'Where the magic happens': Inside F1's mind-blowing TV complex

Biggin Hill might well be a name you have heard before, as the airport — perfect for private flights in the past — has long been the location of another F1 facility. But that facility has been evolving at some pace in the past 12 months.

Now named the Media and Technology Centre (M&TC), Biggin’s playing a far bigger role than it ever has in bringing F1 to the world. And along with quite a few other media and rights-holders, I got a look inside the refurbished broadcast home that acts as a hosting venue, broadcast campus, office space, storage facility and even an F1 team-esque research and development laboratory.

Driving past a timber merchants and turning right at a mini roundabout flanked by a few bungalows doesn’t scream elite sport, and even once you set eyes on the actual building, walking into reception, you’d struggle to believe this is the place where F1 footage is curated and distributed from, reaching 180 territories around the world.

Once inside, though, you start to get the picture of the facility that was all rebuilt at remarkable speed following the end of last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, to be ready for the new season.

A huge central hub that acts as a hosting space — complete with a scale 2022 car — is the first room that you reach, but it’s what’s beyond it, visible through the glass, that is a remarkable sight.

The full gallery is absolutely enormous. From here, the world feed director — providing the pictures that every broadcaster takes from five minutes before each session starts — has countless screens to deal with and choose from, and that’s only the front-left corner of the room. F1TV — the series’ streaming service — takes up the other side, with seemingly-endless banks of desks and screens to clip up replays and packages, offering highlights and working in support of the broadcasts.

Even to simplify it to that level does it a disservice, given we’re talking about a 140-strong team working at the M&TC during a race weekend. And that’s on top of the 75 staff that are on-site in the slimmed-down Event Technology Centre (ETC) that connects the at-track footage with the main broadcast set-up at Biggin.

Since the Covid pandemic but also with an eye on sustainability, more and more of the tasks have moved to the M&TC to reduce travel, with data and video beamed between the track and the permanent facility via two dedicated fibre pipelines, allowing for 10GB of bandwidth. That’s needed, because there’s 500TB of data transferred each race; 50 times the amount the Hubble space telescope produces in a year.

And that’s because ‘data’ is such a wide-ranging term. Walk through past the gallery and, depending on the side you take, you’re reaching areas such as sound or the simply mind-blowing team radio department. That’s because every audio feed is immediately available to the small unit, which insists each clip is turned around within a lap to be offered up to the world feed director.

You’ll have noticed it’s not just the team radio audio you tend to receive while watching a race now, either. The written radio message that appears on your TV screen is courtesy of an immensely quick-fingered typist called Seb who can not only decipher the messages but transcribe them at well over 100 words per minute.

Walk further and after passing even more booths bespoke to certain feeds, you hit an often overlooked aspect of what F1 produces: telemetry.

Looking just like a large gallery on its own, the countless feeds you can access via different apps and F1TV are on display here. Timing data, sector times, driver maps, tyre usage – it all comes through this area, with the telemetry allowing F1 to measure cars’ lap times to within 1/10000th of a second.

120 videos are able to be sent concurrently between the ETC and M&TC due to the data transfer systems in use, but there is also plenty of audio too, with commentary booths lining the opposite corridor to team radio. And that corridor leads to a new state-of-the-art studio that feels like walking onto the Match of the Day set. And I mean that in the most positive possible way. I was lucky enough to not only see it during a look around but use it a few weeks earlier for a pilot show, and with classic helmets and random car parts dotting the backdrop, there are three separate filming locations to allow a range of programming from chat shows to technical explanations to race footage analysis.

The new stuff is all massively impressive – and shows the scale of what the world feed director has to handle to bring a race to your screens – but it’s some of the older aspects that are even more fascinating.

There’s an R&D department that tests new technologies to help cover the sport. Onboard cameras are the main attraction here, but there are also tiny microphones that have been developed to withstand severe conditions – such as the exhaust exit – to capture the most accurate sounds possible.

The T-cam that sits above the roll hoop is perhaps the most obvious camera you’ve seen, and within the casing is immensely intricate technology to both shoot high-quality footage but also transmit it back to the M&TC via the 38 antennas positioned around the circuit to allow constant two-way transmission between the cars.

But the casing shouldn’t be overlooked itself, with the T-cam from Zhou Guanyu’s terrifying crash at Silverstone holding up, while Fernando Alonso’s was also largely intact after his enormous shunt in Melbourne in 2016. Sergio Perez’s dramatic flip at the Hungaroring in 2015 cracked the protection open, though. All three are proudly on display here and could certainly grace a sporting museum.

There are multiple other cameras too, to supply the seven points that can be used on each car. The roll hoop can provide front and rear, and be added to with the chassis camera, helmet cam, pedal shot, helmet-facing view, front wing angle and 360 degree camera. In total, 90 are affixed to cars across the weekend, sending back footage.

That such pictures so quickly and clearly make their way from the glamorous surrounds of Monaco, Singapore, Melbourne and Miami to what is essentially a glorified industrial unit in the South East of England is some feat. While a huge archive still needs trawling through, modern captures now create a back catalogue that regularly ends up on different platforms to provide further coverage of the sport.

It might be the same old building that has been an F1 property for decades, but inside it’s becoming ever-more the place where the magic happens. Or at the very least, the place that makes sure you’re seeing the magic happen.