AT&T provided flights from Washington, DC, to Las Vegas and accommodation so Ars could attend the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
LAS VEGAS—A Formula 1 car runs on soon-to-be-synthetic gasoline, but an F1 team runs on data. It’s always been an engineering-driven sport, and while you can make decisions based on a hunch, the kinds of people who become good engineers prefer something a little more convincing. And the volumes of data just continue to get bigger and bigger each season. A few years ago we spoke to Red Bull Racing about how it stayed on top of the task, but a lot has changed in F1 since 2017, as we found out at this year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
It’s hugely popular now, for one thing, even in the United States: a 200 mph soap opera now with 24 episodes a season. Superficially the cars look the same—exposed wheels, front and rear wings, the driver in between some side pods. And the hybrid powertrains that make the cars move are still the same format: 1.6 L turbocharged V6 engines that recover energy from the rear wheels under braking as well as the turbine as it gets spun by hot exhaust gases.
But the cars are actually fundamentally different, particularly the way they generate their aerodynamic grip mostly via ground effect generated by the specially sculpted underside of their floors rather than the front and rear wings. A bigger change lurks in everyone’s accounts. The days where teams were free to spend as much money as they could find are gone.
“We have $140 million to develop the full car and that’s between all the partners; all the products we use with AT&T are part of this cost cap. So that’s why we have to make sure we don’t use too much,” explained Morgan Maia, senior partnerships manager with Oracle Red Bull Racing. The telecoms company has worked with Red Bull for more than a decade but has expanded that role in recent years, linking the garage with a command center at its factory in the UK that lets it bring many more minds to bear on any particular problem than those of the 60 people each team is allowed to bring to each race.