AUSTIN, Texas – Formula 1 (F1) racing is riding a Netflix-fueled high of reality show-like popularity, but behind-the-scenes is a complex technological reality that sponsors and partners are using to help power next-generation enterprise opportunities.

This reality was showcased at the United States Grand Prix held just outside of Austin, Texas, where Cisco and the McLaren F1 team provided access to their race weekend technical operations.

McLaren is currently one of the top teams in Formula 1, leading the series’ constructor championship rankings and having its two drivers near the top in the driver standings. The team operates under the race series’ $140 million annual budget cap and employs around 1,200 people, including 40 in IT-specific roles.

Ed Green, who recently joined Cisco as its head of sponsorship technology after having spent four years in technical roles at McLaren, explained that each of McLaren F1 team’s two vehicles are coated with 300 sensors that feed into an on-board edge processing unit. That data, along with 4K-quality video streams from 20 on-board cameras, is relayed through a 2 Mb/s connection across a low-latency track-wide Wi-Fi network that was developed by Formula 1 back to a mobile data center unit in the back of the team garage.

Green said that these sensors and camera result in more than 250 million data points of information taking up 1.5 terabytes of storage from each vehicle is transmitted over a race weekend.

This data is stored and processed by a pair of on-premises 38u racks packed with radios, routing, switching, six physical hosts, and 140 terabytes of storage from the McLaren’s team’s various sponsors. That data is then beamed back in real time to McLaren’s headquarters in Woking, England, using a 100 Mb/s MPLS connection.

Race engineers and mechanics on sight at each event are backed by more than 30 engineers stationed in Woking, working in what Green described as a “calm, air conditioned” environment to help with monitoring each race car. The integrity of that data being transmitted is critical as Green noted any one of those engineers in Woking can call for a car to be directed into the pit or retired based on the information they are receiving.

Green noted that “obviously, latency is bad,” but “consistent latency means you can start to model and understand what’s going on.”

Cisco’s F1 connection growing with AI The F1 series currently includes 24 races across the globe, which requires each team to transport their own portable data centers from event to event. Green explained that McLaren’s IT team arrives to most locations a few days before the vehicles hit the track, which provides them with a bit of time to get their technology up and running.

Green specifically pointed to the McLaren teams use of Cisco’s Webex, Splunk, and ThousandEyes products, which allow for a unified and standardized collaboration, monitoring, and viewing platform across different environments.

McLaren has “got to be able to run and manage that system to deal with the challenges that come up in a weekend,” Green said. “If that platform is uniform and together and the policies link, you can easily add a switch into Splunk, or you can target a telemetry end quote from ThousandEyes and it all shows up in one place, that starts to give you that confidence to know what's happening.”

McLaren is also eyeing ways to integrate Cisco’s growing artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions. This includes a unique use case of using AI to help delineate between real and “coded” words that rival drivers exchange with their teams.

“You can radio between the pit wall and the driver and it’s open to all teams, inside the team it’s encrypted and what you end up with is if you said to the driver, ‘hey, how are your tires doing?’ Or you said, ‘hey, tell me about the tires,’ one of those commands, because everyone else is listening, is for real information, and one of those commands is for fake information. What you’re trying to do is dupe the competition into thinking that your tires are lasting or not lasting, and everyone’s doing the same thing.” Green explained, adding that when he was at McLaren they had a “team of volunteers that will transcribe radio on race day, about 10 people. Could you use AI to do speech-to-text? Most certainly, that's kind of simple. Then you look at could you do sentiment? Could you just give it a last-minute worth of information bits and learn what is said on the radio? It's taking these AI concepts and looking at them a little bit differently.”

Green did add that there is not a lot of direct AI use today, but that he expects it to start helping teams with patching and maintenance.

“Then that frees up engineers to help support the team in building out AI acceleration clusters and stress test clusters,” Green said. “From our point of view AI is an additive thing and not a replacement thing. And if it's there helping people take care of the long sequences, I think that's real transformation.”

Does this help Cisco outside of the track? Cisco’s work with McLaren also allows it to test equipment and services in stressful situations, which can then help prove performance for other environments. That can then feed into how that equipment might work in other enterprise verticals.

“In Singapore a few weeks ago, you're up at 90% humidity [and high temperatures], and more often than not you look at the switches and they're well above the standard operating ranges,” Green said, adding that McLaren has “proved at this point this kit is pretty resilient, and it gets bumped and shocked and pushed around, and it can survive it. I wouldn't encourage people to do it, but it's really exciting for us to know if that stuff works and that we can give the team's feedback on how we use out it out in the field.”

This can also help with broader integration and customer support challenges that are more common outside of a controlled sport-sponsorship relationship. Green pointed to McLaren’s initial F1 work with Splunk that pre-dated its Cisco sponsorship, and how Cisco is now able to use learnings from that integration through the McLaren sponsorship to help with those other enterprise opportunities.

“Sometimes our technology wouldn't always all integrate with each other as simply as you'd like as a customer, but now that's the sort of drive and commitment,” Green said. “They want these products to come together and have these moments where they all work simply together.”

Cisco covered travel and accommodation expenses for this event.

This story has been updated/corrected to change Ed Green’s title and to make it more clear about whether he was speaking collectively when he was at his former position at McLaren or at his current position at Cisco.