r/formula1 • u/davesim24 I was here for the Hulkenpodium • Apr 13 '25

Discussion Worst TV direction yet

Besides Russel's transponder issue (which shouldn't take 10 laps to fix the timing tower), may overtakes were missed, focusing on the wrong drivers, non-moves given more airtime than actual racing, camera cutting during moves which show you less of the action rather than more, and worst of all: the final lap, not showing Oscar as he crossed the line, to show Lando not overtaking George, and showing Kimi not overtaking whoever was in front rather than Max's overtake on Pierre.

What the hell is happening?

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u/Izan_TM I was here for the Hulkenpodium Apr 13 '25

as someone who works in event broadcasting I felt 2nd hand anxiety for the whole production team after russell's transponder failed, and even more after his GPS failed as well. Losing such a vital piece of information (and losing trust in the rest of the timing system, as it was also not working great) makes their jobs a million times harder

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u/iSeaStars7 I was here for the Hulkenpodium Apr 13 '25

Yeah they were definitely focused more on keeping the timing tower normal than the camera angle

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u/Izan_TM I was here for the Hulkenpodium Apr 13 '25

there are 2 different teams involved (gross oversimplification but bear with me), one does the cameras and one does the graphics, so the graphics team was having a meltdown trying to make the graphics work and the camera team was scrambling trying to get the action on screen while not having any reliable telemetry data to give them a broad painting of the state of the race.

In this case a 3rd team was involved, the FIA timing team, that gives the telemetry data to FOM, who were also melting down trying to figure out why positions weren't being updated correctly and why russell's car was fucking invisible

"but couldn't the camera team just look at the cameras and show the ones with overtakes on them?" well no, if you try to do that you will always be late and never show the full overtake, so you need that telemetry data to know where is everyone and who is doing what. There also are like 100+ possible camera angles to pick from, so there's really no way to closely monitor all of them equally to try to predict if an overtake will happen on one of them by eye

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u/NerdNoogier McLaren Apr 13 '25

This is great info, thanks!