, please contact Motorsport Broadcasting in the first instance.