It first emerged in April, was then expanded on a touch further in June, but what actually is it?
What is the ‘command center’ the World Rally Championship plans to introduce in 2025?
WRC Promoter showcased the system to the world’s media during Secto Rally Finland last weekend, with both event director Simon Larkin and consultant Andrea Adamo in attendance to explain more of the nuances.
This is what we know so far about the WRC command center:
What is its purpose?
Larkin has made this clear already, but the whole motivation to launch ‘command center’ is to improve storytelling.
Command center is a “working title”, but essentially the promoter wants to better utilize the data already at the teams’ disposal in order to enhance the broadcast coverage.
“What’s motivated this is we have these very expensive rally cars, million-euro rally cars, and my rental car has better connectivity in it,” Larkin said. “The fact is these cars, they have a lot of data. It’s all in there and we’re a little bit [in the] stone age.
“There’s a minimum of 104 sensors just being measured right now by the FIA in the rally box, and it’s dumb, if you know what I mean. These are dumb cars. So we want to try to find a way to make them smarter.”
It will benefit the competitors too
Tänak's trouble on Rally México 2023 is cited as an example where command center could help teams and fans
The primary motive is to tell a better TV story, but Larkin thinks this innovation will benefit the competing teams as well as simultaneously improving the show.
“We want to try to find ways to help keep these cars in the rally, in between stages,” he said.
“The examples that I give – I always give, because I’ve been talking about this for a while but now it’s happening – is last year, Rally México. Friday morning, Ott Tänak driving for M-Sport. Everyone’s really excited.
“First stage of the morning, he has a problem on the stage. M-Sport themselves don’t know what was wrong with the car. We don’t know what’s wrong with the car. M-Sport didn’t have radio. There was no phone service, so nothing could be found out what was wrong.
“He gets to the end of the stage. Of course, a driver being a driver and driving for a team, he doesn’t want to say what went wrong or even what he did because he then gets onto the road section, gets on the car phone and talks to his engineer there.
“M-Sport themselves didn’t know what was going on with their car. We didn’t know what was going on with his car. There was no story then, there was no ability for us to tell the fans what’s going on.
With command center, engineers could have greater ability to keep their cars in competition
“The other example can be last year, Croatia. Séb [Ogier] was first on the road I think. Essentially he has an issue with a wheel. Three minutes later, bang, Kalle [Rovanperä] hits basically the same thing and has the same problem. And four seconds later, I can tell you it was about four seconds later, my phone started ringing from Terenzio [Testoni, Pirelli rally activity manager], knowing that they both hit something, but he knows that Séb in particular may be a little bit negative about Pirelli when he gets to the stage end.
“We could have been more ahead of that story, to head that off when they get to the stage end, to have something to talk about, something to poke about. We want to try to have some data, we want to try to have some story.
“Importantly, ourselves, [and] the FIA, we want to put ourselves in the middle of this. Because the reality is this is a sport that goes against the clock, these aren’t cars bashing into each other. Secrecy – I’m sure the teams will disagree, particularly your technical directors – maybe isn’t as important as it can be in a circuit race where they are literally going after each other.
“Strategy and data can help. We want to help the teams and we want to have a story.”
Command center will not cost the teams any more money either, as it will simply utilize sensors that already exist on the cars, rather than requiring anything new to be fitted.
A strategic tyre change or something more dramatic? Command center will provide more information
And Larkin is keen to keep parity between the competition by doing things that way, too.
“What we’re very conscious of is not creating an extra thing that the teams can spend a lot of money on,” he added. “So even the amount of data that we may provide live will be… it may well be that not all 104 sensors [are used]. We may start with 10, we may start with 15, we may start with 20. Because what we want to do is we want to provide useful data, but we don’t want to get to the point where that data can be analyzed by an additional performance engineer or additional data analyst or starting doing overlay and live upon live upon live analysis because that will then just add… For those who have money, they will spend the money on it.
“We’re going to do this in a rational way. We’re going to start to roll it out. We want it to be useful. We want to keep cars in the rally, but not add cost. We just want to add this as a technological addition.”
Command center should also have safety benefits, too.
“Of course, another thing that I think is good to underline is that also for the safety it’s good because for sure we have now the GPS, the SAS [tracking], whatever you want,” Adamo said.
“But here we can see immediately if the car, for example, has some problem with the hybrid, if the car has any big impact and we know also the direction of the g-force that normally is just recognized as a value, that is, for example, 20G, we can know exactly the direction of the impact, not just the impact itself.”
How will it work?
Teams are already using radio to communicate with drivers, but their chatter is not shared publicly
A smart antenna, supplied by Marelli, will be fitted to each car, transmitting data back to base via an LTE (4G) connection.
As previously mentioned, all Rally1 cars are fitted with sensors that the FIA accesses, primarily for safety purposes, which reveal pretty much everything about the car and how it is (or in some cases isn’t) operating.
Using a data analysis system called Wintax 4, all of the information can be accessed and then displayed accordingly in a concise manner for broadcast.
Radio communication will also be added to offer viewers never-before-heard access between drivers and their engineers. Currently Toyota and Hyundai each have a radio system but M-Sport doesn’t, so WRC Promoter will supply one universal system so all things remain equal.
All in all, the idea is to immediately make it abundantly clear what is going on with each competing Rally1, and if there is a problem what specifically that problem is.
“This system can allow us to have a clear understanding of what’s going on,” Adamo said. “So it’s good for the broadcast because we can understand immediately what is happening. And so if you have a car that is stopped somewhere, you know why normally it’s stopped.
“For example, if it’s a puncture, we can see immediately that the pressures are going down to zero. If you broadcast an empty cockpit, you can immediately say, OK, it has a puncture and this or that. Same thing, we will have, for example, engine temperature, liquid pressure, the hybrid working in order to immediately recognize a possible issue, follow the car, create stories. So this is for the pure broadcast.
“Of course, for the engineers, maybe it will be also good because if you have some easy things that can be fixed by the driver with the things that are in the car, it’s good because they can help. Currently we all know that at the end of the stage, the communication that we have is simply a picture of the display of the car sent to the engineers [by the co-driver], but then you have the picture at the end of the stage and most of the time you hope that it covers all the information.
“We [Hyundai] suffered some problems in the past that could have been solved easily if we would have known more about what was going on, like cars that didn’t fire up or things like this. So to lose a car for stupid things, it’s a pity nowadays, I guess.
“The target is to have a room where we will have different windows, different screens for different cars with a clear pop-up alarm that can immediately let us know that car X, Y, Z has the temperature for the rear diff that is getting higher and so immediately you can inform the broadcast or whoever that something is happening on this car so you can follow it closer,” Adamo added.
“You can follow it along the road section, because most probably the crew is going to fix it, they’re going to work in the car, you can follow and understand what’s going on.”
Adamo knows how teams can benefit
The technology should also allow for easy comparisons between drivers which can be analyzed and displayed in a fashion similar to the ‘Virtual Spectator’ system that featured on the WRC’s TV broadcasts in the mid-2000s.
“With this data, what you can do is also nice stories between stages, comparing the behavior of the different cars along the stage. Because, for example, the splits can be much shorter, because with the GPS you can do whatever you want,” Adamo explained.
“You can compare trajectory, you can compare the different ways drivers are using the hybrid system, the regenerate, the deployment of the energy. You can understand, for example, why one driver was faster in the first part of the stage than the others.
“You can understand the way they are managing tire pressures and tire temperature, and then seeing the difference in performances. For example, in a rally like Monte Carlo, when you have drivers starting with maybe different compounds and different things, you can see in the stage who was faster in a certain part, who was slower [and] why.
“There are many things that thanks to the data you can develop and make a story, keep the fans informed and explain them things that so far they are a bit not able to understand because so far we were blind.
“And another thing that we are developing is to do like it’s done elsewhere. So all the tires can be with the RFD recognized by the system, so at the stage start we know exactly which tires are fitted in the car and how many kilometers they have, so you know exactly who is using more used tires, less used tires, where they fit, how they manage the tires, so you can understand strategies that so far sometimes they are a bit untold, let me say like this.”
What happens next?
The new system was first trialed in competition on the Puma of Sesks in Latvia
Command center will roll out at the 2025 Monte Carlo Rally [January 23-26], but the system has already been trialed on cars during testing and competition.
It was first used in Estonia, during M-Sport’s pre-event test for Poland, Latvia and Finland, before featuring on Mārtiņš Sesks’ Puma Rally1 for Rally Latvia, and Sami Pajari’s Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 for Rally Finland.
Those two specific cars were chosen “because they’re non-championship cars but additional cars that are being run, so there’s less potential for any kind of impropriety or any perception of an issue there” says Larkin.
The target is to trial the system on a car from each manufacturer – Toyota, Hyundai and M-Sport – at October’s Central European Rally, because “the more real world testing we can do, the more we learn, the more that our technical partners can help come to the table and really adapt this to what’s going to work for us”.
If that does happen, a mini version of what the command center will look like may be set up to give everyone a taster as to how it will work in 2025.
Larkin insists the feature is already capable of being used though. They just want to take their time to refine it.
“At the moment, for Monte, our target is to have a robust [system], available for teams, available for us, and in particular for our international feed,” he said. “And then we will start to grow that.”
