Thanks
@Eckhart von Glan great news! Something to watch tonight then!
With such massive grids now, in so many of the esports events, there is a heck of a lot that we're all going to miss - stories involving drivers that we're attached to, and want to see the continuation of.
In the last event of the first The Race season, Mike Epps narrowly missed out on a class title to Max Gunther. That was a story I really wanted to see continue, but Gunther didn't enter the second season and Epps was 'promoted' to the sim driver class, which dumped him into the middle of this field of cars and relative anonymity.
It was good to see him score a podium in the reverse grid race.
It can be a difficult job for a director to identify and predict when and where the race defining moments are going to play out, but there's more to a director's job than that.
In the RD race at Zandvoort, with action still close at the front, the director cut away to events in around 20th place, focussing on RD regular
@Ricoow , Ricardo Umans. This is a good move - in a grid of mainly anonymous names, we could get behind someone we recognise.
And as luck would have it, a story started to play out. The number 10 Mercedes, driven by Emmanuel Soriano was starting to defend very aggressively and Umans and maybe another driver ended up in the gravel, with Soriano continuing.
Now, critically, for me, what the director has to identify at this point, is we have a controversial incident. Something that can create a narrative for the race with events yet to play out. We have, possibly, a villian and a victim. In a narrative sense, at least. A hook. A story that viewers want to see unfold.
So the director needs to be aware of this, or be made aware. Let's see more of Soriano because he's likely to be in the thick of it. Let's see Umans and other affected drivers.
As it turned out, something did happen to Soriano - he ended up dropping back, but we only know this from the position tower. There was no focus on his car for the next few laps when his was the story we were interested in.
Something I associate Martin Haven's voice with more than anything else is the review style. I wonder if, once the race is over and all replays and editing tools are available, you could produce a magazine style review of the races. Not with as-live commentary, but with a scripted review.
That gives you opportunity to highlight all narratives and stories from the race and will create hooks and reasons to watch the next events live.
You could even include interviews with involved participants to hear their opinions.
With such big grids and limited availability of replays we're not seeing comprehensive coverage of any of the events and stories that are taking place mid-race in any of the current series. In fact we're not seeing most of the events at the front of the races either.
And, as others have said, once the big name real-world drivers have gone back to their big name real-world cars, there'll be a lot less reason and pull for punters like me to keep watching broadcast sim racing.
I'm sure there ARE reasons, stories, controversies in there that WOULD engage me. But it's the responsibility of the broadcaster to make sure I'm able to see them.
