Column: Huge hits on a small screen
It’s been a funny old season. It started with a regular trip to Chennai and discovering a frog living in the toilet roll in the circuit’s loo, consisted of more visits to Lydden than to Oulton Park which is 20 minutes away from home, and ended with television commentary from the Banger World Final at Ipswich. Actually, I need to clarify a little here: there are numerous Banger World Finals, and now different classes of Banger have a World Final. What? A banger is a banger, surely?
Oh, no. There are National Bangers, where engine swaps and modifications are more permissible, Back-to-Basics Bangers which tries to go back to the original concept of the class (and if anybody can give me a satisfactory answer to why it was allowed to move away from this, you win a prize…) and then there are 1600cc Bangers (easy) that used to be called Rookie Bangers, to encourage in newcomers. Yawn with your mouths closed, please.
Anyway, one of the positives of lockdown has been Spedeworth TV. Born from the longstanding tradition of a circuit video company, Spedeworth TV has been pioneering programmes all through the year, adding to its subscription service of race meetings. Not only can you watch a race meeting, or just one category if you prefer, there are also some excellent magazine-style programmes featuring racing as well as full-length interviews with some of Spedeworth’s stars of the past and present. Fronted by Spedeworth’s top commentator Graham Woodward, Back on Track has been a great series, with a well thought out set of features as well as the interviews. Carl Boardley and stock car hero Conrad Self are excellent, should you wish to invest your £12 sub.
But then there is the race action. A few years ago, Suffolk production company Summer Isle Films became involved with productions of the National Hot Rod World
Final for Motors TV and that involvement with the sport has grown. When Ipswich Stadium’s regular videographer Martin Hunt decided it was time to wind down, Summer Isle Films stepped up to the plate and formed Spedeworth TV initially showing race meetings.
However, cometh the lockdown, cometh the live stream. When Spedeworth tried a behind-closed-doors meeting in July at Aldershot, Tom Newman and his Summer Isle team had a new challenge. Filming the action is the easy part, but the greater complexities come in getting that footage out of the stadium and online.
That has been achieved by a process called cellular bonding, which as I am sure you know, is the process in which two or more cellular modems are combined in an intelligent way that allows the one to use the combined bandwidth. Yeah, thought you knew that.
Now, live streams are becoming so common, so popular, that oval racing doing the same isn’t really news, you may think.
But bear in mind that this is all done on a tiny scale. Think about motor racing as a minority sport and then oval racing as a minority of a minority. There isn’t a massive amount of money to throw at this, so Newman and his team have to do it as frugally as possible, but they come up well.
With a locked-off camera on the presenters and a couple of trackside cameras, the rest of the team is four (director, producer and two technical boffins) in the production room, sat beside the commentators. There are gremlins inevitably, largely to do with talkback and audio. But for a tiny team, it is a massively impressive effort and proper thought has gone into the coverage of an event, with a bank of VTs of assorted lengths to play for when the gaps between the races need something to cover them.
And a Banger World Final? Mega! One thing Spedeworth has always done well is the build-up to a major race and even with a reduced crowd, the company carried on that skill. By the time each qualifier has been introduced and done their lap of honour to the grid, you were almost aching for the race to start. Red flags were inevitable, a late-race stoppage giving people a chance to twig that Mark Almeida was leading and heading for this third World title. Nope. He was stopped by lurking traffic on the dash to the flag allowing prolific race-winner Joey Reynolds his chance to score the crown, only to be dislodged on the last bend by Josh Vowden who claimed the title.
Oval racing has a magic of all of its own, but Spedeworth TV brings something extra. You can enjoy it all in the warmth live or at your leisure. Most impressively of all is how that branch of motorsport that people like to sneer at is showing us what can be done.
“Cometh the lockdown, cometh the short oval live stream…”