When Formula 1 comes to town, a whole industry travels with it. Huge trucks arrive at each location, turning Transformers-style into temporary HQs for each team. This is the paddock, where celebrities hang out and Sky’s Ted Kravitz attempts to grab the latest gossip.
Tucked discreetly behind the paddock, attracting no attention at all, is F1’s Event Technical Centre (ETC), a suite of temporary rooms packed with screens, PCs and serious-looking people dressed in black. In terms of data, this is the ground zero of each race. Every single crackled conversation from the drivers to their engineers, every byte of information tracked by the dozens of sensors on each car, each of the multiple 4K video streams that eventually appear on our screens.
For while the coverage you see on TV is topped and tailed by the hundreds of broadcasters who beam races around the world, they rely on a single source: F1 itself. It has total control of the broadcasts, as if it was a TV production company as well as the organiser of the event. F1 also fully controls the technical services, from the timing that decides who wins and who loses to the bottomless pit of telemetry (rev counts, the steering angle, the G-forces) that viewers eventually see on their screens.
This process is managed by a comparatively small team that’s more akin to an SMB with a few hundred employees, rather than the global megabrand we think of when we imagine Formula 1. “We’re not a massive organisation,” said Pete Samara, director of innovation and digital technology at Formula 1, speaking on the Friday (practice day) before this year’s Silverstone race. “We’re effectively an SME, and efficiency is really important.”
At its most basic that means buying hardware that will keep working (“that we don’t need to switch on and off”) and a system that allows staff to order whatever they need to their job. “We’ve got engineers, editors, broadcast graphics operators, CAD designers that are 3D-forming this building. So all types of user profiles.”
For the past few years, F1 has chosen Lenovo as its hardware partner, and that partnership extends to its data centre. Or, strictly speaking, two data centres. We’ve
