AWS for M&E Blog

F1 revs up race day broadcasts with real-time data storytelling

Enhanced story identification enables production team to create a more immersive fan experience.

On a FORMULA 1® (F1) race day, the broadcast control room is pressure-packed as production personnel seek to keep pace with all the action on the track and behind the wheel to relay impactful stories to viewers around the world. On track, 20 elite drivers pilot their high-performance vehicles around hairpin turns and reach speeds of up to 230mph, with the goal of reaching the top of the podium. For those attending an F1 Grand Prix, this all delivers an adrenaline-fueled, full body experience, something that is tough to replicate off the track.

For viewers at home, the F1 broadcast team tracks roughly 90 minutes of race activity spanning hundreds of miles, then distributes it to audiences in real time to create a compelling viewing experience. Track Pulse, F1’s latest collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), helps the F1 broadcast team gain a clearer, more comprehensive picture of on-track action at any moment including live driver battles, championship predictions, top speeds, and new fastest sectors and laps. The team can use these live updates to determine which elements to highlight for viewers and the right information to bring the story to life while predicting what’s around the corner to anticipate and accelerate race day storytelling.

According to Dean Locke, Director of Broadcast & Media at F1, Track Pulse is instrumental to his team’s work. He explained, “Covering F1 is tricky; it’s very complex and there are multiple things happening simultaneously over a large expanse of real estate. It is really difficult to get all that information over to fans without bombarding them. Track Pulse allows us to take fans on a journey with data and graphics in a way that feels intuitive.”

Embracing a culture of innovation

For many years, F1 broadcasts have leveraged data to deliver more compelling and immersive fan experiences. Since kicking off a cloud-based technology transformation with AWS in 2018, the organization doubled down on the partnership in 2022 with a shared focus to drive technological innovation and improve how fans engage with the sport.

Today, every F1 vehicle sports 300 sensors, generating 1.1M telemetry data points per second while on track. This data, along with more than 70 years of historic F1 data stored in the cloud, fuels F1 Insights, powered by AWS. These insights give fans a new perspective before, during, and after each race, and help them understand how drivers make split-second decisions, the real-time outcomes of those decisions, and other aspects of the sport.

To appropriately leverage data during F1 coverage, however, broadcast teams must parse through a tremendous amount of incoming information while keeping up with the latest on-track action, which is no small feat. Combining the wealth of F1 data and data analytics services from AWS in a streamlined interface, Track Pulse supercharges the F1 broadcast production team’s ability to rapidly craft narratives for 750 million F1 fans worldwide.

“There are tangible benefits with Track Pulse; it takes the heavy lifting out of data-driven storytelling,” Locke shared. “To properly cover F1, you have to be part storyteller, part F1 strategist, and it’s often hard to find someone who can do both, so enabling them to have all the information at their fingertips is quite valuable. Track Pulse allows us to harness all of our available data, as well as analytics that AWS enables, to create more exciting stories for fans.”

Recognizing opportunity to elevate the fan experience

As part of its longstanding partnership, AWS proactively evaluates areas where F1 can raise the bar through technology. Track Pulse originated after a team from AWS shadowed the F1 broadcast team during the 2022 Belgian Grand Prix weekend to better understand the complexities involved in producing F1’s worldwide broadcast.

AWS identified opportunities to deliver an improved fan experience by consolidating the visualization of a vast number of data sources in order to identify stories unfolding on track. AWS worked backwards from an improved F1 fan experience to envision Track Pulse, identifying and predicting moments in real time with supporting data and visualizations that simplify story identification and give production teams the information they need to bring every moment to life.

Figure 1: Close-up view of Track Pulse interface.

Under the hood of Track Pulse

Designed to augment the capabilities of F1’s production team, Track Pulse provides authenticated users with an easy-to-navigate storytelling tool that consolidates various data sources and insights into a unified experience. Users can scan stories and select those of interest to view more detail. Each story is updated in real time and prioritized based on relevance. They provide supporting data that gives meaning to the “why” behind each story, such as differing tire strategies or new trends in sector performance.

By surfacing the right data for each story, production teams now have the information they need to time the story at the highest impact moment and create graphics packages that provide fans with meaningful insight. Production teams can also use Track Pulse to monitor unfolding stories and anticipate which narratives to feature throughout the broadcast.

Track Pulse must keep up with race pace to deliver in real time. To make this possible, AWS worked with F1 to identify the right combination of services for each component. The tool is built on a serverless architecture, utilizing key services like AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets the team focus on building their application without managing servers. At the core of the system, a dedicated AWS Fargate container operates throughout the session, seamlessly consuming and processing data in real time. This dynamic engine responds to event changes, crafting engaging stories as they unfold.

The data journey begins with another Fargate container, which ingests and publishes data for consumption. As the action unfolds, crucial timing details and stories find their home in Amazon DynamoDB. This serverless, fully managed NoSQL database solution delivers consistent high performance, reliability, and scalability, ensuring the system can handle unlimited throughput and storage demands with consistent efficiency.

AWS AppSync connects with AWS Lambda for real-time data synchronization and processes data with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which provides fully managed message queuing for distributed systems and serverless applications. These services work together to transform the data collected from the track into meaningful and sequential information as it unfolds. Finally, Track Pulse pushes packaged stories to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for centralized storage, then delivers them to the broadcast team via the web-based user interface with Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) that delivers content to end users with low latency and high transfer speeds.

Extending access to real-time insights

Track Pulse has already changed the game for F1 broadcasting by transforming tedious, manual operations into one where key race insights are pushed to the production team in a consolidated, easy to understand view.

Locke concluded, “F1 is the greatest racing spectacle on the planet and AWS has enabled us to be pioneering with our coverage, despite being in a new place each week, with 24 events per year on different continents. Successful partnership is about combining expertise from both sides to push forward. Together with AWS, we’re able to experiment and iterate, and ultimately build products that benefit our fans.”

In 2025, F1’s broadcast partners will be able to take advantage of the tool in their commentary and production, with an intention to make Track Pulse available in F1 TV at some point during the year. Additionally, as the Track Pulse development team evolves the tool, they’re looking to incorporate new features with generative artificial intelligence (AI) that further enhance the fan experience. With a strong foundation in place, there’s no telling how far Track Pulse will be able to help advance data-driven storytelling for F1. 

Learn more about AWS services and solutions for creating data insights and delivering standout broadcasts, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.

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Michael Aghataher

Michael Aghataher

Michael Aghataher is Global Partnership and Innovation Lead for Motorsports at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he spearheads strategic partnerships and drives technological innovation for F1 and Ferrari. With decades of experience, he has been leading strategic partnerships in technology companies throughout his career.