As SailGP prepares to welcome thousands of fans to the south coast of England for its first ever Portsmouth event, executive producer Chris Carpenter is excited to be bringing the high-speed, high-tech racing event back to the UK.

“It was always a desire to make the UK a regular stop on the tour – with its sailing history, knowledgeable fans and of course the Emirates Great Britain SailGP team wanting to race on home waters. It’s fantastic to be back on such historic waters and it’s set to be one of the flagship sport events of the British summer in 2025, as Portsmouth will welcome thousands of fans to the city’s historic dockyard and harbour. It will potentially be the biggest we’ve ever had live at a SailGP event.”

The last race on UK waters was in 2022 when the city of Plymouth played host. A lot has changed since then, particularly in terms of the growth of the sport, both from a competitor and an audience perspective. Most notably the number of F50 catamarans taking part this year is up to 12, from nine three years previously. As Carpenter points out, this has added more challenges to the production.

“We were already a very complicated show. There’s not a single cabled camera across the production, we work in challenging places where we build the set-up in just a few days, often in locations we’ve never been to with complex RF and communications spectrums. Add to that complicated data and graphics systems, logistical problems surrounding where the boats are docked, where the race area and stadium is and where our TV compound is located. Then throw in every curveball you can think of, from technical gremlins, unhelpful weather, and unexpected visitors to our racecourse. .We have to deal with a lot.”

The camera setup in Portsmouth will be a standard SailGP affair, however this still means that the number of feeds that need to be managed is extensive. “Each of the 12 boats now carries four live onboard cameras. With just those, that’s 48 feeds we need to receive, monitor and record in the studio,” he says.

One of these cameras is a remotely operated agile camera, the other three are fixed POV angles, two of which operate via a 5G network.

In addition, two helicopters with gyro-stabilised cameras that also have the LiveLine graphics capability will also be utilised, along with three chase boats on the water that also all have gyro stabilised cameras – one of these is LiveLine graphics capable and one is a super slow-motion camera that can shoot up to 250fps. An on-water reporter will also be present with an RF camera for conducting close-up interviews with the athletes between races.

Read more SailGP Season 5: AI cameras to get viewers closer to the action

New for this season are ‘Mark cameras’ which are being developed alongside Cross Shore Media. Carpenter explains: “These are smaller gyro-stabilised cameras which are placed on the turning marks of the race course. We can control them remotely, but the long-term goal is that through AI and the huge array of live data coming from the F50’s, they will learn what action is interesting that is happening on the race course. Over time, they will operate themselves and capture things that a human operator just can’t see or predict quickly enough. With 12 boats doing 100kph going in different directions, we are always going to miss things with our traditional set of cameras so we see these as helping capture those bits of drama through more angles other than just the onboard ones.”

All of this innovation means more than 60 low-latency camera feeds are coming back from onsite.

The graphics are a key part of the SailGP broadcast and LiveLine, its in-house broadcast graphics, continues to benefit from regular enhancements to provide ever-more insight to fans, including race strategy, boat performance, weather conditions and more.

“Without LiveLine SailGP just isn’t a TV product – what that system does for the sport is unlike any other sport out there really,” says Carpenter. “Sailing just doesn’t make much sense when you can’t see where the race course is, who the boats are and most importantly, who’s winning and losing.”

Improvements for this season include the ability to overlay the augmented graphics on chase boat angles, rather than just helicopter shots.

“This helps keep the viewer in the augmented world with the boat flags, course boundaries and turning marks all displayed. This also helps our commercial partners gain more airtime, with their logos appearing onscreen in the course boundary for a longer duration,” he adds.

“We’ve also been working a lot on our 2D graphics system that we brought in-house for the start of last season. We’ve added in quite a lot, including live, in-race event standings based on current positions, boat configuration animations displaying their technical set-up, plus AI-generated crew member tagging so that we can see who is where overlaid on one of the onboard cameras. It’s cool to see them running across the boat with their names above.”

The audio effort has also been enhanced, with three crew members in each team able to receive and provide comms as well as effect mics on the boats.

As SailGP pioneered the remote production model, it’s no surprise that the event will be handled out of Timeline’s Ealing Broadcast Centre, despite taking place just down the road.

“The setup is just too large and complicated to bring onsite for just one event. It would take a huge amount of time and money to do so without any gain. We are now so used to being a remote production that it would actually throw us out of rhythm to be on-site,” he says.

While SailGP was always designed to be a remote production, much has changed since its inception in 2019.

“We started out with more elements being handled onsite – for example, the onboard agile camera operators – but we’ve now moved as much as possible to being remote. Our footprint on the ground is now very minimal.

“We receive everything back in London over multiple routed fibre feeds and the latency of these has reduced over time, which has been a good improvement.”

Along with the main fully editorialised and produced show, SailGP also now creates a world feed which other broadcasters take and augment with their own studio and onsite set-ups. To service this and the additional teams racing it has expanded its EVS operation and is now running seven operated systems servicing the two galleries.

A green screen studio where the umpiring team are located so viewers can see and hear them make real-time decisions has also been added this season.

“They have their own EVS Zeebra system for them to replay and review racing situations and we’re looking at ways to further integrate them more in the future to bring the audience closer to the action and decision making,” Carpenter adds.

Read more SailGP Season 5: Getting umpires onscreen and more studio-based content

All of this effort to get viewers closer to the action and tell the story of SailGP is having a positive impact on audience numbers too. Some 52 broadcasters currently showing SailGP’s live feed in 212 global markets, most of which also take highlights and the BTS series, Racing on the Edge.

“We’re also helping broadcasters to editorialise their own programming through our world feed offering. We’re encouraging them to do more themselves to localise the output, whether that’s by utilising our VT content, which we distribute through our ‘Port’ system, powered by Imagen, or by coming on-site with their own talent and camera teams to further localise our content.”

He concludes: “Our audience grew 63% between season 3 and 4 which is fantastic and we’re hoping to build on those numbers again this season. We know the product is good – we are just pushing for more awareness and fan creation.”

The Emirates Great Britain SailGP Portsmouth takes place on 19-20 July. It will be broadcast live on TNT Sports.