Name: Lifting the lid: The cutting-edge tech fueling F1 success
Uploaded: 2025-10-19T18:02:20.000Z
Duration: 15 min 7 s
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Technology and innovation is what Formula one is all about.

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Formula one is probably the largest team engineering competition in the world.

We are much more focused on data now than we were in the past.

Technology, full stop in our world, is the bedrock of everything that we do in F1 racing.

Technology and innovation have always been key to a successful season, and

the engineers are some of the best in the business.

Their job, to build a car that pushes the limit, a perfect combination of speed and performance.

I think Formula one is all about performance and it's performance which drives success on the racetrack.

So we as engineers are always focused on how can we get the quickest car.

And to achieve that requires a very innovative approach.

The main ingredients are the chassis, the power unit, the driver, and the understanding of the tyres.

And without all four of them operating at a very high level, it's very difficult to have real success.

Getting that combination just right is what every engineer in F1 strives for.

But just how much time does it take to design the perfect car?

There's different approaches to designing a Formula one car.

Either you take the base of what was your previous year's car and you carry that over, or you're going for a completely conceptual change to unlock more performance.

In both cases, there's still lot of work that goes into physically building the car.

In the winter season, about 30% of my time is spent on technology.

What are we going to do that makes a difference up and down the pit lane?

How are we going to differentiate ourselves relative to none other teams that are wanting to be successful as well?

How do we carve out enough time with an organization that we're not just doing the same thing over and over, but

we automate and improve that in the future?

As one of the newest team principals to arrive on the grid, Vals has high hopes for the next few years.

What I'm doing is creating technologies and infrastructure that allow us not to produce a good car in 24, but

allow us to produce a good car in 20, 26, 27, 28.

In our world, we normally think about one race in the future, not three years in the future.

But it's really important to see, set that right timeline out.

What we're fixing can't be fixed overnight.

And you can, but you'll shortcut it and regret it because you'll fall over again in the future.

The design and build of an F1 car is a labor of love and a bespoke process for each of the 10 teams.

You get to trial something, you get to see if it works at the racetrack.

If it doesn't, you go away, you redesign, you re engineer it, you take it back to the racetrack two weeks later, and

And if that is the case, it's how we improve the performance of the car, whether that's race by race or year on year.

And I think that environment is what really breeds the innovation that we see.

While it's exciting to finally see the car on the circuit, most of the work happens well before race day.

If you're a fan, then what you see is what you get on the television.

We iterate a lot at the top end of our concept, which in aerodynamics, and

we use something called cfd, and that, in effect, is a digital wind tunnel.

What that allows us to do is to iterate different concepts without actually physically having to build the car.

Once we think we've found a design that is performant, we then build a 60% version of that, and

And that gives us the first indication of how is this thing actually going to physically perform on track as it goes through that process.

We'll then do a number of simulations against the tracks that are upcoming for each of the races.

And we'll also give that setup to our drivers in the loop simulator so the drivers can get an early digital feel of what the car and the setup may feel like when it gets to the track.

And then, of course, it goes through our manufacturing process.

We build the car, and then we deploy it to an event.

In 2009, F1 banned private road testing outside of race weekends, so teams have learned to rely heavily on data and simulators to do most of the work.

There's a lot of things that you analyze or work on before you even get to the racetrack, including, of course, spending time on the simulator as well, you know, to really try and optimize the car as soon as it hits the ground.

The difference is this a car now, when you build it and bring it together so 20,000 different components, you can build it in a week.

And it all fits together perfectly because it's been designed.

Everything in a digital world, 20 years ago, you'd build it and a wishbone would be going through a piece of bodyworks.

Then you find an axle in the wrong place.

Digital systems are the only way of doing something as complex as building a Formula One car.

And then developing the Formula One car race on race in 2021.

FIA put limits on how much a team can spend on their car throughout the season.

These cost caps are designed to level the playing field for all 10 teams.

Cost cap has meant a significant step in terms of sustainability from the financial point of view.

We want to make sure that the gaps between the top team and the small team can be reduced.

And this is the only way to make sure that this is possible.

Teams will have to operate within $135 million every year.

So that includes the driver salaries, includes the top three senior management team members, includes marketing staff, includes some of the travel expenses.

Actually, the number is significantly bigger and they are looking at changing their budget cap to incorporate more but raise the actual cost of that.

I have the advantage to come from a small team and to be now at Ferrari.

And I saw both sides of this and on both sides the cost cap was positive.

When you are in a small team, it's much easier, I think today to find sponsorship because you can argue that you will fight with the same resources.

And when you are a top team, you can be profitable or at least to be balanced.

The entire spread of the field right now is less than 3% and that's the smallest it's ever been.

And you have the team that's in 10th place who can get into the final round of qualifying.

That's nothing that you have historically seen.

We are simply having to invest so much into the organization.

But I can see light to the end of the tunnel, which wouldn't have been the case without a cost cap.

But there's also some bad elements to the cost cap.

There's an operational side and OPEX side.

There's a capital expenditure side which is 36 million across four years.

And the downside of that is what it means is I don't have the facilities in Williams that we need today.

We're spending as much money as we can to get ourselves up to the right level, but

What the latest set of regulations have done is forced us to be able to change how we look at innovation.

It used to be that we could be very innovative in fields which are right at the frontier and we could afford to take maybe quite a major risk in terms of are we going to get a performance benefit from this?

Now, with the advent of cost cap and the latest set of regulations, we have to be very mindful of the cost and we also need to focus very much on efficiency to succeed in Formula One.

It's all about teamwork, relying on everyone from the drivers and engineers to the suppliers and broader team to create the perfect car.

Another piece of the puzzle is leaning on technology and partnerships to help get there.

We recently announced an expansion with our partnership with Google and we've been using their technology throughout the team and that's definitely been giving us a competitive edge.

We're using some of their off the shelf AI capabilities to really start to challenge some of our inefficiencies and our processes to go, how do we do this better for cheaper and how do we do this ultimately with less people and deploy some of that knowledge and skill set elsewhere where it's perhaps more valued rather than on a manual task.

A good example of the work we do with Google and how they're supporting on our performance is around pit stops.

In 2023, at the Qatar Grand Prix, we achieved the world record at 1.8 seconds.

And the way in which we do that is obviously a lot of hard work, a lot of practice, but

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Lifting the lid: The cutting-edge tech fueling F1 success

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