In the Driver's Seat

Motorsport fans are a dedicated crowd. Give them the prospect of spending a huge sum of money to watch 22 Formula One cars screeching around a circuit for a couple of hours and they'll happily hand over their hard-earned cash. Offer them the chance to watch 90 rally cars storming sideways along a dirt track in 40°C heat and they'll trek up mountains for hours. Hardship comes with the territory. But will they sit in the comfort of their living rooms glued to their computer screens? That is what the World Rally Championship (WRC) is hoping for.

Rallying is an enormously popular sport. In 14 countries across four continents around 10 million fans go out and watch some of the best drivers in the world racing full pelt for three days over narrow, twisting public roads. But because of the distances involved in following the race, television coverage of the sport even as recently as five years ago consisted of week-old footage. Since David Richards' company, International Sportsworld Communicators (ISC), bought the TV and commercial rights to the WRC two years ago, bringing the sport to the public has been transformed.

Today, television companies using satellite communications produce same-day programs editing together helicopter and trackside shots with on-board video footage that are broadcast to 186 countries. But ISC's ambition goes further than that. By next summer it expects to be able to produce live images direct from cars negotiating the harshest and most spectacularly beautiful courses around the world.

It was on a visit to New Zealand that Richards encountered the technology that is taking the sport into a new dimension. Virtual Spectator, a computer-graphics company, had created Internet coverage of America's Cup races, showing the yachts' positions on a virtual ocean. Richards immediately thought, "This could work very well in motor racing." But it was a complex job. Virtual Spectator had to recreate exact pictures of all the courses with every tree and boulder, then use information sent back from the car by Global Positioning Systems to superimpose it on the virtual track. Because rallying is a series of time trials with cars leaving the start at two-minute intervals, spectators at the course never see entrants running side by side. But Virtual Spectator fans sitting at home with a computer will be able to run up to six cars over the same stretch of track to compare their favorites' performances. Says Ford motorsport director Martin Whitaker, "This Virtual Spectator is something that just knocks people's socks off."

Richards intends to give Virtual Spectator graphics the look of WRC. Television broadcasts already use them to enhance their shows, and the huge-selling Sony PlayStation WRC game is based on them. The teams too are impressed with the information they are getting back from the system. Previously they sent staff members out with stopwatches to time runs. Now they can stay at the service park and receive far more information. Corrado Provera, boss of the Peugeot team, relishes the improvement. Says he: "The engineers are cutting the stages in many slices and analyzing why the drivers are faster or slower."

In addition to introducing the new technology, Richards set about reforming the championship's sometimes haphazard organization. With the often reluctant agreement of the race organizers he ensured that races would not clash with Formula One Grands Prix, redesigned the high-speed stages so that they returned to a central service park and imposed computer-controlled timing equipment. Barry Reynolds, manager of Ford's motorsport communications, recalls that years ago positions in a race were sorted out by co-drivers comparing times. "You'd go and ask a driver, 'Are you still lying fifth?' and he'd say, 'Yeah, maybe.'"

But the revolution doesn't end there. Within the next five years Richards plans to eliminate car No. 10 from the championship and replace it with a virtual one. Then fans will be able to enter a real-time rally on Virtual Spectator. They will be able to log in at the same time as the real drivers start and, using real weather and road conditions, pilot car No. 10 around the course in virtual competition with real drivers. Richards isn't phased by the difficulties to be overcome in bringing all the technology together. "When I see the progress we've made in the past couple of years," he says, "I'm not frightened by anything."

Though sitting in front of a computer can never substitute for the sheer exhilaration of being at trackside, it won't be long before fans of World Rally Championship can challenge their heroes, virtually.