Oracle and Red Bull have maintained one of the most fruitful alliances in Formula 1 since 2022. The agreement should be so positive for both brands that this week they announced an extension and expansion of it, which will reinforce one of the most important technological collaborations on the grid. This partnership ranges from developing Red Bull Ford Powertrains’ new hybrid power unit in the cloud to deploying AI agents on the garage wall during Grands Prix.
To understand the magnitude of this digital integration, it is necessary to delve into the team’s work structure with the help of its main technical managers. Jack Harrington, director of technology and performance alliances at Oracle Red Bull Racing, explained his mission forcefully during the Spanish Grand Prix to a group of IT media, including Byte TI: “My role is essentially to try to use the partnerships we have with companies that provide us with products to improve the performance of our car or our business. It is my job to help weaponize the technology that our partners provide us to achieve a more competitive advantage on the track.”
It’s no longer just marketing
Formula 1 has undergone a radical metamorphosis in the last two decades. Until not many years ago, alliances were limited to the context of marketing and advertising. The emergence of the main technology companies has completely transformed the model. Now it’s still marketing, but above all, a lot of innovation. As Harrington noted, “our alliance with Oracle is a good example of this reality, and our relationship with them is the most integrated and best example of technological partnership in Formula 1. This is not an exaggeration. In fact, all the case studies we have are real, we have metrics that support what we do and, without them, we would not be able to operate as a team.”
This technical symbiosis is materialized through key figures such as Miles Jackson, an Oracle specialist integrated directly into the engineering department of Oracle Red Bull Racing. Jackson acts as a technical liaison to identify the team’s challenges and adapt the tools of the Oracle suite, translating processing capabilities into direct improvements to the car and the team’s operational efficiency.
From Monte Carlo simulations to our own engine
The story of this collaboration began in 2021 when Oracle joined as an innovation partner. In that first year, the team moved its pit stop strategy simulations to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Monte Carlo mathematical models. As Harrington himself explains, “instead of using them to simulate the behavior of a stock or stock, we used them to simulate when to make a pit stop.”
The resounding success of this project led Oracle to become a title sponsor in 2022, expanding its technology to the commercial and fan interaction area through CRM applications. However, the most audacious challenge came with Red Bull’s decision to design and manufacture its own engine for the 2026 regulations. The team leveraged the computing power of Oracle’s cloud to accelerate development of the Red Bull Ford Powertrains power unit without the need to build a traditional physical data center, allowing its engineers to scale simulation capacity in a record time of four years.
The Monza case study
Artificial Intelligence has already become the great competitive frontier of the Formula 1 championship. In this sense, the team has developed an AI-powered strategy agent that condenses sports regulations, technical regulations and records of past incidents within a language model (LLM) supported by autonomous agent workflows.
Harrington details that the goal of AI is not to replace humans, but to unleash their potential. As he stated, “what we are doing with Artificial Intelligence is empowering our engineers to do more things, more efficiently. We want to make sure we provide the data and tools to our engineers so they can focus on their specialty as human members of our team.”
To confirm the use case, the Oracle Red Bull Racing spokesperson gave an example that occurred during the Italian Grand Prix in Monza. In the middle of the race, Max Verstappen made an overtake in the first corner in which he was forced to go slightly outside the limits of the track. In a matter of 10 to 15 seconds, the AI tool analyzed the history of FIA decisions and regulations, recommending immediately returning the position to avoid a time penalty.
“We listened to the agent’s advice and told Max to give the position back,” Harrington says. “Max wasn’t very happy about it, but by returning the position immediately we were able to recover it later through a clean overtake on the track. He achieved a better result than if he hadn’t returned the position. That’s the level of confidence we have in these systems.” In addition to speeding up decisions, leaving regulation consultation in the hands of AI allows engineers to keep their eyes on the track, identifying safety risks such as yellow flags or analyzing telemetry in real time.
“NASA Control” in Milton Keynes and the virtual battle
The operation of a Grand Prix weekend involves the generation of a massive volume of data. F1 regulations limit the number of engineers deployed to the circuit to work on the car to 60. To overcome this restriction, Red Bull connects the track with its headquarters in Milton Keynes (United Kingdom).
“In Milton Keynes we have an operations room that looks like NASA control, where there are 60 other engineers analyzing live data. We can transfer data from Melbourne to our campus in 0.4 seconds,” reveals Harrington.
During free practice sessions, tire degradation data collected on the track is sent to both the operations center and the Oracle cloud. There, the strategy team led by engineer Hannah Schmitz runs advanced simulations. Thanks to OCI’s infrastructure, the team has increased the number of simulations executed by 25%, testing thousands of probable scenarios and evaluating risk levels through virtualization.
This precision in simulations has already led to races, where predictive models can indicate which is the best option to win a race.
The challenge of the budget limit and the human factor
Since the implementation of the budget limit (cost cap) set at around $215 million, the teams cannot solve their problems through unlimited spending. Harrington emphasizes that this restriction has reduced budgets almost in half compared to past times. In this new scenario, “the way you use your budget is as important as the way you design the car. Seeking efficiency through Oracle cloud technology or Artificial Intelligence gives us enormous performance benefits.”
Despite the latest generation technological deployment, at the heart of Red Bull Racing the last word still belongs to the human factor. When asked if algorithms can dictate perfect driving and outperform drivers on the track, Harrington concludes with a smile: “Max Verstappen is almost a machine in himself and would challenge any AI model to go faster than him on the line. The AI does not advise Max how to drive, but, for example, what is the most efficient way to manage the tires throughout the entire race distance to reach the finish as quickly as possible.”
