The World Rally Championship presents its brand new concept of moving all behind-the-scenes conversations from the track to the broadcast

The World Rally Championship (WRC) is working on a completely new concept for the 2025 season, which will introduce a new level of transparency in racing strategy and competition. The goal of the WRC is to make public conversations held during races between drivers and their teams in its broadcasts.

The concept, which will premiere at the Monte Carlo Rally on January 23-26, 2025, under the working title “Command Center”, will bring teams together in one room where they will be able to chat live with their drivers as well as view live data . from vehicles – that are not currently available to them – which will have a drastic impact on the way they plan and win races.

“We all have a common goal in the WRC; we all want to increase the reach of the championship. We want to reach new fans, we want to reach new demographics. And this will only work if we are more transparent about sports.”

Florian Ruth, senior director of content and communications at WRC Promoter, explains further: “The idea is to provide a bit more transparency of what goes on behind the scenes of a rally, as you see in other motorsports where you talk between the boss team and driver. Just like in Formula 1, in a rally such stories happen behind closed doors, so when the car has a problem on a given section of the road, the driver calls the engineer on his cell phone and they discuss a strategy on how to fix the car and what to do. do the next one, discuss tire choices and so on, all behind closed doors.

“We want to do two things with the Command Center concept,” Ruth emphasizes. “At the moment, engineers and team principals do not have any up-to-date technical information about the cars. That’s why, together with our partner Marelli Motorsport (official supplier of FIA data recorders), we have developed a project on how we can transmit all car data live to the teams.

“Every sensor in the car will send a signal and then the engineers and teams will get all the information that can be obtained from the car live. We will provide this, but in turn the teams will share their communications with us and our viewers.”

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Currently, access to information about what is happening on the track is limited for both the WRC and fans. Says Ruth: “We are currently communicating with cars as the relay plane has taken off; cars have buttons called “road” and “scene” modes. When the cars are in “road” mode, we get more or less all the information from the cars and conversations, but once the cars cross the finish line, they have to switch to “road” mode and then everything gets blocked. We don’t extract anything from the car, no data, no communication, nothing. But with the new concept, that will change.”

Unprecedented access

The command center will literally be this; command center for all teams. Team members will stay together in one room, sitting in front of a wall of monitors and audio panels. Interestingly, this means that not only WRC and fans will be able to hear and see what is happening in individual teams, but each of them will know what is happening with the other teams on an ongoing basis, which should result in interesting dynamics and conversations within the Command Center.

“It will look a bit like NASA’s launch control center,” Ruth says. “All the teams and their engineers will be in one big room, with lots of screens and monitors, and then it will really be the heart of the rally.”

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This move will be a game-changer for WRC fans, giving them unprecedented access to information they’ve never had before. Ruth comments on how this will be used in the broadcasts: “In terms of storytelling, in terms of emotion, in terms of information, in terms of explaining everything that is happening behind closed doors at the moment, we want to open up to the fans, so storytelling history will be much more exciting, much more open and much more transparent than what it is now.

“It will also be quite an interesting technology story because on the one hand we transmit a lot of data from cars. On the other hand, we are currently developing a completely new network with NEP Finland and Riedel that will allow us to dig deeper into these stories and tell them, how we can listen to the conversations and how we can tell these stories much better.”

WRC, NEP Finland and Riedel have been working on the Command Center concept for over a year. Various tests were carried out during rallies this season.

Ruth explains: “We tested several antennas this year. We tested several transmission points to download data from the car. We tested audio communication.

Behind the scenes

Command Center has the potential to fully expose many of the behind-the-scenes issues that occur in WRC rallies, where anything can happen in the remote locations where cars are racing.

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Ruth explains: “Often times we know there is something wrong with the car but we don’t know what it is. Teams don’t tell us when a car is nearing the end of a stage (that something is wrong); Our reporter just sees that there is a warning button on the car’s display, but the driver doesn’t tell us anything.

“So the driver drives away and that’s really where the story begins. They talk to the engineer about what they can do to get to the next stage, how they can save the day, how to stay in the rally and so on. Neither we nor the audience currently have any idea about these stories and conversations, and we want to make that transparent because these developing stories are actually good stories between stages on sections of the road. These stories really showcase the talent not only of the drivers, but of the entire team. How good is the team 50 or a hundred miles away instructing their drivers how to repair an absolutely top-notch race car?

“Drivers explain the problem to their mechanics or engineers and then they have to think about it, so it’s a bit like MacGyver! (an American TV series from the 1980s in which the star can solve any problem in the field, using the materials available to him).

Apparently a lot of duct tape and sometimes water from a nearby lake goes into these high-end repairs in the middle of nowhere, and soon viewers will be participants in these decisions.

Persuasion and negotiation

For the teams behind these WRC cars, it took some persuasion and negotiation to convince them that revealing their innermost secrets was a good idea, says Ruth.

He notes: “These are their secrets and there are still some discussions going on, but of course they are very keen to see current data about their car so that they can make immediate decisions, and of course they see that there are good door stories happening behind closed doors. If we want to increase the popularity of our sport, if we want to open up even more, if we want to increase the number of viewers and attract new ones, these are the stories that need to be told and the teams need to be understood.

“We all have a common goal in the WRC; we all want to increase the reach of the championship. We want to reach new fans, we want to reach new demographics. And this will only work if we are more transparent about sports.

Ruth concludes: “We will launch the Command Center in Monte Carlo ’25 and I would say that this will obviously be a development program for the next few years. But it will also change the way we tell stories and the look and feel of our broadcast because there will be a second storyline there.”

The Command Center will be made available to WRC fans during the Monte Carlo Rally on January 23-26, 2025.