How Cloud And AI-Powered Data Insights Are Helping F1 Attract New Fans
As the world’s most technologically advanced sport, Formula 1 doesn’t just adopt technologies from the business world, it actively creates and pioneers innovations that are in turn adopted by other industries.
F1 teams were harnessing the power of Big Data before the term was even coined and its practices and creations have been adapted for health, manufacturing and retail. Naturally, there have been substantial contributions to the automotive industry.
But despite this exhaustive quest to identify anything that can give teams a fraction of a second advantage F1 has, until relatively recently, been behind the curve when it comes to digital. The sport was a late adopter of modern communications technology and cloud platforms, while its broadcast, mobile and social presentations were a little behind the times.
When Liberty Media took over the sport in 2017, it appointed former Ferrari technical director and Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn as Sporting MD. He made it clear that digital was to be a priority in the sport’s new era.
“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do and we’re putting the infrastructure in place,” he said in 2017.
Since then, F1 has overhauled its branding, its social platforms and has a successful eSports division. The Virtual Grand Prix series, which pits drivers, professional gamers and celebrities against each other, has been one of sports’ lockdown success stories.
Meanwhile, it has also launched its F1 TV, its own streaming service in certain markets.
This digital push is essential if Formula 1 is to maintain and build its fanbase. There is intense competition for millennials’ leisure time and even then they are using new channels, like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to interact with sporting organizations.
However, unlike other sports, F1 broadcasts can only show a fraction of events that are taking place. Whereas a tennis match can be captured with a single camera and a soccer game can use multiple angles to follow the ball, F1 races involve 20 cars racing around a track that is several miles long.
Only one story can be told with a linear video feed and directors have to switch between different events throughout a 2-hour broadcast. This can make it difficult to follow everything that’s going on in a race and challenging to attract new fans. Meanwhile, there is a need to add context to the short clips that can be consumed on social media.
F1 believes its historical database, coupled with the huge amount of data generated by every race, will be critical in adapting to changing behaviors and catering for all audiences. At its disposal is nearly 70 years-worth of information, while 300 sensors on each car generate more than 1.1 million data points every single race.
The ability to analyze this information as quickly as possible is a key competitive advantage for F1 teams but making this data relatable to audiences is a huge challenge. It’s why F1 teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018. Since then, F1 has migrated systems to the cloud and is now looking at how AWS’s storage, processing and machine learning capabilities can make sense of this vast data repository.
But to identify what insights are interesting and relevant, Brawn has also enlisted the support of former Ferrari and Williams engineer Rob Smedley. Even if you’ve never heard of him, if you’ve watched in an F1 race in the past decade, you’ve likely heard him issuing instructions to drivers over the team radio.
Smedley’s career in motorsport spans a quarter of a century, meaning a decision to take a sabbatical at the end of the 2018 season was well-deserved. His talents ensured several teams were enquiring about his availability last summer but it was Brawn’s offer to help F1 identify data insights that seemed the most tempting offer.
Initially, Smedley joined as a consultant but is now chief engineer, bringing a pit-lane perspective to content.
