How Aston Martin’s Formula One Team Fueled Up Its IT Strategy

In the digital era, a well-tuned Formula One (F1) racing team needs talented drivers, machines that run at peak performance lap after lap, and ways to leverage and optimize data.

The Aston Martin Formula One (AMF1) team uses resources from Cognizant to help build up its IT infrastructure, transform for growth, as well as run simulations and use a digital twin powered by AI to deliver predictions during races that might give the team an edge on the track.

Finding Their Lane

British carmaker Aston Martin reemerged in the F1 scene in 2021, at first with the Aston Martin AMR21 racing car, after decades away from the sport. Getting sleek racers on the track was only part of the team’s long-term efforts, according to Mark Carter, chief enterprise architect with AMF1. Additional investment in IT, he says, was necessary for the team beyond just “keeping the lights on” in a support function. Furthermore, the team did not need to wrestle with technical debt while trying to reestablish its track presence.

“That doesn’t really make us agile and available really to drive as a business,” Carter says. “To be honest, we can’t transform the business if we have a lack of investment from an IT perspective.” Other challenges emerged, he says, such as what to do with the data being collected year after year. “How can we make that data more useful from a data insights perspective?” he asks. “How can we use things like AI and GenAI?”

Related:NFL IT Leader on How the League Uses AI, Data Analytics

AMF1 also considered upskilling its IT team, Carter says. “I think back then we were about 20 people in IT and a lot of that was contractors.” That meant the skills went with the contractors if they moved on. “For us, it’s really about skilling up the team and investing in people because it really drives that transformational journey,” he says.

There was also a need to be pragmatic about visibility into the solutions being used and costs, Carter says. “The more we can drive down some of those costs and consolidate those costs, the more money we can spend on the car.”

Technical Expertise

Initially Cognizant, also title sponsor of AMF1, came in to help with buildup and supplement the team’s IT strategy and skills, he says. “At that point in time … the service desk was lacking. Architecture didn’t exist. So how can you think about your data strategy? How can you think about where you want to go, how you want to use new technologies, if you don’t have an architecture?”

Work with Cognizant began even before the team got on the track, says David Ingham, Cognizant’s client partner for media, entertainment, and sports. “The first engagement we did, I think it was even before the season started in 2021, was create a roadmap,” he says. “We came in with a number of consultants from different functions, whether it was cloud, or data, or infrastructure applications and laid out saying, ‘What is the current state of the organization? Where do we see some deficiencies or immature capabilities for where they want to go?’”

Related:Driving the Innovation Cycle

Part of the work included a rebranding from what had been Racing Point F1 to Aston Martin, which brought internal and external changes, Ingham says. “They were going to double staff, double headcount within the team,” he says. “They were going to increase investment in the innovation center -- the new campus that’s open.” The rebranding and interest in Aston Martin also doubled the fan data the team had, Ingham says. “You had new data, new security, new GDPR or data privacy responsibilities that you didn’t have before.”

Furthermore, F1’s governing body -- the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile -- brought a cost cap, layering on the internal and external pressures on the team. “There were a lot of factors in that first year that we could contribute to.” Ingham says.

Working From the Ground Up

Related:NHL, Presidio, and a Transformation Power Move with Hybrid Cloud

The elements Cognizant brought to bear started with AMF1’s immediate needs and built from there. “One of the first things we did was provide help desk support and other people to keep the lights on,” he says, to make sure that technology trackside as well as in the factory or in the campus didn’t go down. That’s a core set of capabilities that Cognizant has.”

 As AMF1 matured its IT capabilities over the next few years, the team took more of that work in-house, Ingham says. “In the first year, though, we did work on other fan engagement, fan data projects, as well as cost cap data, data consolidation, and integration projects to help them meet short-term needs basically to fill skills gaps that they had just had to get done,” he says.

For Aston Martin, the partnership seems to be paying off from a tech perspective. “Our cloud strategy has definitely come to fruition,” Carter says. “The partnership has really enabled us to build out our hybrid cloud model in terms of on-prem and using Azure as our cloud provider.” Building up an infrastructure “landing zone” enabled AMF1 to migrate to a new headquarters -- more than 200 servers in six weeks.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do that without support from Cognizant,” he says. The help from Cognizant also granted AMF1 space to innovate and drive new proofs of concept, Carter says. “It’s really enabling us to scale our services … it’s really quickly enabling us to deploy new services, whether that’s on cloud or use that infrastructure on premise as well.”