Command Centre: World Rally Championship to add team and driver audio to its broadcast output
WRC is set to launch Command Centre, a brand new concept for the 2025 season that will bring a new level of transparency to life behind racing strategy and struggles, for the 2025 season
World Rally Championship (WRC) is hoping to bring a new level of transparency to racing strategy in 2025 by sharing driver and team conversation audio as part of its broadcast output.
Launching at Rallye Monte Carlo on 23 to 26 January 2025, the concept – with the working title of ‘Command Centre’ – will bring teams together in one room where they will be able to talk to their drivers live, as well as see live data from the vehicles – which is not currently available to them – which will have a drastic effect on how races are strategised and won.
“We all have the common goal in WRC; we all want to increase the outreach of the championship. We want to reach new fans, we want to reach new demographics. And this only works if we are more transparent with the sport”
Florian Ruth, senior director of content and communication at WRC Promoter, explains further: “The idea is to have a bit more transparency about what’s going on behind the scenes at a rally, as you see it in other motorsports where you have the conversation between the team principal and the drivers. Like in Formula One, in rally, those stories happen behind closed doors, so when there’s an issue in the car on the road section, the driver calls the engineer on the cell phone and they discuss strategies, how to repair the car, what to do next, discuss the tyre choice and so on, all behind closed doors.
“With this Command Centre concept, we want to do two things,” outlines Ruth. “At the moment, the engineers and the team bosses don’t have any live technical information out of the cars. So with our partner Marelli Motorsport [official FIA data logger provider] we have developed a project about how we can transmit all the car data live for the teams.
“Every sensor in the car will send a signal, then the engineers and the teams will get all the information you can get out of the car, live. We will provide this, but in turn the teams will open up their communications for us and our viewers.”
Currently, access to information about what is going on at the track is limited for both WRC and the fans. Says Ruth: “At the moment we get the communication out of the cars when the relay plane is up; the cars have buttons called ‘road’ and ‘stage’ mode. When the cars are in ‘stage’ mode, we more or less get all the information from the cars and from the conversations, but once the cars cross the flying finish line, they have to switch to ‘road’ mode and then everything is blocked. We get nothing out of the car, no data, no communication, nothing. But with this new concept, this will be changed.”
“It will look a bit like the launch control centre at NASA,” says Ruth. “All the teams with the engineers will be in one big room, a lot of screens, a lot of monitors, and then this really will be like the heart of the rally”
Unprecedented access
The Command Centre will literally be that; a centre of command for all the teams. Members of the teams will be together in a single room seated in front of a wall of monitors and audio panels. Interestingly, this means that not only will WRC and the fans be able to hear and see what is going on in the individual teams, but they will each know in the moment what is happening with the other teams, which should lead to interesting dynamics and conversations in the Command Centre itself.
“It will look a bit like the launch control centre at NASA,” says Ruth. “All the teams with the engineers will be in one big room, a lot of screens, a lot of monitors, and then this really will be like the heart of the rally.”
This move will be a gamechanger for fans of WRC, giving them unprecedented access to information they have never had before. Ruth comments on how that will be used in the broadcasts: “In terms of storytelling, in terms of excitement, in terms of information, in terms of explanation, all what happens at the moment behind closed doors, we want to open up for the fans, so the storytelling will be much more exciting and much more open and much more transparent than to what it is now.
“It will be also quite an interesting tech story because on the one side, we are transmitting a lot of data out of the cars. On the other hand, we’re just developing together with NEP Finland and Riedel a complete new network that will allow us to dip in and tell those stories, how we can listen to the conversations, how we can tell those stories much better.”
WRC, NEP Finland and Riedel have been working on the concept for Command Centre for over a year already. This season various tests have been run during rallies.
Ruth explains: “This whole year we tested several antennas. We tested several transmission points to get the data out of the car. We tested the audio communications.
Command Centre has the potential to completely open up many of the behind the scenes issues that occur on WRC rallies, where anything can happen in the remote locations the cars race in
Behind the scenes
Command Centre has the potential to completely open up many of the behind the scenes issues that occur on WRC rallies, where anything can happen in the remote locations the cars race in.
Ruth elaborates: “There’s often something where we know something’s wrong with the car, but we don’t know what it is. The teams won’t tell us when the car comes to the end of a stage [that there’s something wrong]; our reporter just sees there’s a warning button on the display of the car, but the driver won’t tell us anything.
“So the driver drives off and then the whole story actually starts. They talk to the engineer, about what can they do to make it in time to the next stage, how can they save the day, how can they stay in the rally, and so on. Neither we nor the viewers have any idea about these stories and conversations at the moment, and this is we want to make transparent because those unfolding stories are really the good stories inbetween the stages on the road sections. These stories really show the talent, not only of the drivers, but of the whole team. How good is the team sitting 80 or a hundred kilometres away at instructing their drivers how to repair an absolutely high end racing car?
“The drivers explain to their mechanics or their engineers the issue, and then they have to think something out, so it’s a bit like MacGyver! [1980s American TV series where the star is able to solve any problem out in the field using any materials at hand].”
Apparently a lot of gaffer tape, and sometimes water out of a nearby lake come into those high end fixes in the middle of nowhere, and soon viewers will be party to those decisions.
Persuasion and negotiation
For the teams behind these cars, a degree of persuasion and negotiation has had to go on for WRC to convince them that exposing their inner-most secrets is a good idea, Ruth says.
He notes: “These are their secrets and there’s still a few discussions going on, but obviously they have a big interest in seeing the live data of their car so they can make instant decisions, and obviously they see that good stories are unfolding behind closed doors. If we want to increase the popularity of our sport, if we want to further open up, if we want to increase and attract new audiences, those are the stories which need to be told and the teams understand.
“We all have the common goal in WRC; we all want to increase the outreach of the championship. We want to reach new fans, we want to reach new demographics. And this only works if we are more transparent with the sport.”
Concludes Ruth: “We will launch Command Centre in Monte Carlo ’25, and then obviously it’s a development programme across the next few years, I would say. But it will change the storytelling and the look and feel of our broadcast as well, because there will be a permanent second storyline.”
Command Centre will launch for WRC fans at Rallye Monte Carlo on 23 to 26 January 2025