Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1301602
My earliest memories of racing date back to when I was young, living in Middlesbrough, watching my Dad glued to the screen every time Formula 1 was on TV. It wasn't long before I was hooked, too, and desperately wanted to be an engineer in this beautiful world of sporting art and engineering excellence. After university, I had my first role in racecar design with Mike Pilbeam, the ex BRM F1 design chief, which kicked off my career with formula racing. The sport has changed a lot since my early days, but the one constant has always been the spirit of innovation built into everything we do. We are constantly innovating, all day, every day; it is a part of the DNA of an F1 engineer. The innovation lands across all areas of technology within F1, but it is also hugely important to understand the human element. It is the people—and their spirit of innovation—that are responsible for both fast racing cars and efficient organizations. As engineers, we have to have a very close relationship with our drivers. Like the machinery they drive, we must understand how to get the best out of them. The drivers are the ones executing their skills on the track, but we feel an immense responsibility both for their success and the success of the team, as well as for their safety. My first experiences with telemetry data in racing started in the mid-'90s, but data has never been more critical to the sport than it is today. With telemetry data collected from every car and on every track, F1 has been able to make massive improvements to make the sport more interesting for fans and safer for drivers. It is the very essence of data analytics that has led us as an organization to the 2022 rules, which we hope deliver a more exciting, a more engaging, and more insightful Formula 1. If I can play a small part in that journey of bringing a better Formula 1 to our fans with data, it will be a great honor. Therefore, after spending 11 years at Ferrari, five years as head of vehicle performance at Williams, and 25 years in total within the Formula 1 teams, I'm now working directly with F1 as their director of data systems. This has put me in close proximity to the work F1 is building on AWS, much of it leveraging their machine learning and AI in exciting new ways. Formula 1 and AWS both have problem-solving in their DNA. Amazon employs what they call a "working backwards model," which forces them to start with the customer and the problems they're solving for rather than trying to fit a use case or product somewhere it doesn't belong. I immediately identified with the engineers at AWS—they clearly get it, and they're invested in breaking new ground for their customers. We have a robust roadmap ahead of us, and I'm excited to see where this partnership evolves. But this work isn't just aspirational; it's active. We've already worked with AWS to develop F1 Insights; now in its second racing season, and among a number of other projects, we're improving vehicle design to increase wheel-to-wheel action, using advances in high performance computing. It's just the start. But we're excited to bring you along. Buckle up. Rob Smedley Director of Data Systems, Formula 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N | 3