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…
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