I watched the live coverage of Rally Monte Carlo this afternoon on Eurosport and it can be described with one word – awesome. IRC seemed to have the right ambitions regarding media coverage from the beginning, not very surprising because of the Eurosport involvement. However, TV is not my point here. Now I want the same progress done in digital media! Here is my wishlist:
- Rally radio – I’m really missing this from the WRC. A quite cheap (I guess) way to keep distance-followers up-to-date all over the world – not only regarding results but also regarding accidents, retirements, driver comments etc.
- An IRC results system including split times that is common to the whole championship and reachable directly on ircseries.com – not something that each organiser can/must do in different ways.
- A “short live news” service – preferably with short, journalistic comments made by a crew member and also driver comments from the stages (maybe taken straight from the rally radio?).
- Digital stagemaps with zoom-in/out ability and maybe – oh my god – live car tracking.
Those points are just a few, and for sure there are a lot more that can be done. But if IRC could fix this – then North One TV (the WRC rights holder) would have to speed up a lot to keep their fans. But… Is it possible? Of course it all depends on money, but in principle it should be. So, how do I know that? Well, the answer is I’ve done a lot of it myself. I’ll explain…
- Rally radio – No, I’ve not done that. But the WRC crew have. For sure it costs some money, but it should be good value too.
- Point two and three – Results system and short news service. When I worked at the Swedish Rally I was responsible for developing the results system used in 2007 with live updating of results integrated with live journalist comments and driver comments. I just wish we had time to integrate the live video player that streamed video from the rally into it too…
- Point four – In 2008 when I worked with Daniel Carlsson, I was part of the development of a live system (in cooperation Swedish teleoperator NMT, Jemba, and more) where a stage map showing a live GPS position of Daniel’s were combined with live incar streaming video/sound. There are some communication issues, but the technology is quite simple.
So, rock it IRC! It’s not more complicated than producing live TV. Rally coverage online has been so neglected in the WRC that it now feels that we are a few years behind other sports. I’m so curious to see where we can be in just a few years…
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Tags: comments, driver comments, eurosport, gps, IRC, live coverage, map, north one, rally radio, results, tracking
I don’t know does IRC drivers get split times while on stage or how accurate they are. But if they don’t have such a system built up like they do in WRC, it’d be better if they don’t even try.
No split times information to drivers makes the sport more rich – no tactics, just as fast through the stage as possible.
I think Monte Carlo is by far the most followed IRC event so far and for many WRC fans it’s also the first IRC event followed live. At least that’s the deal in my case. So far I’m very impressed by the quality of Eurosport’s quality of live coverage. Also some aspects of result coverage is better than on WRC (I’m using BFGoodrich service). However some of the things you pointed out I’m missing also – like rally radio or similar service. If I see someone from the top 10 missing a bulk of time on stage, I’d like to know what went wrong ASAP. Or not ASAP, better NOW.
Still – IRC is challenging WRC, and what I’d like to see in the future is that these two series combine their best sides.
I think IRC just should be IRC, a support serie to the WRC, such as in racing. There´s only one Formula 1 and should only be one WRC.
What we´ve seen so far this year in IRC, is a very good school for drivers wanting to become future stars in WRC (and of course a playground for old stars no longer good enough for WRC).
I think we should take interesting things developed in IRC, and important – things that has proven to be good – in to the WRC, just to make WRC better than today.
FIA runs both series and I guess they´d never aloud IRC be so big it overtakes the no 1 position in world rallying.
And that is good. So please don´t look at IRC as something that will substitute WRC, because it never can and will be permitted to be.
Rallyper, I think you’re both right and wrong. First off I’ve never looked on IRC as something to replace the WRC, because a World Championship is a world championship. Period.
However, the WRC has stagnated and I’m sure that if they doesn’t shape up, then the sport will lose a lot of interest from the public – and IRC will take a much bigger part of the cookie than it does today – even though it will never replace WRC.
What I mean is that IRC is good and that they do almost all things right that FIA/NorthOne does wrong in the WRC. WRC has became a serie that is mismanaged and where short-term thinking and NorthOne’s lack of interest or money to developing the championship ruins much. IRC is the fresh breeze that I think is needed to make them understand that if they doesn’t get onto the train for real – they will be left on the station…
racemouse/ For sure. WRC is suffering from bad contracts with the teleoperator. And of course as you say they have been stagnated until this day, but as I mentioned it´s the FIA that rules both series and they have to think it over to transfer the good things developed from the IRC to the WRC.
Btw the more I look and listen to the S2000 cars the more I do realize the requirement of turbo-kits on those cars to make them really interesting. In the present form the S2000 cars become more and more – I have to say – boring.