How do you make F1 more exciting? Danny Baker had the brilliant idea of making drivers do the first lap on foot, but that’s unlikely to go down well with Lewis Hamilton and co. Instead, ahead of the 2022 season, the F1 authorities decided to use the power of cloud computing to make races more competitive.
Nobody wants to spend two hours of their Sunday afternoon watching cars file round a track in a procession – least of all the millions of fans drawn in by the deftly edited highlights shown in Netflix’s Drive to Survive. So, Formula One decided to change the rules, to enforce modifications to the design of the cars that would make it easier to overtake, inducing more of those moments that make Martin Brundle’s voice shoot up an octave.
F1’s engineers and experts had a good idea about what modifications would result in more overtaking, but they needed the evidence to prove it. Testing is wildly expensive and terrible for the environment; wind tunnels are limited in size and scope, especially when you’re measuring the impact on overtaking, a test that necessarily requires two cars. Instead, F1 turned to its partners at cloud computing giant AWS to see if software simulations could provide the answers.
I met with Dr Neil Ashton, principal computational fluid dynamics architect at AWS, and Formula 1 pit lane legend and former Ferrari race engineer, Rob Smedley – now an F1 consultant working alongside AWS – to find out how F1 leaned on cloud computing to design the 2022 car, and whether it worked.
Let them race
F1 often finds itself in a dilemma. The safety of the sport has improved vastly since the days when drivers such as Jackie Stewart
