Signpost: When data wins
the day in F1 racing

Formula One cars run on more than fuel. They run on information, and on the ability to turn that information into action in a split second. In fact, so much data is produced in a single race, that it cannot be stored by the vehicle itself, and has to be stored and processed by cloud computing.

“Every single race-winning decision that we’ve made since 2021 has been made on OCI (for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure),” says Jack Harrington, who manages the partnership between Oracle and Red Bull Racing. Four years into Oracle’s sponsorship of the team, OCI sits as deeply in Red Bull’s championship DNA as the chassis, tyres, and driver.

Harrington role is “to manage all of the technical partners that we have with the team, being those that provide us a product that we use to bring performance to the car on track or back at our wider business in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom.”

The partnership began in 2021. “Coincidentally, that was the year that Max Verstappen won his first world championship. So draw your own conclusions there.”

By 2022, Oracle had become title sponsor and the technical integration expanded.

“The first use case we had with Oracle were our strategy decisions,” said Harrington, speaking exclusively to Gadget during the recent Oracle AI World 2025 conference in Las Vegas. “Ultimately, the question was, when should we make a pit stop during a race? Nowadays, that relies on a lot of known data and unknown data, and we run our Monte Carlo simulations on the Oracle Cloud to help us make a live decision during a race as to when we should make that pit stop most efficiently.”

A Monte Carlo simulation, a mathematical analysis inspired by the chaos in casinos, uses statistical modelling to run millions of possible race scenarios, revealing the most probable outcomes and strategies.

“We run over 8-billion Monte Carlo simulations of the race ahead of us, even before arriving at track,” aid Harrington. “So if something happens during the race, we’ve likely seen it in the virtual world, so we can react to it very efficiently.”

Efficiency translates into championship points. Harrington recalled the Grand Prix race at Imola, Spain, in May. “There was a critical call to pit Max on his way to his victory there, and that was made through the simulations we ran before the race and during the race itself. The live degradation that was happening on the tyres was changing rapidly, and being able to adapt to that and make the right decision, which Max was confident in, ultimately led to the race result.”

Data defines the difference.

“We have 300-plus sensors on the car feeding two terabytes of data back post-session,” he says. “A lot of that data is related to tyre degradation curves and how we’re looking at the heat dissipation across the tyre itself. We can look at all that data live, introduce it into our simulation models and adapt to it.”

The speed of that loop determines success.

“We need to be able to process those simulations very quickly so that we can inform the driver and say, over the radio, ‘box, box, box’, and then actually come into the pit rather than drive past,” he says.

For Harrington, the partnership with Oracle goes beyond branding, and the team uses Oracle across the business.

“This is more than a sticker on the car. It’s the technology inside the car that we’re really showcasing. Our HR tools are all running on Oracle HCM. Our finance tools are all running on Oracle EPM. And our loyalty programme – the way that we connect with our fans – is running on Oracle CX solutions.

 “AT&T gives us our network connection, which allows us to get data back from Australia to our base in Milton Keynes in the blink of an eye. We have 60 engineers sat in a room in Milton Keynes live during a race – whatever time it is, 3am in the morning – making decisions about the setup and performance of that car live, using the data that’s coming from that track.”

He calls the Oracle alliance “a superpower”.

“They can advise us on where best to place their products, where our focus should be, what the performance benefits of using a certain AI tool should be.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge.