F1’s “Mission Control”: Unpacking the tech behind every heart-stopping moment

Formula 1 is back, starting the 2024 season in Bahrain, after a break that’s been full of rumour, drama and a dab of controversy. Formula 1 has undergone a renaissance over the past decade, thanks in no small part to the democratisation that Drive to Survive – the Netflix documentary – brought to the sport.

But it’s not just new fans tuning in to witness the drama off the track, the spectacle of race day is now better than ever. Behind the scenes, Formula One Management has made huge changes to how the action on the track is captured and distributed, and that gives it power to direct the action live as it happens, so that the races contain as much storytelling as the Emmy Award-winning Netflix show.

I got the chance to look behind the curtain, to see what actually happens, within Formula 1’s Media and Technology Centre in Biggin Hill.

It’s all about telling the Formula 1 story

While the pandemic was a disaster for many companies, for Formula 1 it was an opportunity, explains Pete Samara, director of innovation and digital technology at Formula 1. This is the second time I’ve met Samara: “We’re serious people,” he says, as he tells the story of how the Media and Technology Centre (M&TC) in Biggin Hill came into existence.

He’s not kidding either: it’s a serious business too. With an audience of around 1.8 billion and 477 hours of live footage in 2023, taking what happens on the track and repackaging it for watching on your TV is what the M&TC does and much of it happens in real time.

Before the pandemic, this was done from each race location. That meant moving the entire broadcast operation around the globe to cover the 20+ races of the Championship. But the break that the pandemic forced gave Formula 1 the opportunity to split its operation and execute a new plan of action.

The aim, in part, was to make the operation more sustainable: by establishing a base in Biggin Hill, logistically there’s less to ship around the world. While the M&TC runs the show from Biggin Hill, locally it’s the Event Technical Centre (ETC) that moves from race to race.

What some people might not realise is that Formula 1 provides a global feed. Nothing is locally sourced at races, F1 supplies and overlays all the technology they need in each location to make it happen. That means that Formula 1 not only stays strictly in control of what’s happening, but it can also provide a guarantee of the quality of the experience for viewers.

Some Formula 1 facts and figures

Unlike a football match where you have two teams in one contained area, several cameras and perhaps a Skycam, Formula 1 has to deal with the whole track length, multiple corners, pit lanes, helicopter cameras and more. The setup includes 58km of cables, 1200 telemetry streams, 28 cameras, 90 onboard cameras on the cars, 147 microphones providing 5.1 Dolby audio – the list goes on.

It becomes a much greater technical challenge than other sports, because anything can happen at any point on the track – that might be an incident at a corner, something in the pit lane, while individual battles between rival teammates or rival teams could be happening simultaneously on different sides of the track.

On location, the director in the ETC will live cut a track mix from the 28 track cameras that comes back to the M&TC – this is what is actually happening in the race. What the M&TC does is take that track mix and turn it into the story of the race by layering in all the other feeds at its disposal.

That will include roaming cameras, anything from helicopters, team radio, picture-in-picture, slow motion replays and of course all that footage from the cars themselves. There’s so much happening in a Formula 1 race that it’s a team of 300 people, split across the two locations that makes the magic happen.

The Media and Technology Centre is like a Bond Villain’s lair

The Main Control Room is the heart of the M&TC. There are screens everywhere, the director sitting at the front with the main control board and the room filled with other stations, screens stacked above them. To tell the story beyond what’s happening in the race, the director will make over 3000 cuts, pulling together the different elements of race data that come from around the M&TC.

There are twin 10Gb connections to link the M&TC to the world, with satellite backup. There’s redundancy built into the operation everywhere: for example, there are dual connections to the grid for power, dual UPS (uninterruptible power supply) which can run the M&TC for an hour from battery and finally diesel generators, in case everything else fails.

Samara reiterates that Formula 1 works with “selected and trusted partners”, which he considers to be the best in the business, including Lenovo, AWS and Tata Communications. These partners aren’t just suppliers and they aren’t just sponsors, they need to be part of the team that delivers the Formula 1 experience.

The M&TC is stuffed full of Lenovo hardware from the data centre to the individual terminals that staff are working at. The message I get is that Formula 1 pushes its partners to deliver solutions. “We’re serious abusers of hardware”, says Chris Roberts, director of IT, talking about the conditions that are encountered out on trackside, where hardware has to work regardless of the desert heat or torrential downpours – and it’s down to partners like Lenovo to rise to the challenge.

Formula 1 as an organisation also demonstrates innovation. The cameras it uses are bespoke, with adaptations to make them more efficient for the task, like incorporating a button to cut into the feed and take over from that single local camera if there’s a big incident that needs instant coverage.

There’s a team at the M&TC that monitors the consistency and quality of the camera feeds, able to remotely adjust things like the exposure from Biggin Hill, with latency of just 150ms.

More than just pictures: Team radio, telemetry and timing

Team radio is one of the highlights of a Formula 1 race. Listening to drivers talking to their teams, hearing those reactions, the tactical communications and instructions add a dimension that pictures alone can’t supply.

Team Radio lives in a small room tucked behind the Main Control Room. Eight people listen to the feeds on all the channels, dividing up the tasks between them on race day. Surprisingly there’s no AI transcription here either, all the captions are typed by hand so those can be added to the feed for viewers.

The scale of listening is difficult to fathom. There are 20 drivers, 20 race engineers and up to 18 other voices across the team radio network. There was 245 hours of team radio produced in 2023 and from that room, another line of storytelling is crafted to bring the race to life.

Team radio, of course, isn’t just for the amusement of spectators. It’s a service that’s provided to the teams by Formula 1. Other racing systems are also provided, including timing which is fed to the FIA (Federation Internationale de l’Automobile) the governing body for motor sport.

Onboard telemetry is a big part of the race these days too, and something else that’s managed by Formula 1. Again, there’s access to this data to put into the live broadcast, but it also feeds into the Formula 1 app, as well as providing a vital link that race teams use in managing their cars during the race. As Samara tells me, they take “technical ownership” of delivering that data to teams.

While all this data is pouring into the M&TC to allow the director to cut together the story of the race, there’s also a studio on-site at Biggin Hill. Crammed into a small space, the on-site studio will allow broadcasts at any time – before, during and after the race. The room is split into conventional static studio space, a green screen space and a hybrid area which can be used for augmented views.

This also allows Formula 1 to support the trackside presentation and the main race coverage with studio commentary, before and after the race. While all broadcasters use the same race coverage – distributed live from Biggin Hill – many broadcasters, like Sky, will provide their own analysis and trackside presentation. But for those broadcasters that don’t do that, again, Biggin Hill’s studio space means there’s somewhere on-site to complete the package for viewers globally.

Formula 1 is only just getting started

Formula 1 is heavily invested in technology, with the M&TC designed to be as efficient as it can be. When asked what the building was like on race day, I was told that it was actually calm and peaceful, because it’s all about delivering with maximum efficiency.

For an operation that’s so technically complex, what’s perhaps surprising is just how new this all is. The first race season it covered through this operation was 2023. All the attention now turns to the 2024 season  – and the M&TC is going to be behind every thrilling second of the action that you watch.