COVER STORY: Formula 1 and the increasingly digital race-track

Venture capitalists like to talk about the rule of 10X — innovations that are so transformative they deliver outcomes 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, 10 times better, 10 times greener — and where that huge improvement is a result of an investment in technology.

But when it comes to Formula 1, it’s the small, incremental gains that can be the most impactful.

After two years of Covid cancellations the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix went ahead in Melbourne this month, drawing in a crowd of over 419,000 fans, the highest number since 1996.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to four Formula 1 teams and their key technology partners to understand how the most elite championship in the world of motorsports leverages digital in the pursuit of high performance.

Mercedes-AMG Petronas

The Mercedes racing team has seen unparalleled success in Formula 1 over the past decade, with lead driver Lewis Hamilton winning seven world titles, and the Mercedes team taking home eight constructors’ championships.

Michael Taylor, IT director at Mercedes-AMG Petronas told Digital Nation Australia that reliance on digital is fundamental to the competition.

“Formula 1 is technologically the most advanced sport in the world,” said Taylor.

“Everything that goes on behind the scenes is enabled through technology, and IT is integral to the success of every team.”

Like any large enterprise, technology is not only held within the realms of the IT department but spans every facet of the business.

“The technology that we use is relevant in every organisation. We still have a finance department, we have an HR department, we have a marketing team here that shares all of the same services or back office-led challenges that any other organisation has.”

Taylor said that the IT provision of the Mercedes team has been evolving in the last 10 years to become more mainstream.

“We're looking at how we provide a lean common core to our business applications within this organisation, in the same way that every other big organisation across the globe is looking to find those advancements and benefits with their technology choices and decisions.”

From the instrumentation of the car to the data generated from simulations and modelling, and the continuous testing and development, Taylor believes that large enterprises can use Formula 1 as a benchmark for success in leveraging technology.

“I think it's a great reference for any technology partner to show that if their tools, their solutions, their platforms can stand up to the rigours of Formula 1, then generally they can stand up to the rigours of most business operations across the globe.”

One technology partner that the Mercedes team have leant on this season to support the digitalisation of the entire value chain is the global remote connectivity provider, TeamViewer.

According to Emad Afghani, vice president sales Australia and New Zealand at TeamViewer, “Formula 1 and Formula E engineer the future of mobility in the world’s fastest development laboratory through advanced performance hybrid solutions in Formula 1 and battery-electric technology in Formula E,” said Afghani.

“We translate experiences gained from the demanding remote operating conditions and the data-driven nature of the events from the racetrack into the industrial environment of TeamViewer’s customers.”

Mercedes leverages TeamViewer for its remote IT support, as well as for the efficiency gains in running multiple tests simultaneously, he said.

“TeamViewer provides essential remote connectivity between the limited number of trackside crew and the UK-based engineering team, increasing trackside performance and reducing the team’s carbon footprint.”

Oracle Red Bull Racing

Home to 2021’s Formula 1 world champion Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing is one of the F1’s most competitive teams.

Zoe Chilton, head of strategic partnerships at Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Technology spoke at a press event during the Australian F1 Grand Prix weekend, about the team’s partnership with Oracle since the start of 2021.

According to Chilton, “We're always looking for the best opportunities to gain performance, and to incrementally improve the performance of our whole package — the car, the team, the physical team as well.

“We're looking for every opportunity to make decisions that will improve our performance on the track. And not all of those are the moment that the lights go out, and the race starts. A huge amount of that decision making and that key process has happened way before that.”

While Chilton concedes that incremental improvements are important in every business, she believes there is no clearer example of the power of an incremental gain than on the F1 race track.

“In every part of our business, there are opportunities for incremental improvements, in everybody's business. But for us, those incremental improvements, the small ones, can make big differences on the track. And that's where it counts,” she said.

“Every decision can be made better. Every bit of data has to be used to absolute optimum.”

Red Bull Racing have invested in a strong portfolio of innovation partners, of which Oracle is the title partner.

“Oracle really have this appetite to understand the engineering challenges, the database challenges that we're facing. And help us to attack those challenges, solve them, use really agile infrastructure solutions and incredibly clever AI tools to help us overcome some of those challenges,” said Chilton.

As volumes of data consistently grow, the team is focused on deploying the tools that deliver actionable insights.

“We started working with Oracle, because we knew that cloud infrastructure was going to be a key part of our future. And we knew that tools like AI and ML are going to become really important in the sport as we become more and more data-driven.”

One example of how Red Bull Racing is leveraging its cloud infrastructure is through its real-time race simulation, namely the Monte Carlo Simulation.

“This is the bit that everybody gets very excited about, because it's ultimately what decides when we do our pit stops and how we react to what's happening around us on the track,” she said.

Using known inputs including track data, tire data, and data captured during testing sessions, practice sessions and qualifiers, Red Bull Racing runs millions of simulations to feed into the algorithm, to better inform the team’s strategy come race day.

“Being able to use cloud infrastructure to do more simulations and do a greater volume of different possibilities, essentially, is likely to give you a more accurate outcome,” she said.

“Then, of course, when you get into the race, you're re-simulating that using live data that's coming in, you're adjusting that simulation, that predicted plan, with new information that you're gaining every second on track. And again, the ability to react to that incredibly quickly and having the bandwidth to do so very fast has been critical to us.”

According to Chilton, Red Bull Racing has been able to run 25 percent more simulations in a given timeframe since working with Oracle.

The partnership has not only proven fruitful for the racing team, but Taylor Newill, senior director of motorsports engineering at Oracle believes that Red Bull Racing has pushed the tech company from the perspective of both its technology and its team.

“Oracle Red Bull Racing pushes us to develop our hardware to meet their demands. What we're finding is, it's also benefiting all of our other enterprise customers,” said Newill.

“The things that they're asking us to do are informing us on the development of our next generation hardware.

“We are getting more than just a name on the race car. We're actually getting better products, attracting better talent.”

McLaren Racing

The Australian Grand Prix is the home race for Aussie champion Daniel Ricciardo, who is sporting orange this year, driving for McLaren Racing.

When it comes to McLaren’s investment in digital, two of its key technology partners are data and analytics software Alteryx and collaboration software Smartsheet.

Alan Jacobson, chief data & analytics officer at Alteryx told Digital Nation Australia, "One of the neat things about analytics is how quickly you can get results, you can actually learn about your business and impact a business. And so very quickly, we were able to cut our teeth on several use cases with the McLaren team."

One such use case is in relation to the cost cap regulations imposed this year. In 2022 the baseline cost cap is US$140 million per team.

According to Jacobson, there are about 8000 components of the car, with new parts being produced every 17 minutes. Each prototype of a part undergoes fingerprinting, is exposed to a wind tunnel and measurements are taken before a decision is made as to which parts will be the most performance-enhancing during the race.

“[McLaren Racing] use Alteryx to do, not only analysis of that fingerprint data and help them merge these different datasets together. But they also use Alteryx to eliminate waste to try to figure out where there's manufacturing and material waste that's going on, and how to become more efficient in terms of maybe making fewer of certain parts and more of other parts,” said Jacobson.

McLaren's marketing team meanwhile also leverages geolocation capabilities, collating data from all of the McLaren sponsors and combining it with mapping technologies to indicate where each of their headquarters are located relative to the tracks, to assist with marketing and events.

“We have Experian, Tom Tom, Mapbox, Digital Globe data, as well as their data, and we merge and fuse all that data together to get insight as to where to put these events on,” he said.

Fuel may power the car, but cold hard cash helps drives innovation, and digital plays a role here as well.

“While it doesn’t directly relate to actually how fast the car goes on the track, in some ways, it very indirectly relates to it, because the money that they raised with those sponsors is fundamentally what pays for the car, which is fundamentally what does make it go fast, because they have a budget to make it go fast,” he said.

Throughout a race weekend, the control unit for the F1 McLaren car produces 1.5 terabytes of data and requires a pop-up data centre at every race track.

“There's a need for very powerful local compute. And so, the tracks themselves are set up with very high speed, high mesh, data cabling, that enables massive amounts of data to be collected by all of the race teams literally at the track,” he said.

“Then it has to go from the track, they beam a ton of it back to their race centre in the UK. They have analysis that's happening effectively live there, and then it beams back from there back to their local crew that's at the race itself.”

McLaren Racing analyses data both trackside and on the cloud to feed unique information back to the drivers.

“Each driver is getting different information that not only comes from the analysis that's been run on their data, but what's going to be important to them, and there's a lot of human filtering in that.”

McLaren also uses Brandfolder from Smartsheet to help manage its digital content. 

According to Nigel Mendonca, VP Asia Pacific at Smartsheet the software helps McLaren identify, organise and track digital content in an automated way via AI tagging. "And [it] provides those images to their fan base and their partner base for distribution.”

According to Mark Mader, CEO at Smartsheet, “One of the big unlocks for them has been being able to find images and assets. So when a sponsor makes a request, that's where McLaren is contractually obligated to deliver an asset.

“They're already starting to see the efficacy of finding requested assets and being able to get those to market. I think they will be able to fully articulate that value over the course of a race season.”

Mader said the team at Smartsheet have had to adopt the 'F1 mindset' when working with McLaren.

“It's all about continuous improvement and incremental change. It's not like a big bang, like ‘We're going to go into the hole for a year, build, build, build and come out.’ They’re like, ‘We want to see results quickly. And then we want to iterate.’ And that really, philosophically aligns really well to how we serve our customers,” he said.

Williams Racing

Williams Racing utilises enterprise cloud computing solutions from Nutanix. That has helped it develop a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that allows the organisation to run apps on a single platform, across both public and private clouds.

Williams Racing is leveraging the Nutanix Cloud Platform alongside Intel’s hardware, and Dell XC Series hyper-converged appliances, to provide data in real-time.

Matt Maw, head of technology strategy, Australia and New Zealand at Nutanix told Digital Nation Australia, “In F1, just a few hundredths of a second can separate the winner from the rest, and this tiny margin of error sees the industry rely on enormous volumes of data generated by each individual car,” said Maw.

“Between Friday practice sessions, trackside engineers have one hour to analyse data — every minute counts. Williams’ traditional network-attached storage was causing bottlenecks across the garage, with engine sensors, wind tunnel information, audio, video and beyond experiencing up to three-minute load time delays.”

According to Maw, there are key learnings that the corporate world can takeaway from the use of tech on the race track.

“F1 is one of the few industries where success can be measured in such minute detail. With a simple change to the aerodynamics, engine power, or the technology that supports it all, teams can tell if something has made a difference and quickly. Other industries should watch closely — this is IT performance at its peak.”

Formula 1 Heineken Australian Grand Prix 2022

Rather than partnering with a particular team, pureplay data and analytics company Versor is the official data and analytics partner of this year’s Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix.

The Fujitsu company’s role was to analyse the on-track performance of the race in Melbourne, as well as for every subsequent Formula 1 race this season, to provide insights to racing fans around the world.

According to Michelle Greco, general manager – sales & commercial of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, live in-depth analysis and insights from the race were made available through this collaboration.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Chris Benson, director data, analytics and AI at Versor about how their insights are enhancing the fan experience.

“Post-race, we create a bit of a summary on how the race went. And we use data and AI to specifically talk to certain points. For example, lap time summaries, braking distances, braking on the corners, different speeds between different drivers and so on. And really just coming up with some great little tid-bits around some analytics that we could see and display to the users to show them how the drivers went,” said Benson.

Receiving an API from the Formula 1 website, Versor runs both descriptive and predictive analytics, he said.

“Pre-race, you would be able to do descriptive analytics around, who was the fastest time and so on. You could look at all the past races on that track, and say, ‘Based on that and the practices, we believe that Ferrari is going to win this one.”

However, according to Benson, analytics can only go so far in making predictions.

“There'll be some percentage around it, like an 80 percent score, but there's lots of things that are out of our control, like the engine failing and things like that.”

While the Scuderia-Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc and Red Bull's Verstappen are the ones to beat this season, its any one’s guess who will hold the championship cup this year, but whichever team prevails, technology will have played a crucial role in that success.