A Los Angeles production company has rolled the Rocket Racing League onto the TV launch pad.
“It’s the Jetsons, it’s a video game come to life, it’s insane and so cool,” said Arthur Smith, founder of production company A. Smith & Co.
But charting the future, and the American viewing public’s tastes, can be tricky. Remember the XFL, the short-lived made-for-TV football league on NBC?
The rocket-powered aircraft racing series was supposed to debut this fall, but there have been development delays with the racing vehicles and other more typical Hollywood travails.
Mojave-based XCOR Aerospace builds the kerosene-burning rocket racers. According to league co-founder Granger Whitelaw, the biggest source of the delays in getting the league up and running were the tweaks required on the redesigned race vehicle, the Mark 1 X-Racer, which shoots a 15-foot tail flame. Finding the right time slot on the TV schedule and accommodating a sponsor’s wishes also caused delays.
Peter Diamandis, who founded the $10 million X Prize for private space flight, teamed with racecar backer Whitelaw to launch the Rocket Racing League in 2005.
Diamandis is CEO and co-founder of Zero Gravity Corp., which offers parabolic weightless flights to the general public, and the co-founder of Space Adventures LTD, the company that has flown four private citizens on the Soyuz spaceship to the International Space Station.
Whitelaw has been an Indy car financier, and much of the league’s infrastructure and operation is similar to professional auto racing. The league’s goal is to echo the business success and widespread grassroots popularity of NASCAR, only in the air (where the racers are subject to regulation by the Federal Aviation Administration, of course).
Some of the biggest NASCAR sponsors have contracts valued in the $20 million range, and even smaller sponsorships for logos on vehicles run into the millions. A handful of those deals would get the league off and roaring. But to do that, you need heavy-duty TV exposure along with brand and product integration.
“If someone was starting baseball today it would be utterly different; it might not even get off the ground,” Smith said. “In hockey there would probably be halftime rather than three periods because it breaks up the TV time. That’s the benefit of RRL no new sport can be successful unless it translates well to television and we’re building that in. Sports is television; if it doesn’t work on TV then there is no league.”
Smith and the league are planning virtual advertisement and brand integration utilizing the technology that creates the virtual first-down lines in TV football plus loads of sponsorship from the rockets to uniforms and the like. They have the experience, since Smith and his partner Kent Weed are behind the hit Fox reality series “Hell’s Kitchen.”
The league isn’t cheap it costs $1.25 million for a plane and ground support equipment alone and the TV rights won’t be either, though Smith and Whitelaw wouldn’t talk specifics.
Smith is hoping the series 10 teams in eight to 10 annual competitions around the United States on courses that are expected to be approximately two miles long, one mile wide, and about 5,000 feet high will appeal to an audience of general sports, motorsports and airplane enthusiasts, video game and technology lovers, and the youth demographic.
“This will work because it’s basically racing in the sky and it’s going to look really, really cool,” Smith said. “TV leagues need sponsors, that’s why auto racing makes so much money. There are so many sponsorship tie-ins, tech companies, beer, sport drinks, the usual, and there’s a whole lot of interest out there.”
The production costs are literally and figuratively up in the air but Smith said they’re in line with big NASCAR-type races with a crew of about 200 people and 35 cameras, not including four in-plane cameras planned.
“It’s not way more than auto racing because it can’t be if the cost was too high the economics model wouldn’t work and the league wouldn’t exist,” Smith said.
