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AWS and Formula 1 Announce New Racing Performance Stats for 2020 Season

First of seven real-time racing statistics to debut at Australia Grand Prix, giving fans more insight into the action on the track with combined driver, race team, and vehicle performance

AWS and Formula 1 Announce New Racing Performance Stats for 2020 Season

First of seven real-time racing statistics to debut at Australia Grand Prix, giving fans more insight into the action on the track with combined driver, race team, and vehicle performance

SEATTLE – March 13, 2020 - Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Formula One Group (F1) (NASDAQ: FWONA, FWONK) are introducing seven new, real-time racing statistics for the 2020 season. The new F1 Insights are powered by AWS and will debut throughout the season, beginning with the launch of a “Car Performance Rating” at the first F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne, Australia. These new stats are the latest in AWS’s ongoing work with F1 to unlock new ways of engaging fans through advanced analytics, helping one of the world’s most data-driven sports organizations continue to innovate. Learn more at: aws.com/f1.

Debuting Sunday, the new “Car Performance Rating” insight will be displayed as an on-screen graphic, providing fans with a breakdown of an individual car’s total performance according to seven core metrics, and illustrate how those metrics compare from one car to another, enabling race fans to gauge a given car’s relative performance in those different areas and see where each team and driver is leading the pack or losing crucial time to their rivals. As the season unfolds, F1 will roll out additional metrics and on-screen graphics, offering race fans more insights into the action on the track and behind the pit wall.

Formula 1 is a data-driven sport – each car is equipped with 120 sensors that generate more than 1,500 individual pieces of race information per second. AWS currently powers three F1 Insights, and these seven additional statistics will further bring fans closer than ever to the action on the racetrack. The new 2020 statistics will include a range of car performance, driver skills, and cornering performance metrics, as well as predictions on race and qualification results. Using AWS’s proven experience, breadth and depth of services, and unmatched performance, F1 will introduce the following new “F1 Insights powered by AWS” in the 2020 season:

  • Car Performance Rating: This insight isolates an individual car’s performance and allows race fans to compare its performance to that of different vehicles head-to-head. Debuts March 15 in Australia.
  • Driver Skills Rating: This statistic breaks down and scores driver skills, based on the most important factors for overall performance, to help identify the best “total driver” on the track. Calculating varying subsets of qualifying, starts, race pace, tire management, and overtaking/defending styles, the insight will provide an overall driver ranking. Debuts April 5 in Vietnam.
  • Ultimate Driver Speed Comparison: This insight allows race fans to see how their favorite drivers compare to other drivers in history, dating back to 1983. Debuts July 19 in Great Britain.
  • Low-Speed Corner Performance: This insight – one of the most important indicators of driver and vehicle performance – allows fans to see the relative strength or weakness of a car in slow cornering (below 125 kph/78 mph) compared to other vehicles, which is critical to lap time. Debuts June 5 in Austria.
  • Qualifying and Race Predictions: This insight will enable broadcasters to provide a live visual graphic to help bring the race to life for fans watching along at home. Debuts September 6 in Italy.
  • High-Speed Corner Performance: Coupled with low-speed performance, this insight allows fans to see how well their driver tackles the fastest bends on the track when the vehicle is travelling at more than 175 kph/109 mph. Debuts October 25 in the USA.
  • Car/Team Development & Overall Season Performance: As the season unfolds, this F1 stat will plot a driver and a team’s cumulative performance from race to race to uncover and highlight the unsung heroes in the middle of the race division. Debuts November 29 in Abu Dhabi.

To create these news stats Formula 1 data scientists use 65 years of historical race data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), coupled with live data streamed from the racetrack. They leverage this data to train machine learning (ML) models with Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s fully managed service for building, training, and deploying ML models. The ML models are hosted on AWS Lambda, a service that runs code without the need to provision or manage servers. The new ML-powered stats focus on driver and vehicle performance over time to provide a long-term view of a team’s strategy and road to victory throughout the racing season. The new insights will be integrated into worldwide coverage of F1 races that occur around the globe, including on F1 TV and for online watchers helping Formula 1 fans understand the split-second decisions made by drivers or pit crews that can dramatically affect the outcome of a race.

“Over the past two years, Formula 1 has embraced AWS’s services to perform intense and dynamic data analysis on and off the track. The statistics we’re delivering together for fans have get them closer to the race track and into the pits, and the insights we’re unlocking are even influencing vehicle designs for the 2021 season,” said Rob Smedley of Formula 1. “We’re excited to be expanding this successful relationship to bring even more insights to life, giving fans to go deeper into the many ways that drivers and racing teams impact the outcome of a race.”

For more information about AWS and its involvement with Formula 1, please visit: aws.com/f1.

About Amazon Web Services

For almost 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 69 Availability Zones (AZs) within 22 geographic regions, with announced plans for 16 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Africa, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Formula 1®

Formula 1® racing began in 1950 and is the world’s most prestigious motor racing competition, as well as the world’s most popular annual sporting series. The 2019 FIA Formula One World Championship™ runs from March to December and spans 21 races in 21 countries across five continents. Formula One World Championship Limited is part of Formula 1® and holds the exclusive commercial rights to the FIA Formula One World Championship™. Formula 1® is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corporation (NASDAQ: LSXMA, LSXMB, LSXMK, BATRA, BATRK, FWONA, FWONK) attributed to the Formula One Group tracking stock. The F1 logo, F1 FORMULA 1 logo, FORMULA 1, F1, FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, GRAND PRIX, PADDOCK CLUB and related marks are trademarks of Formula One Licensing BV, a Formula 1 company. All rights reserved. 

Getting Started With Professional Services

In 2018 F1 engaged with the AWS Professional Services (ProServ) team, who has since delivered two models to support race graphics: Pit Stop Advantage in March 2019, and Battle Forecast in July 2019. F1 continues to innovate with the Professional Services team and Machine Learning Solutions Lab to accelerate development of F1 Insights by prototyping use cases and develop new proofs of concept. The ProServ team then helps F1 get models in to production and integrated into the F1 infrastructure.

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