HappyFunCorp Blog Tech is Like…Formula 1 Racing

How to push hardware limitations, constantly innovate, and not get anyone killedTech is Like is a series from HFC that seeks to explore and draw insights from industries that fascinate and excite us.Formula 1 isn’t the obvious role model for responsible, forward-thinking tech development: In the middle of a climate crisis, twenty super-rich drivers power feather-light, hyper-powered carbon fibre cars around a track at 200 mph on behalf of multinational manufacturers. Eventually, some of their highly specialized innovations might make it into tomorrow’s road cars.Occasionally, someone dies in the process.But there’s actually a lot to learn from F1’s approach to innovation, and how software innovators can think about development and impact in the face of our own increasingly visible body count. It’s a good time for gut-checks — and considering what the most prestigious racing series in the world knows about innovation and limitations.The question of racing fundamentally changed: from how do we build the fastest car? to how do we build the fastest car that is also safe to drive?Between all the champagne, national anthems, and spectacle, it can be easy to forget that at its heart, motorsport is tech.Racing is a major development and testing site for a wild amount of materials science: aerodynamics, the chemical composition of tires, or the rapid development of sensor technology to clock performance data on race day. It’s an absolute mental buffet for anyone curious about how stuff works.But for all that it plays to the cameras, Formula 1 is also an intensely regulated space. The first set of hard limits: physics. Aerodynamics, gravity, and the mechanical limits of human bodies are ultimately non-negotiable, just like any digital design or development team lives within the physical realities of circuit boards, local infrastructure, and the hardware clients use.The second set of hard limits? A strict set of specs, performance standards, and conduct rules runs like a secret universe of plumbing beneath every race weekend. Those ever-updating standards are the formula in Formula 1 — what we’d consider the brief. The series is literally defined by technical specifications it first set out in the wake of World War II.Designs have adapted to new regulations over the sport’s 70+ year historyCompliance is overseen by the 117-year-old governing body of the sport, the FIA, which appoints licensed stewards to oversee each race. Their duties run from the routine — weighing drivers and cars before and after to keep everyone over the minimum weight limit — to the occasionally horrific. And it’s the horrific that’s spurred many of Formula 1’s rule and design changes.One of the peculiarities of Grand Prix racing — Formula 1 and its feeder series — is that drivers have always died. Marshals, mechanics, and pit crew members died. Sometimes, spectators died. Alongside millions of other racing fans, I watched Romain Grosjean’s Haas go into the barriers, split in two, and spit out a fireball at last autumn’s Bahrain Grand Prix. He miraculously lived, with relatively minor burns. I was sick for days.Grosjean’s crash made world news due to the seeming improbability of surviving the infernoSince at least 1901, the sport has come with a death toll — and varying reactions to those casualties. Races have been cancelled, manufacturers temporarily withdrew, legions of witnessing drivers retired early and did something else or became active champions for safety. Some countries have banned racing in the wake of major disasters: Switzerland’s race ban only lifted in 2015, 60 years after the mass casualty that spurred it. Safety improvements were also made — helmets, seat belts — but they came slowly.By the 1970s, the push for faster cars hit a tipping point: they overreached the inherent limits of the tracks, and the fairly routine crashes were increasingly fatal. Cars went off in places cars had never crashed before. Two drivers a season died, and this time they were dying in televised races, with the logos of their major corporate sponsors across the burnt chassis.Understandably, the rest of the drivers — and the team bosses, mechanics, engineers, and factory fabricators who were duly traumatized by watching their co-workers burn to death — got more than a little tired of this. So did fans and sponsors. There are certain cruelties we might take for granted in human nature, but it turns out very few people actually want to watch a person die. The combination of sustained driver advocacy, fan horror, and corporate brand protection was enough to accelerate a shift toward features that made cars not just faster, but safer.The question of racing fundamentally changed: from how do we build the fastest car? to how do we build the fastest car that is also safe to drive?That and has been pivotal for the development of motorsport. It installed another unspoken hard limit: that technical innovation works for human users, not against us. When technology runs up against the human body, the human body is not the thing discarded. Everyone still wants to make the cars faster, but when the obstacle is safety, you find another — safer — way through.This attitude toward a limitation has, arguably, effected a deeper shift in how Formula 1 develops its technologies: it unmakes the perception that innovation is about breaking the rules — that innovation is inherently a confrontation. The limitation is not there to be argued, subverted, or destroyed. The entire point of the exercise becomes what seven-championship-winning Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff has repeatedly called “the truth of the stopwatch”: when all variables have been made as fair and equal as possible, when all the bullshit is swept aside, when you have met the entire complexity of the brief — who can out-think everyone else and have the faster car?So when you can’t break the rules, and you can’t cut corners — and let’s face it, perpetual crunch policies, union-busting, and design dark patterns are at their heart corner-cutting — where do you go? What do you do when your core question grows an and?Motorsport’s answer? Optimize sideways, and develop real organizational capacity in more things.Most Formula 1 teams have dug deep into their own organizational back ends: the systems that uphold their on-track performance. If there is only so fast the car and driver can go, you consider the efficiency of everyone who takes part in a race weekend, and pit crews start chasing the sub-two-second pit stop.If you don’t have a car that can beat every other driver every time, you start thinking about strategy: who are we racing really? Not every F1 team aims for podiums every race day; the season’s goal can be defeating two other, particular midfield teams as part of a five-year rebuild plan — and if it is, you don’t waste time or risk car damage blocking a frontrunner on track. Strategies change when you think about your actual opponents’ tendencies, and where we time our own actions to make the most of other people’s habits.You start considering everything you know about the track you’re on: is it difficult to overtake other cars here? Better throw all your effort into qualifying near the front and less into a setup optimized for overtaking.You start thinking differently about how to develop talent when you find it young, and look for talent in new places. Your working culture starts to increasingly matter: seven-time champion Mercedes’s famous no-blame culture is an long-acknowledged asset on-track, and Ferrari’s more turbulent organizational landscape one of the reasons they’ve tumbled in the standings.But most of all: Have a broader concept of results. We live in an interconnected world, and what happens on-track leaks off-track, and vice versa. Formula 1’s been spinning off external applications for decades, but the sport has broadened its notion of results by applying its innovations outside automotive verticals. Technologies developed to solve the question of fastest, safest car now generate power for green cities, run simulations for air traffic control, monitor ICU patients, and make refrigerators more efficient. The sport is two years deep into an ambitious carbon-zero sustainability plan that’s already testing second-generation biowaste fuels. Everything is the answer to somebody’s question, if we’re holistic and creative enough.In short, you think about the totality of what you’re doing here: the assumptions, the impacts, the what if. And you fit those pieces together to drive a better race.Formula 1 is far from utopia. The money comes from frequently questionable sources, the choice of venues has been fairly criticized as reputation laundering for dictatorships, its current diversity still doesn’t hit the bar for a century-old global sport, and as an industry, it’s brutally political. All these things are true: but the questions of and and what if are ones it handles peerlessly well.These are questions that many major fields, big tech included, haven’t been forced to figure out yet. As an industry tech is still in a boomtown mentality, and digital-world consequences are frequently delivered at a remove: rising oceans in island countries, Instagram suicides, and the artificial retooling of entire national economies. We’re not yet confronted with the visceral reality of the fireball.But whether we can feel it on the skin or not, we’re arguably in racing’s 1970s moment, where how fast the cars go has overreached the realities of our proverbial racetracks and our fragile bodies. It’s a good time to modify the questions we’re asking ourselves with a little and. Not necessarily the classic Jurassic Park “they didn’t stop to think if they should,” but slipping out of that binary thinking — the kind that makes innovation a confrontation — into the yes, but also thinking that makes Formula 1 cars both win races, make obscene gobs of cash, and get everyone home alive.We can, I think, have all of it. The answer