Tyred and Exhausted: How Formula E Reinvented the Sound of Motorsports

Tyred and exhausted: How Formula E reinvented the sound of motorsports By Kevin Emmott

Thursday, April 20, 2023 - 13:22

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Inside the Gravity Media Production Centre in White City, London, during the live broadcast of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship race in Mexico City on 14 January

Gravity Media's new Production Centre located in the heart of White City, London, got off the starting grid this year with a live broadcast of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship race in Mexico City on 14 January.

In the slipstream of the Formula E's groundbreaking ethos, Gravity's approach to live broadcast taps directly into the same spirit with a full remote audio mix which not only saves time and money, but also encourages creativity in a way that simply isn't possible on location.

The 2023 Formula E season is streets ahead of the competition. With motorsport heavyweight McLaren joining the team, and Maserati returning to single-seater world championship racing for the first time since 1957, this season's Formula E championship has swelled to 11 teams, introduced new race locations and debuted its faster, lighter and more powerful GEN3 cars.

The championship is a big-ticket item and was the perfect event to showcase Gravity Media's brand new 50,000 square foot Production Centre. Located in the historic Westworks building, the facility is designed to support both on-prem and remote production workflows with a full SMPTE 2110 IP infrastructure.

Formula E is the Production Centre's first podium client and gave it the opportunity to hit the ground running, connecting its six production and audio control rooms, seven flexi control rooms, multiple off-tube commentary booths and two studio spaces with crews on the ground in Hyderabad, India for the round four race on 11 February.

Reinventing the (driving) wheel

It also gave them the opportunity to reinvent how motor sport is covered, and how it sounds. Gravity's head of audio, TJ Nancarrow, should know; he has been covering motor sports for the last seven years.

Even though the drivers are racing for different teams, they are all in this together and the Drivers Room is a place they can go after the race to watch replays and key moments in an informal environment. We mic this area up with some Sennheiser 416s to gives us the ability to capture the chatter and opinions between the racers

After a ten year stint with Australia's Nine Networks, his passion for travel got the better of him and a move to the UK led to a job with UK facilities house Gearhouse, now Gravity Media.

Gearhouse gave me the opportunity to work on a variety of outside broadcasts, he says. I was fortunate enough to travel all over the world on Sky's F1 coverage, which definitely got that travel bug out of my system, as well as ATP 1000 and grand slam tennis competitions. I learned a lot and loved the life, but I must admit the new Westworks Production Centre is a welcome change from seeing all those lovely car parks!

The audio approach on Formula E is unlike anything Nancarrow experienced with F1. The range of mic inputs is vast with over 80 sources to play with, and a working culture which encourages collaboration and access provides options he has never had before.

In keeping with Formula E's green ethos to minimise costs and environmental impact, Gravity's on-location equipment is minimal, with most of the heavy lifting done remotely in the studio at Westworks.

Gravity Media's head of audio, TJ Nancarrow

Two pods are better than one

Nancarrow comments on the set up between the racetracks and Westworks: There are two custom-designed pods which travel with the crew: one MCR pod which houses all the on-site vision kit like the CCUs and IP routing fabric for video, and one audio pod. The audio pod has a Calrec Summa console, 2 x 128-port RTS intercom racks, 2 x modular I/O racks and a Calrec RP1 for in-ear monitor feeds, as well as all the Wisycom rackmount kit for all the RF.

There are two Ferrofish A32pro Dante units in the audio pod, as well as four in the MCR pod which provide us with all of the analogue IO for the CCU's comms, and another three out in the field. Two of these are used in our RF racks to give the UHF a Dante interface into the network, and we have another situated in the TOC which handles any onsite rights holder audio feed distribution.

The Dante network onsite is pretty tasty. Across the two modular I/O frames we have six Dante cards, four of which are managed within Gravity's network. These four cards give us 256 channels of I/O between the console core, our RTS Omeno comms network and other external Dante devices. The other two Dante cards are members of other onsite Dante networks; one is the MRTC network which allows us to pick all of the team radio comms, the other is for ADI's network which provides all of the trackside big screen entertainment.

In addition to the console everything packs down into three 30u racks.

Creating a wider soundscape

But the small package does not tell the whole story. In fact, it gives the production crew scope to tell more stories than ever before, with a wide range of microphones providing access to previously hidden corners of the racing community.

Nancarrow explains: We have 24 Sony line cameras located around the track, each with a stereo mic embedded on the camera head. We also have 10 Dante mic pre-amps which the ground crew will select on a race-by-race basis to associate with a particular camera. From an audio perspective it gives the camera a much wider area to capture the approach and the follow through, which emphasises the stereo image of the car passing the camera and gives the whole treatment a wider perspective.

We have 10 of Gravity's own mini-cams situated around the track in various locatio

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