How Formula One works with AWS to drive data insights

Proof of concepts deployed at live events

From an IT management perspective, Kirk says: “Every race is different. New new features and new products are being released at every race. We’re always looking ahead to the next event. It’s very constant.”

While the sport has a break during the summer, it is a busy time for the teams to build out new performance improvements on the cars. For Kirk and the team at Formula One focused on the digital and fan experience, it is when they spend time developing a lot of new features.

As Kirk notes, there is also a lot of optimisation of the back-end infrastructure. “We have races during the year, so the more sensitive changes we make are deployed throughout the summer break.”

The updates tend to be tweaks or new graphics, such as AWS Insights, which was released earlier this year. This, according to AWS, uses distinct data points to inform each insight. F1 enables fans to understand how drivers make split-second decisions and how teams devise and implement race strategies in real time that impact the outcome of a race.

“It is all about expanding the product to give the fans,” says Kirk. “There are more stories to tell and we want to create a richer viewer experience for the end user, whether that is on our digital domain, or what is broadcast to your home.”

Among the challenges Formula One faces is that prototypes and proof of concepts can only truly be tested during live racing events.”Testing them during an event allows us to see what value they bring.”

Kirk says that there is a regimented testing procedure, but, as he points out: “Unfortunately, you can never simulate real life and we have to leverage race events, especially from a data perspective.”

What this means in practice is that the internal team previews the new functionality during the live race event where it is being tested. But the new functionality is not made available to broadcasters or fans.

“We can validate the data and validate the output. And then if we get all the ticks, we go forward for launch,” Kirk says.

After going live, the new functionality migrates to a maintenance phase. The project team then goes back to the start, identifying new priorities and cycling through the work to get the new functionality live.

The role of AI

AI has been among the themes has featured in the work AWS has brought to Formula One this year. AWS’s Ralph says: “Typically, we want to help remove the cognitive load from the F1 broadcast team, to allow them to do the fantastic job they do putting on a great television show.”

He says that AI is used to help broadcasters navigate the historic data repository of historic facts and statistics without having to write complex SQL database queries. Instead, he says, they are able to ask natural language questions with a chatbot that then queries the databases.

When something does go wrong, there tends to be plenty of conversations. Kirk says that details sometimes gets missed, which is where generative AI can help. “The time to resolution should significantly come down,” he says. “The tests have been extremely positive and it’s using AI, which is super cool.”

As AWS’ Ralph said earlier, the work with Formula One enables the public cloud provider to showcase its technology. “I think one of the reasons AWS has these partnerships with the likes of Formula One is because sport is a language that transcends industry sectors,” he says.

“So when we demonstrate the use of AWS technology in an environment like Formula One and hundreds of millions of people around the world watch, some may be intrigued by the use of that technology and look further into how it relates to their own businesses.”

For instance, real-time data insights are something that can be applied in many businesses. “Observing how Formula One does it can sometimes inspire companies to look at how they can do real-time data insights, leveraging high performance compute on AWS,” Ralph adds.

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