The world championship-winning F1 team Red Bull Racing has expanded its Oracle partnership, using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for vital insights such as real-time race simulations.
In addition to strategy, the partnership will apply Oracle Cloud technologies across Red Bull Racing’s operations, helping the team optimize engine development, enhance training for up-and-coming drivers using AI and machine learning, and engage with fans in new ways.
Oracle and Red Bull Racing enhanced their partnership for the 2022 season, including use of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for analytics-backed race strategy. “Oracle Cloud enabled us to make race-day decisions that helped Max Verstappen win the 2021 Drivers’ Championship,” says Christian Horner, Oracle Red Bull Racing team principal and CEO.
During its championship season, the team’s engineers used OCI to run billions of computer simulations to prepare their race strategies and to help them make real-time decisions during the races, such as when to make a pit stop to change tires. In 2022 OCI will let Oracle Red Bull Racing cost effectively run more simulations faster, and expand the variety of data the team can model and analyze.
The 2022 season also brings a new car design and regulation changes for all F1 teams, changes meant to allow for more passing and more exciting races. Teams will need to quickly learn a lot about how the new cars perform and factor that into their strategies, a challenge that OCI-powered computer simulations will support on race day and in the preparations before it. “Always in the end, this comes down to a human being making a decision, but that decision gets informed with more accurate data,” says Guillaume Cattelani, chief engineer of technology and analysis tools for Oracle Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Technology. “So, becoming a master at modeling and execution in real time is an advantage.”
The partnership between Oracle and Red Bull Racing will let race strategists and engineers assess a greater variety and volume of data even faster. By containerizing the team’s simulation application and running it on OCI’s Arm-based virtual servers, the team last year accelerated simulation processing speeds by 10X, giving race strategists more time to make the right call. The team also increased the number of strategy simulations it could run by 1,000X compared with on-premises systems used in the past. Meantime, OCI significantly reduced the cost of those simulations, enabling the team to improve performance on the track while keeping within F1’s stringent spending regulations. “Discovering and reacting to opportunities quickly is crucial to our success on and off the track, and Oracle is integral in that effort,” Horner says.
The partnership will also expand the use of technology to build a closer connection with fans. Oracle and Red Bull Racing last season launched The Red Bull Racing Paddock, a loyalty platform that drove a 9X increase in membership sign-ups. Powered by Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement and OCI, The Paddock provides a direct line of communication between fans and the team, letting fans last season submit thousands of questions to the team and redeem 35,000 digital rewards. Additions in 2022 include the ability for fans to create user-generated content and personalize the information they receive to suit their interests.
