(Editor's note: Michael Davies will be the featured speaker during tomorrow's TVTech Talk webinar on sports production. He will discuss Fox Sports' preparations for Indy 500 and 2026 FIFA World Cup coverage. Register here to attend.)
SPEEDWAY, Ind.—The crash involving drivers Alexander Rossi, Pat O’Ward and Romain Grosjean during Indianapolis 500 Qualifying Monday once again demonstrated to race fans what in-car cameras bring to coverage as driver view shots from inside O’Ward and Rossi’s cars gave viewers the closest experience they’ll ever have to a smashup at more than 200 mph.
Those shots, however, are only one of multiple different in-car angles viewers can expect May 24 during Fox Sports’ coverage of the 110th running of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
New for this year’s race coverage from the cars are what the broadcaster has dubbed “Top Gun” cameras, miniature RF cameras pointed at drivers in the cockpit, and what it is calling a Buckeye Camera mounted on the rear quarter panel of Indy cars.
“Inspiration for our ‘Top Gun’ camera comes from some of the films about racing,” said Michael Davies, Fox Sports executive vice president of technical and field operations. “F1: The Movie was a fantastic inspiration to see what we could do, and our director [Mitch Riggin] thought of how to get this amazing shot of the driver’s head looking straight on.”
The addition of the rear quarter panel camera brings another angle to engage the audience with new views of racing and pit action, he added.
“There’s just a lot of inspiration that goes into figuring out how to not only get the cameras that show you the X’s and O’s and the strategy, but also the emotion of it—the kind of thing you might see in a cinematic production,” said Davies.
These two new camera angles join the Racing Force micro-cameras embedded in drivers’ helmets at eyeline for Driver’s Eye shots, which Fox Sports used during its inaugural Indy 500 coverage last year and which captured yesterday’s qualifying round crash in such detail, as well as on-board forward and rear hoop angles and sidepod and suspension views.
To augment the Driver’s Eye shots, Fox Sports will key on its heads-up display (HUD) telemetry, including throttle, brake gear, speed and other key data.
(Editor’s note: Live coverage of the Indy 500 begins at 10 a.m. EDT on Fox. The green flag drops at 12:30 p.m. EDT. Coverage is also available via Fox One and the Fox Sports App.)
By The Numbers
Production of the Indianapolis 500 is a massive undertaking—not only in terms of the technology used to cover the race from the 1,000 acres Speedway property, but also the number of people in attendance. About 350,000 people are expected, including 235,000 in the stands, 100,000 in the infield and about 12,000 workers.
To capture the race, Fox Sports will deploy cameras at about 70 positions around the Speedway to supply more than 100 camera fees. Ten cameras will run at up to 240 fps 4x HFR to deliver what the broadcaster is calling “cinema-grade” slow motion. Fourteen RF handheld cameras and six pit-box cameras from NEP Broadcast Sports International (BSI) will provide roaming shots. The broadcaster will also provide some 30 ISO replay channels from five EVS systems.
Fox Sports is producing the race in 1080p HDR with a crew of about 200 production personnel, some of whom have worked on the IndyCar tour for decades. It will distribute its show in 4K UHD.
Drones and Digital Cinema
Fox Sports is adding a third drone to its airborne complement of cameras for this year’s race. Beverly Hills Aerials, which the broadcaster has turned to for major tent pole events, including NASCAR and IndyCar races, is providing the drone camera platforms and piloting them.
“The thing about Indy is it’s just vast,” said Davies. “To get around very quickly on the track, there’s no real substitute for utilizing drones. Motorsports is one of those sports that lends itself to using drones for actual coverage of the sport, not just beauty shots.”
The three drones and a Helivision helicopter will provide first-person view (FPV) shots, aerial coverage of pre-race events and shots of “some of the more histrionics” of the day at the Brickyard, he said.
The use of drones has evolved over time. While Fox Sports will not fly drones of the track during races, drones have become safer with the addition of features like parachutes and other safety equipment that not only ensure safety but make it legally allowed to fly over people, he noted.
“Certainly, from where we were a few years ago, the drone space and the flexibility in how they are used have opened up, and IndyCar has been a fantastic partner in understanding the importance of drones in the coverage and the overall presentation of the of the product,” Davies added.
For its Indy 500 remote studio show, Fox Sports is deploying more than 10 ARRI digital cinema cameras specially outfitted by The Helm to eliminate operational complexity and enable the broadcaster to integrate them into its live production pipeline, he said.
“We've been convinced these cameras have some interesting properties that can help us in terms of light tolerance and the ability to dial up and down a shallow depth of field, depending not just on the look we want but also because there may be things we don’t want viewers to see,” said Davies.
On-Site Production
As with its coverage of last year’s race, Fox Sports again is partnering with Indy Motor Sports (IMS) Productions, which has rolled its HD-5 IP-based mobile production unit to the speedway. The broadcaster is augmenting HD-5’s capabilities with Game Creek’s Ovation mobile unit, which also serves as Fox Sports’ flagship truck for NASCAR coverage.
NEP BSI, which provides end-to-end, turnkey RF and microwave services for race coverage, has brought a truck to the track as well, as has CE+T, which is providing Fox Sports with power. The broadcaster will use about 2 MWs of power, including primary and backup, across the production compound and its remote sets.
Infinite Structures has also built temporary remote offices and broadcast facilities for the production crew. In all, Fox Sports is deploying 12 mobile units for race coverage.
These units make this year’s Indy 500 a rather “old-school” remote production setup, “but it’ll probably be the last one,” said Davies.
“One of the things we saw when we came in to do our first year of IndyCar was that besides Indy itself [the Indianapolis Motor Speedway], there was virtually no other tracks that had the fiber need to even consider doing distributed production,” he said.
Over the past year, Fox Sports has worked with Lumen Technologies to outfit IndyCar tracks with the fiber optic infrastructure needed to support distributed production. “Indy has always been the outlier in that respect because they always had it [fiber] there,” said Davies.
Even though there are some 20 miles of fiber optic cable is in place around the speedway, “we wanted to sort of crawl, walk and run on this, and didn’t sink too many resources into distributed production methods,” he said, adding that next year will be different.
Remember The Future
Distributed production isn’t the only thing Fox Sports is teeing up for next year’s Indy 500 race coverage. Managing RF cameras more efficiently is also planned. “We’re testing a lot to see what we can bring back, maybe not in terms of the number of cameras, but rather in a more intelligent way,” said Davies. “Even if you were able to bring back five cameras from a car—whether it’s an IndyCar or NASCAR—I’m not sure what you’d be able to do with all of that.”
How those remote camera signals are managed is only one part of the next generation of the connected car, however. Radio and location technology are others, he noted.
Currently, Fox Sports relies on SportsMEDIA Technology for GPS location data and is looking at how it is evolving. “Whether it’s NASCAR or IndyCar, we only have two channels of audio coming back from the cars. We need more.”
All of these sources rely on RF connectivity, and Fox Sports is working with Verizon on using a private 5G network to augment that.
“We’ve been working with Verizon to help understand what their technology can do,” said Davies. “You know, the interesting part is that if you’re going to test something and it has to work at the biggest events, then it’s absolutely essential to bring a testing environment into the Indy 500, because if it doesn’t work there or at the Daytona 500 or Talladega, then it doesn’t work.”
