Besides helping to optimise the performance of cars and drivers, technology is also being used by F1 teams to enhance fan engagement and support their sustainability efforts.
Oracle Red Bull Racing, for instance, uses Oracle Cloud CX as the foundation of its fan engagement platform, The Paddock, to better understand and engage with its fanbase. The platform combines several customer experience solutions to understand each fan’s preferences, automate personalised communications, and manage hospitality communications to individual fans, partners and the media.
“The implementation of the platform has allowed Oracle Red Bull Racing to test new engagement strategies and personalise their digital touchpoints for all fans,” says Oracle’s Chelliah.
As a result, The Paddock saw a 950% increase in members globally from its launch in 2021 to the end of last year’s F1 season. It also opened a direct communication route between fans and the team, with over 5,500 questions asked directly through the question-and-answer portal, along with other forms of engagement like collection of loyalty points and signed cards by drivers.
Similarly, the McLaren F1 Team is leveraging technology to better connect with its loyal and passionate fans.
“The McLaren F1 Team is supercharging fan engagement through Alteryx’s geospatial capability as well as automated behavioural and sentiment analysis throughout the race calendar,” says Alteryx’s Madgwick.
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For example, its marketing teams can create new engagement opportunities by correlating fan and lifestyle partner location data.
“If a lifestyle partner has a location in a city which happens to be near where many of our fans are based, we may decide to hold an event at that facility. It is meaningful to be able to innovate and bring our fans closer to the sport,” explains Dan Keyworth, director of business technology at McLaren Racing.
F1 revealed in 2019 that about 256,000 tonnes of CO2 are emitted each F1 season. With climate change becoming a serious issue, the sport has committed to becoming net carbon zero by 2030.
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In light of that, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team has established goals to minimise its impact in every corner of its business and supply chain.
Pure Storage is helping the team with that as its storage solutions are engineered to do more with less impact, enabling the team to decouple data growth and innovation from its energy consumption.
“Pure Storage’s solutions offer up to 80% reduction in direct carbon usage versus competitive all-flash systems, and more power and capacity in a smaller data centre footprint. The smaller footprint has been especially helpful for Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team. With a smaller storage kit, engineers will be able to build more spare parts for the car to improve its design and performance,” says Pure Storage’s Oostveen.
