Major agreement between F1 and Amazon

Since the arrival of Liberty Media a year and a half ago, F1 has clearly shifted towards the digital era, with numerous investments in content production, notably through a partnership with Netflix, as well as the creation of the first eSports championship and live content broadcasting on Twitter.

But the agreement with Amazon announced this weekend, as part of the Austrian Grand Prix, primarily concerns the technical architecture of the discipline. Indeed, it plans to use the cloud services developed by the American giant. All of the discipline’s data will now be hosted in Amazon‘s databases.

Beyond simply hosting data, there is going to be a real enhancement and increase in added value, as the stored data will feed into the calculation tools developed by Amazon. An example of such use is informing viewers about the ideal windows for tire changes. It will also be possible to determine if a driver has pushed their car to its limits during a session or if they were more in economy mode.

The impact of the partnership will also be felt by the teams in the coming years as Liberty Media intends to use Amazon’s supercomputers to better define future technical regulations, as explained by Pete Samara, the director of innovation and digital technology for F1: “We are very excited that our Formula 1 division will be able to use the high-performance workloads of AWS (Amazon Web Services) computers. This will greatly increase the quantity and quality of simulations that our aerodynamics team will be able to implement as we are working on developing the new regulations for car design in Formula 1.”

It’s a clear transition from the previous mode of operation where new directives were implemented in the hope that they would lead to the desired effects. Let’s hope this will provide real spectacle on track and avoid the incessant changes in technical regulations, one way or another.

With the participation of www.racingbusiness.fr

Special Correspondent in Austria