16th February 2024

Sam Dougan

F1 cars race around circuits at around 220mph/354kph almost every weekend of the year from now to December, sending data down a cable back to their HQs all around the world from anywhere between 10 & 300 milliseconds depending on where they are in the world. Yet the way they receive digital content of the cars directly from the track uses a fifty-year-old data transfer protocol from the 1970s.

In 2021, I became responsible for looking after the ingestion of assets directly from the trackside for a Formula 1 team. Suddenly I had hundreds of photos a minute I needed to tag, organise, store and distribute to the internal staff and partners worldwide.

Imagine 24 race weekends a year (2024 season), photographers shooting from Thursday - to Sunday, they produce on average about 500 photos per weekend, per team. That’s a lot of content…

The photo has to go from the camera, streamed via a data connection provided by their mobile phones or a network hub to their offices in seconds. The images are HIGH RES, RAW images that could be up to 40MB. Then onto their servers to be edited and distributed to race teams using FTP’s directly onto a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform.

I was sat in the HQ back in the UK, watching the race happening live in Silverstone or Bahrain or even Australia whilst receiving live images back from the track in just minutes after having seen the cars race around that specific corner at Silverstone at Copse or Stowe (other tracks and corners are available).

Organising that content was easy then, the hard bit had been done for me - I was able to set up, using the DAM platform, all the content by using previously existing metadata and naming conventions I set to distribute that content throughout the platform in seconds.

This was the fastest way to get content in front of partners and marketing staff across race weekends for social media, activations and digital content.

It became even more important when the cars, drivers and teams won podiums…

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