Amazon’s cloud computing resources helped F1 overhaul the design of the cars in 2022. Barry Collins examines whether it really made the sport a better spectacle

How do you make F1 more exciting?

British media personality 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.With this in mind, 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 commentator voices 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.

Ahead of this summer’s British Grand Prix, 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 had a 50/50 chance of dying over the course of their career. At the same time, fans aren’t shy about reaching for the remote when races are boring. “Trying to get the potential of an overtake, or the actual overtake itself... creates the excitement that we all want,” said Neil Ashton. “If we go back maybe a couple of years to the prior generation of racing cars, I think it was definitely the case that there was a lack of overtaking, and that was certainly reflected by the fans.”