How Cloud Data-Crunching Accelerates the F1 Racing Experience

An F1 racing broadcast provides real-time braking analysis of an on-track duel between drivers Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton using cloud-powered analysis from Amazon Web Services. (Image: AWS)

Today’s cars resemble like rolling computers. That’s especially true of Formula 1 race cars, which push the envelope on technology as well as speed.

F1 teams rely on partnerships with technology providers, leveraging high-performance computing, machine learning and edge computing to gain an edge on the track. These relationships are also valuable to service providers, showcasing cutting-edge uses for their data center technologies.

F1 and its cloud-powered racers will be showcased this weekend at the 2021 United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes-AMG Petronas has won five times in Austin, but enters this week’s race trailing rival Max Verstappen of Red Bull by just two points in one of the most intense championship battles in years.

It’s hard to overstate the role technology plays in F1 racing. Every F1 car contains 300 sensors which generate 1.1 million telemetry data points per second transmitted from the cars to the pits. During each race weekend 160 terabytes of data is sent between the remote race circuit and the F1 Media and Technology Center in Biggin Hill, England.

“It’s been a bit of an arms race over the last decade,” said Michael Taylor, IT director for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, which works with HPE on leveraging edge computing to improve racing performance. “With the major advancements in processing capability, chips, and memory, all teams have made significant investments in technology to improve their chances on the track.”

“Formula One teams have always been pioneers in analyzing data for a competitive advantage, especially when milliseconds mean the difference between pole position and starting somewhere in the middle of the pack,” said Otmar Szafnauer, chief executive officer and team principal at Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One.

At the heart of the Formula One Group’s technology is a deep relationship with Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud horsepower for everything from computer-aided design for cars to an astonishing suite of data analytics and visualizations for F1 fans.

The car design for the 2021 season was developed using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) project to simulate the aerodynamics of cars while racing, using 1,150 compute cores to run detailed simulations, and crunching more than 550 million data points that model the impact of one car’s aerodynamic wake on another. The project ran for six months using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) c5n instances and delivered performance equivalent to that of a supercomputer for a small fraction of the cost.

“This project with AWS was one of the most revolutionary in the history of Formula 1 aerodynamics,” said Pat Symonds, Chief Technical Officer of Formula 1. “Nobody designs a car to come in second, but for this CFD project we were looking at how cars perform in the wake of another, as opposed to running in clean air. We have been able to use AWS technologies to understand the incredible aerodynamic complexities associated with multi-car simulations.”

F1 is also using cloud computing to bring fans inside the racing experience in news ways through F1 Insights, which uses a suite of AWS services to analyze real-time data feeds – including data from sensors along with video from on-board cameras and audio from team radio – and analyze them for live broadcasts around the globe. These insights help fans understand the split-second decisions and race strategies made by drivers or teams that can dramatically affect a race outcome.