From Ayrton’s icon in ’91 to the obscured messages of today: Dean Locke, chief director of Formula 1, tells how he chooses in a few seconds what to make us listen to (and what not)
“Eu venti, I won”. Brazilian GP 1991, Ayrton Senna screams over the radio, exhausted by the grip of poorly adjusted seat belts. Rede Globo, the local television, broadcast the pilot’s cries, making them an icon of the suffering of “Magic” Ayrton. From that moment, Formula One chooses to transmit the voices of the drivers, making them part of the story of the race that we are used to today. But how are radio teams chosen? And what happens if a driver lets himself go with a few too many words, perhaps addressed to the race direction?
“WE FEEL EVERYTHING”
—
“If a car is on the track, we have access to any communication,” the head of international direction, Dean Locke, explains to Race Fans. “It’s a huge advantage for television. It means having the voices and emotions of drivers speeding at 300 km/h. Sometimes I happen to follow golf and after five hours I don’t even know if the athlete is satisfied…”. But “behind all this there is a great responsibility. We want to protect our pilots and if they say something they might regret we prefer to censor it.” An example? Fernando Alonso’s radio team in Mexico. “I really think that the race direction doesn’t understand anything about racing!”, shouts the Spaniard furiously. The director listens, reflects (“no more than about ten seconds though”), and censors.
HIDDEN RADIO TEAMS
—
And to think that once upon a time the teams used private channels to speak with the drivers. “Encrypted communications? Those days are over, now we hear everything,” says Locke. Rewinding the tape, the first to hide the information between the garage and cockpit from its rivals was Ferrari, on the idea of the Sporting Director at the time, Cesare Fiorio. What convinced the Turin driver, in addition to his experience in the rally, where radio communications had been in use for some time, was a curious episode in which some unwary person boasted of his conquests, forgetting that microphones were available to everyone. It was then always the red one, under the leadership of Jean Todt, who agreed with Pioneer to start radio transmissions via satellite: pilot communications and telemetry data, all on the same channel.
SPY RADIO
—
And the history of the radio teams could only intersect with the challenges on the track, to the point of involving real espionage activity. “My job? I was a radio spy for Ferrari,” says Evan Short, now head of electronics at Mercedes. “The teams used encrypted channels and my job was to intercept the McLaren teams, our main rivals. Their sponsor was an encryption company that used a limited combination of frequencies. Once I found the right one, I could hear everything.” But funny episodes also happened in those years. Like when the common frequencies used by some teams made communications “vulnerable” during races in South America, to the point that drivers found themselves hearing messages from taxi drivers or local police stations in their headphones.
THE CHOICES
—
As an aside, “Today we have access to all the communications from the stables, it’s up to us to decide what to transmit,” explains Locke. “We have about ten seconds, no more, because in the meantime the images could already be live. It’s about making an editorial decision in a very short time.” Yes, because choosing to broadcast Verstappen’s outbursts or Russell’s complaints also depends on how Formula One wants to describe a race. “We happened to have drivers arguing with each other while talking to the team over the radio. In that case, if we hadn’t broadcast their voices, no one would really have been able to understand what was happening.”
CURSING WORDS AND DELAYS
—
What if a driver lets himself go with a few too many words? “I remember a race in which a team radio came to my headphones. It contained more swear words than anything else. I chose not to broadcast it, the public would have heard something sensational without having any idea what the driver meant.” Sometimes, however, radio teams go on air late or even missing. “They often criticize us for this – reveals Locke – it happens that even the teams call us to find out why we have set up their team radios in a certain way. The truth is that everything happens so quickly. The teams call their drivers to the pits a few seconds before entering the pit lane and we transmit the message shortly afterwards. People at home think we arrived late, but I assure you that this is not the case!”.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED