New York Sail Grand Prix: Third Time's a Charm for SailGP in NYC

New York Sail Grand Prix: Third Time's a Charm for SailGP in NYC The catamaran competition returns to New York's harbor with a refined REMI By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Monday, June 9, 2025 - 12:48 pm

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SailGP was back in New York City over the weekend (June 7, 8), a dozen of the world's sleekest, fastest racing catamarans flitting around the upper harbor between the event's base camp in New Jersey's Liberty Landing and its operations center on Governors Island. Officially, the Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix is the sixth stop on the sport's 2025 season calendar and SailGP's third visit to the city, featuring two days of fleet racing leading up to a winner-take-all, three-boat final match.

Denmark SailGP Team helmed by Nicolai Sehested leads the SailGP Fleet of F50 catamarans past the New York City skyline. (Photo: Samo Vidic for SailGP)

SailGP is reflective of how sports producers are trying on an array of hybrid techniques, for both broadcasts and logistics. For instance, like MotoGP, its motorcycle-racing counterpart, SailGP has a military-grade logistics operation. The racing machines, the racers, the crews, the entire assembly needed to put on an event are packed in 40-ft. containers (in SailGP's case, 110 of them) and moved between competitions by sea and air.

But, where MotoGP includes its broadcast operations in that massive load, SailGP has been an ardent and early proponent of the REMI approach to production: the vast majority of its production crew is centralized at Timeline Television in London, mixing and managing the microphones and cameras splayed across the harbor arena 3,000 miles away.

A Completely Remote Production' It's a completely remote production, says David McCulloch, systems architect, Riedel, which for the second year provided the entire wireless comms for SailGP, including the wireless comms onsite necessary to connect the six-person crews of the 12 boats (two more than last year) with each other and the broadcast.

Helicopters were deployed to capture footage at the Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix in New York City. (Photo: Jason Ludlow for SailGP)

Riedel provided the critical communications enabling the sailors to communicate with each other as well as with team members on shore, race officials, and the London broadcast center. Riedel's staff of 16 technicians, who comprised about half the total staffing onsite, set up and commissioned the gear onsite before handing the operation over to London.

Modified waterproof Bolero S beltpack systems originally designed for the NFL were worn by the race-team members, and a Bolero antenna is mounted on the back of the hull of each yacht. Artist frames and SmartPanels are ubiquitous in the paddock area and in the race village, used by team coaches ashore and boat skippers to talk tactics and strategy. The Riedel MediorNet Micron high-density signal interface was also deployed for overall signal distribution. Bolero Run, Air Pro, and Max headsets - robust enough to handle the rough rides of the race and the occasional collisions - were on the water the entire weekend.

Transmitting all the audio, video, and telemetry feeds is done via the Riedel Mast Head Unit (MHU) custom antenna atop the F50 wing. A waterproof media case on each yacht houses the electronics that feed the audio and video signals to the antenna.

For the broadcast production, two cameras, built by Riedel and developed with a technology partner, are mounted on each racing yacht: a PTZ camera and a fixed wide-angle camera, remotely controlled by the SailGP production team at the Timeline facility in London. The PTZ camera can be remotely cleaned during the race to rinse off salt water or debris.

The production process is seamless with the UK operation. Commentators and talent interview skippers mid-race in real time from 3,400 miles away with minimal latency. The yachts' six-man crews are connected wirelessly to team coaches at monitors in the race village on Governors Island. A more traditional MESH network is used for telemetry.

Although much of that system architecture was developed for last year's races, this year's systems reflected a broader re-engineering during the interim. We had the first real opportunity [for that] between the two seasons, McCulloch notes. The league has grown and grown. The container we were operating out of at the broadcast site was four desks and three 42-unit racks, which wasn't going to work for the ambitions of the league moving forward.

What we did over the summer in conjunction with SailGP, he continues, was build a brand-new data-center container to support the needs of the league both now and in the future and give us some expansion room to be able to grow and explore new technologies and support new ideas as they come in - from both technology aspects and creative aspects.

BONDS Flying Roos SailGP Team lead Red Bull Italy SailGP team and New Zealand SailGP team pass the Statue of Liberty on Race Day 2. (Photo: Mike Lawrence for SailGP)

Although most of the system components themselves remain the same, the main changes were in the system's flexibility and agility. McCulloch notes the way the team responds to things like last-minute training requests: Once we have our core container onsite, we're able to get our services online very, very quickly. [For example,] the remote nodes for things like the video-over-RF receive can be deployed citywide on anything up to even a dirty' internet connection, and those feeds [can be brought] back in reliably and redundantly. At the race in Auckland, we ended up deploying on the other side of the city for a completely separate training area that wasn't scheduled or wasn't designed.

Managing nearly 100 RF channels wasn't as

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