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
Source: F1
- 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
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.
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Motorsport Broadcasting 
Loved reading this article.
Exactly the reason to visit this site.
Content you’ll never find anywhere else.
Thanks Dave
Thank you for this absolutely fantastic series of articles. I think you’ve covered pretty much everything I could hope to ask about the production! Always impressed with how much they’ve managed to change over the years while keeping it such a well-oiled machine.