How F1’s TV director chooses which team radio to broadcast, censor – or mute

Some Formula 1 drivers hate the fact their radio messages can be broadcast for all the world to hear but there is little chance that’s ever going to change.

F1 has had access to drivers’ radio communications for years. “If the car is on-track, we have the radio for that car and we have access to that radio,” F1’s director of broadcast and media, Dean Locke, explained. “Gone are the days when it could be encrypted or we don’t get it, that radio is out there.”

For Formula One Management, being able to play near-live comments from drivers during broadcasts gives them an advantage over other sports.

“I know someone who covers golf,” Locke relates, “and he [says]: ‘I can follow a golfer for five hours and get nothing – your athlete is in a car with a crash helmet on in a cockpit going 200 miles an hour and we have full emotion’.”

However, as Locke acknowledged, having such close access to a competitor during the competition brings a degree of responsibility. This is why F1 uses its facility to censor or hide – through muting – some radio messages.

This happens in two ways, as F1 broadcasts drivers’ radio communications two different places. F1’s range of onboard channels, available via F1 TV and other places, allows viewers to follow individual drivers and hear almost all of everything they say. Out of those messages, some are also selected for broadcast on the world television feed, which is done using audio clips, text boxes or both.

While the latter has been a regular part of F1 televisions broadcasts for decades, the onboard channels were introduced more recently, in 2018. The drivers’ messages are transmitted with a delay of a few seconds which gives the director the opportunity to mute anything they do not want to broadcast.

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Locke explained this is done if the director is concerned about what the driver might be about to say. “There is a responsibility there,” he said. “So with the live [onboard feed] part, you can in theory listen to a driver individually. But if there is something they may regret we have to sort of protect them a little bit from that, so we have a function that we can deal with that: mute it, bleep it occasionally.”

In practice censorship ‘bleeps’ are rarely, if ever, heard on the onboard channels. When the television director chooses to hide a message this is commonly done by muting it, as was the case when Fernando Alonso vented his anger at race control after several drivers ahead of him cut the first corner at the last race. The highlighted portions of the transcript below were muted on his onboard feed:

If a driver’s message is muted in this way it may never come to light. Alonso’s messages were subsequently revealed in a video published by FOM the day after the race.

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Drivers’ radio communications may also be hidden in this way following a crash, particularly if there is a concern the driver might be injured. Profane messages are not necessarily hidden in this way, such as Alonso’s explosively angry reaction to Lewis Hamilton reaching the finishing line ahead of him in Singapore after cutting several corners over the final laps.

From the huge array of messages sent back and forth between up to 20 drivers and their engineering teams, the television director can choose which to show on the world feed. Any profanity (or, occasionally, offensive language) is censored with audible ‘bleeps’ – occasionally a message may consist of nothing else.

As with all television direction during the race, the selection and editing of radio messages this is handled by FOM. Their production goes to a range of audiences including many territories which do not use English – the universal language of F1’s team radio feeds.

FOM also have to select which messages best relate the key stories unfolding in the race, and how many of them to use. “On the world feed it’s slightly different,” Locke explains. “It’s a much bigger audience we’re choosing to broadcast to as well.”

“It’s contextual, it has to be. The delay is about 15 seconds so the clip could still be coming in while we’re playing it out. But it just gives us time to dumb down [quieten] the effects audio, bring up [amplify] the audio, possibly bleep a driver if we have to bleep a driver, and also make an editorial decision. So: is this in context?”

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Although F1 has been accused by some of favouring emotional and profane radio messages, Locke insists they do not try to sensationalise. “One [clip] I was critical of once had more swear words than not swear words. I was like, ‘I think that’s a bit sensational, rather than actually give us any story of what this driver’s trying to tell us.’”

However FOM sees the radio communications as an important storytelling device. “We’ve had races where two team mates, through the team, are discussing,” says Locke, “and actually, without that process, you wouldn’t really have got the story of what was going on.

“So we need it to push the editorial process, to understand what is going on between the two cars or between a battle.”

“We’re not in the market of sensationalising,” he emphasises. “The team are storytellers and that’s what they’re doing.

“So the process is: the radio comes in, they think it’s important, they start clipping it up. And then they will fire that out, once they’ve let the director know.

“The director might also want to choose to show that subject. If it’s slightly more delayed than that we may choose to put it on a replay because it also tells the story of a replay, because not all replays are straightforward to understand, so it might just sort of explain that process a bit around there.”

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F1 also has the option to show radio messages in a text box either in addition to the audio clip or the driver or instead of it. The latter can be beneficial for commentators as they do not need to stop talking to allow the radio communications to be heard.

“If the transcription can be deployed then it’s deployed as long as it doesn’t delay that radio,” says Locke. “Occasionally we’ll go over that 15 seconds [delay] but it’s normally within a lap and because it’s got timing information it’s out of date by then anyway.

“Sometimes we get criticised – ‘I think that radio was really delayed’ – [but] it just isn’t. You’d be quite surprised when [drivers] get told to pit, when they get told do things, it’s just sometimes quite delayed.”

After the Chinese Grand Prix FOM issued a clarification after Ferrari complained about the editing of its messages involving Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc during the grand prix. However Locke is confident FOM gets the balance right the vast majority of the time.

“Sometimes there’s a Sunday evening when I get a call and [they] say ‘hey was that in context?’ or ‘did you hear that bit?’ Quite often it’s erroneous in the fact that it was a very long sequence and they’re taking a short sequence out of it. But the accuracy of the way we’re able to deliver and tell that story is getting better and better all the time.”

Additional reporting by Claire Cottingham

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