Budapest Red Bull Air Race

The Red Bull Air Race World Championship is an exhilarating motorsport event where pilots compete on an aerial racetrack made up of inflatable pylons and distinctive landmarks in the event’s host cities. This was certainly the case in Budapest in 2018. The Hungarian capital city is actually made up of two separate cities, Buda and Pest, one on each side of the River Danube. The event used the Danube, incorporating the iconic Chain Bridge, as the racetrack.

Van Damme’s Hungarian Distributor Gem Kft., based in Budapest, was heavily involved in providing the event’s audio visual cable infrastructure. Given the length of the course and the Danube’s 560 metre width the only viable option was fibre optic connectivity.

Gem specified Van Damme’s tactical fibre optic Tourlight single mode quad cable for the event, as multimode fibre’s maximum transmission length is, as a rule of thumb, around 600 metres. The polyurethane inner jacketed, coated glass yarn armoured Tourlight range was certainly up to the task. Neutrik OpticalCon Quad connectors were used throughout, and the required assemblies were manufactured in VDC Trading’s state of the art Neutrik COCA A accredited fibre laboratory in London.

In total over 4,000 metres of Tourlight was employed across 12 long cable runs, with the highlight being a 1,000 metre Tourlight OpticalCon assembly which ran across the Chain Bridge, linking the twin cities of Buda and Pest.