Oracle Red Bull driver Max Verstappen in Brazil
Getty Images / Red Bull Content Pool
Formula One is a festival of loud sounds and extremely fast cars adorned with rainbow-bright liveries. Fans are devoted and thrilled by the F1 spectacle, which is unlike anything else in the world.
Behind the scenes and underneath the pageantry that is F1, technology is humming through everything that happens. And for Oracle Red Bull’s racing organization and its star Max Verstappen, AT&T’s connectivity is a critical member of its F1 team.
F1 car in Brazil
Getty Images / Red Bull Content Pool
Oracle Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen.
Getty Images
800 Sensors Feed Data From Verstappen’s F1 Car
Verstappen’s car is festooned with nearly 800 sensors that feed back to AT&T’s on-site team on the track and to the operations center in Milton Keynes, UK. This seamless, real-time connectivity between the F1 tracks across the globe and the racing team helps Verstappen make split-second decisions with low latency and high speed, all powered by the AT&T network
AT&T Assistant Vice President, Sponsorships & Experiential Sabina Ahmed manages the multi-year contract between AT&T and Oracle Red Bull, which has been ongoing since 2011.
“Every millisecond counts,” Ahmed says. “Since our partnership began, demand from a data standpoint has gone up by five times, and AT&T continues to make sure our network and our technology continues to evolve to fulfill the needs of the team.”
Max Verstappen and Oracle Red Bull Racing at the Bahrain International Circuit.
Getty Images / Red Bull Content Pool
Why It Makes Sense For AT&T To Partner With An F1 Team
This partnership is more than an agreement for services, it’s a symbiotic relationship that benefits both companies: Oracle Red Bull gets top-notch connectivity from a company that has been consistently leveling up for more than a century, and AT&T earns high-level marketing and alignment with the fastest-growing sport in the world.
As such, AT&T can—to borrow a famous advertising company of theirs from the 1980s—”reach out and touch someone” via F1’s massive reach. In the vein of the iconic adage “motorsports is marketing,” AT&T is delivering impossibly fast data in real time and proving to customers around the world what it’s capable of.
Although AT&T has been in business for more than a century, don’t mistake it for a dinosaur.
“The reliability, superiority, and the seamless connectivity of our network is truly rooted in how we can help the team perform and communicate well amongst themselves and Oracle Red Bull saw the opportunity with AT&T’s history and legacy,” Ahmed says. “Oracle Red Bull Racing has been known to be innovative, doing new things and exploring new things, and they see AT&T as evolving to the needs of their business.”
Oracle Red Bull’s data center
AT&T/Oracle Red Bull
AT&T Plus F1 Equals Lightning-Fast Data
Certainly, the technology company has the support of champion driver Verstappen. He’s using the information transmitted from the sensors to the data center constantly, including during practice. The faster the connectivity, the faster his team can analyze the data and come up with solutions and improvements to the car and the person driving it.
“We are partnering up with the people who are the best in the business including, of course, AT&T,” Verstappen says. “We’ve been working together already for a very long time and even through the years of working together, to see the progression every single time is amazing.”
Ultimately, Ahmed says, AT&T wants fans at any F1 race to have a great time, experience the brand, connect to the drivers they love and the content they love, and share the word via social media. More than a decade in, it appears to be working very well.