How the WRC's backstage army delivers its live coverage

Sisteron. That 23-mile run up the D3 from Thoard, over the legendary hairpins near Authon and down into the town, is legendary for striking fear into the hearts of rally folk. And now darkness has fallen - in every sense.

In just a couple of hours, the World Rally Championship is expected to step out of the darkness and into the light, courtesy of its ground-breaking All Live service. But now, with the start of the 2018 Monte Carlo Rally looming large, the world's gone a bit mad. It looks like fate may have its finger poised over the pause button.

Florian Ruth, the WRC's head of television, is one of the most positive people you can ever hope to meet. But talk to him about that Thursday night in Gap two years ago and the smile slips.

Those hours still haunt him.

"They were some of the hardest days we had in the championship," he says.

"That Thursday night we were in the middle of the mountains, with two huge mountains between the cars and our base. We also had low temperatures, but the logistics and geography were the biggest challenges.

"We had done a couple of rallies before we started All Live; we tested as much as possible. We knew what our technology was capable of, but to do this, in reality, there was no test possible.

"We cannot ask the manufacturers to run their cars away from a rally for us to check the signals. We tested lots of elements, but the whole system really only ran when Monte started."

For a year, WRC Promoter had been talking about this moment. Everything through 2017 was geared towards offering rally fans around the world all the WRC stages, all live. From the device of your choice, you could sign up and watch the WRC like never before. And lots had signed up, and were ready and waiting.

"That moment on Thursday night was actually quite emotional," says Ruth, "because it looked like we would be failing.

"In Argentina we had some remote-feed drop-outs because some military ops blocked our signals. These are massive challenges that we can't legislate against" Florian Ruth

"For this difficult operation, we had just chosen the absolute hardest day of the whole season with two stages in the middle of the night, in the middle of the mountains with snowfall and minus temperatures. It was so stressful.

"In the end, we had a start and end-of-stage camera via the satellite and a few parts of the action. There was just about enough to tell the story, but this was not how All Live looked in our vision or how we wanted to showcase it to the world.

"It didn't go black, but this wasn't what we'd been thinking of when we were talking about showcasing this beautiful product."

Friday was a new day. And everything was well in the world of All Live.

"The sun came out," says Ruth.

"We knew the [camera] positions and we got some of the absolute best brains in the business and they just did an awesome job and did it together. On Friday we could start to show what the vision looked like, and by Sunday night we'd proved we could make 30 hours of rally coverage per weekend and make it interesting."

And that's what Ruth and his team have been doing ever since.

"This is rallying," he continues. "In Formula 1, they have pre-fibre-cabled camera positions where they plug in the camera and start producing. We have nothing. We don't know if it's sunny, rainy, are there mountains?

"In Argentina we had some remote-feed drop-outs because of some military ops that blocked our signals. These are massive challenges that we can't legislate against."

But it's that challenge that keeps Ruth interested, occupied and very much in the game, and All Live is his game. Having worked on Red Bull's Air Race project for a while, he took a trip to Rally Poland in 2015 and was surprised at how poorly fans were served.

"After that rally I wrote a concept," says Ruth. "In this concept, already I was struggling with logistics of the rally. OK, something happened out on the stages. At this point, somebody filmed it, then the helicopter came and picked up the card to bring it back to base where it was ingested, edited and uploaded. This took hours.

"I'm a big fan of real-time communication. I don't want to learn what happened yesterday, I want to know now. The fans film what happens on the stages and put it on YouTube 10 minutes later. We cannot be hours behind.

"I thought of a way to connect everything we have at the rally and have it all live. There's nothing new with the All Live idea. The previous promoter had a similar idea, to be faster on social and digital media. In combination with new technology on the market, All Live was possible."

Ruth's right. During his tenure in the promoter's seat two decades ago, David Richards was banging the drum about digital live coverage. Richards' frustration about the WRC not being available on mobile telephones in the early noughties was huge. But the cost to change it was simply too high.

Regardless of which end of the world All Live director Stefan Koch calls the shots from, he's sitting in the same seat looking at the same screens and pushing the same buttons

Codecs has fixed that. It's now cheaper and more straightforward than ever to pack pictures into a transmittable format.

"The cost is important, but the main thing is that this is now a reliable and stable system," says Ruth.

"Before these improvements in codecs we would have been using radio frequencies which would have had too many break-ups."

As well as covering the start and finish of every stage, All Live runs some cameras in the stage, as well as onboards and a heli-cam. At any one time, there can be as many as 80 camera feeds coming into the All Live base in the service park. Coming via satellite, they're usually with WRC TV between 1.3-1.6 seconds later.

Those pictures were all fed into the back of an outside broadcast truck. On some events, that was the promoter's own truck, but on events such as Argentina the facility was hired locally. Because of that, there was no continuity of quality.

To combat that, Ruth commissioned the build of studio production pods.

"We have ripped apart an OB van and built it into four pods," says Ruth. "The technology is all the same in the pods [as in the OB van]."

The difference here is that these four pods are taken to every round. Regardless of which end of the world All Live director Stefan Koch calls the shots from, he's sitting in the same seat looking at the same screens and pushing the same buttons.

Over the past two years, making 30 hours of television from Thursday afternoon until Sunday lunchtime has become the norm. Fans have come to expect it. But Ruth himself is still learning.

"I have been in this sport for three years now," he says, "and still on every rally I learn something new.

"This is why we have experts like [former co-driver] Steve Turvey, and this is why we work with the best people and best reporters."

Still, however, there's the odd niggle. Britain's own WRC counter in Wales, for example, can provide a real headache.

"The remote-feed signals are very sensitive," he says. "When it's wet, the signals do get blocked by the water, so when we have forests with leaves we can have break-ups in the transmissions of onboards. The signals don't go through water."

At the moment, stopping the rain remains beyond even Ruth's control. Instead, he'll chase a fix from the tech side. The delays are, of course, necessary on some occasions. If there's a particularly nasty accident, everything can go on hold.

"We send the pictures down the fibre to Stockley Park and they go from the service park to there in around 300 milliseconds" Ruth

"We actually have two delays from our side," says Ruth.

"There's a safety delay of 10 seconds, just in case. We love the sport and we don't want anything to happen; we want control. But in addition to that we want the buffering time, so wherever you watch you should have a continuous and fluent stream of pictures."

And those pictures are available on your iPhone or tablet in Tescos. But if you're watching in the office, just be careful.

"We had some people telling us they lost their jobs because they were watching All Live all the time," says Ruth. "We even had some guy telling us it cost him his marriage!"

In addition to producing constant live pictures for WRC.com, Ruth oversees the creation of the promoter's television package. That process underwent significant change last year, with TV production moving to Stockley Park, near Heathrow.

"Moving to London means we can take 20 people less to each round," says Ruth.

Such cost savings - with the potential for more folk to follow - along with a rapidly growing subscription base are helping to sustain All Live.

"The post-production base in London is possible because of our technical partner Tata," he adds. "Tata provides a fibre connection all around the world and, once we plug into this connection from our rally base, we send the pictures down the fibre to Stockley Park and they go from the service park to there in around 300 milliseconds."

So, when you fire up the phone for to watch the action unfold in the Alps, you'll do so safe in the knowledge that, actually, Ott Tanak's not the fastest thing in the service park.