Formula One Sim Racing is the high-octane esports series which closely mirrors the real thing. The same 10 teams battle to win the World Championship title, practising, qualifying and racing on virtual tracks which exactly replicate their physical counterparts. Speed is everything.
As with Formula One itself, peak performance relies on team strategy, driver skill and an optimal car setup – and deep data analysis is increasingly driving the competitive advantage in these essential areas.
In the real-world sport, Aston Martin Formula One and Cognizant are working together to harness petabytes of data for faster decision making, when every millisecond counts. On the virtual track, we are also partnering with the Aston Martin Aramco Esports Team (AMF1 Esports) on a data-driven approach to fuelling success.
The challenge
The 2023-24 Formula One Sim Racing championship saw 20 drivers compete over 12 rounds, livestreamed on YouTube. For next season, the AMF1 Esports Team wanted a better understanding of which setups and tactics will empower their drivers to go faster.
Team Manager Miguel Faisca and his colleagues are highly experienced and have a strong intuition for what works best, but the fast and furious nature of Formula One Sim Racing means that it’s impossible to keep track of every scenario – or to effectively harness the data which pours out of every test, practice and race. Virtual races typically involve more drivers and track sessions, which creates more useful data but also adds to the complexity of capturing it. Until now, pulling and analysing the data has been a laborious manual process, which limited the team to looking at stats in isolation, for example being able to compare data from two specific laps at most.
Design and development
As the main Formula One team’s partner in developing data-driven solutions for the competitive edge, Cognizant was ideally positioned to build a customised data tool for the AMF1 Esports Team, with our Lithuania-Poland digital engineering studio taking ownership to execute its core offering – product led engineering, fully partnering in the customer’s journey from ideation to implementation at scale. The first stage was to talk in depth to Miguel and the drivers about what shapes their race strategies and what insights would support them to make better, faster decisions.
We then produced rapid prototypes to verify and validate our ideas; we were thinking outside the box to deliver the right information in the most accessible way. This wasn’t about designing first, building later. We constantly demonstrated functionality to Miguel and the team throughout the development process, so that we could all see what worked best and refine the tool accordingly. This was a rapid build/measure/learn cycle, at a speed matching that of F1’s.
The tool: precision analysis
Our tool uploads all data for immediate analysis after a race, practice or test, empowering the team to compare the drivers’ timings in defined areas - or sectors - of the track, over multiple laps. Standout functionality enables the team to subdivide the sectors as precisely as they want, expanding to include several corners or zooming into a single corner or part of a corner. This pinpoints exactly where drivers gain or lose speed and the results can be compared against the data from other racetracks.
