If Formula One racing is considered the pinnacle of motorsport, Sim Racing Championship is quickly becoming the top echelon of competitive gaming, with the same high speeds and extreme rivalries that make F1 so exciting.
And the gap between the digital world and the on-track world has never been smaller.
Oracle Red Bull Racing is applying the technical and strategic methodology it uses in F1 to its official esports team, Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing. The Sim Racing team is tapping cloud-based computing infrastructure, real-time data dashboards, and lap-by-lap analytics of braking, acceleration, and throttle to help drivers improve performance in virtual races.
“Every tool that we’ve been developing for the Sim Racing team has been derived straight from what we know from Formula One,” says Dan Smith, technical partnerships executive at Oracle Red Bull Racing.
Oracle Red Bull Racing’s focus on Sim Racing is part of an effort to increase fan engagement and make F1 more accessible to an even larger global audience. Before each race weekend, one of Oracle Red Bull Racing’s championship drivers—Max Verstappen or Sergio Pérez—will do a virtual lap on the racetrack of the upcoming Grand Prix using a simulator, and the team will post that result. Called Oracle Virtual Laps, the program lets gamers compare their lap performance in Electronic Arts F1 2023 against the world’s most talented drivers. That kind of gaming experience can help foster racing fandom—and just maybe, it’ll uncover one of the world’s next great esports pros.
“Being fast in a simulation requires an incredibly high level of skill and consistency that is very similar to what is required in real life in Formula One,” says Joe Soltysik, esports lead for Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing.
No other Formula One team has ever revealed data to this extent, or given access to a driver’s data, be it a video game or in real life.Dan Smith Technical Partnerships Executive, Oracle Red Bull Racing
Verstappen says he analyzes his sim racing exactly as he would an F1 race, including assessing his throttle, brake, and steering inputs and evaluating strategy choices. “When I’m sim racing, I’m doing the same thing as I’m doing in real life—you go and look into the data, and you look at what can I do better,” says Verstappen. (Verstappen shares more sim racing insights in Episode 3 of Oracle TV’s “Built to Win” docuseries.)
For Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing’s drivers, the ability to rapidly refine race techniques and strategy with data has had a real impact on performance. Josh Idowu, an F1 Esports driver for the Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing team, says that leveraging telemetry data from practice laps has helped him make tweaks to his strategy for better outcomes on the grid.
“With the Oracle data in the F1 Esports Series Pro Championship, I was able to see where exactly my weak points were,” says Idowu. “Once I was able to fix them, I was able to really push for pole position in some of the races. So, the data definitely helped push me up the grid, that's for sure.”
For Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing, it’s also an opportunity to show off its impressive technical prowess and, in an unprecedented move, share driver data with fans. Historically, F1 teams guard their data closely to avoid giving away strategic information to competitors. So fans rarely get to see the detailed performance or telemetry data of their favorite driver.
In esports, teams have more options with their data. With Oracle Virtual Laps, the team shares select telemetry data for Verstappen and Pérez—such as speed, brake, and throttle—and visualizes their performance to provide never-before-seen visibility into their technique.
“No other Formula One team has ever revealed data to this extent, or given access to a driver’s data, be it a video game or in real life,” says Smith. “So, this is something that is genuinely new and special.”>
The importance of digital simulations like these is growing across industries, well beyond sports. Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing’s experience ingesting, sharing, and analyzing data from its digital simulations offers the latest example of how real-time data monitoring and instant analysis can open new opportunities. Digital innovators in industries such as manufacturing and logistics are relying more on “digital twins,” where super realistic simulations let companies test equipment stress limits or try out new factory or warehouse configurations without major expense or investment.
The technical infrastructure used by the Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing team is remarkably similar to what’s in use for the real-world F1 races. Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing is ingesting a firehose of data from a fully equipped racing Playseat rather than an actual race car, of course. That Playseat is running the Electronic Arts F1 22 video game, which is streaming telemetry data through an internet gateway to a virtual machine on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The telemetry data, coming at an average of 150,000 data points per second, is then captured and split with an Oracle Java API, with one thread going to a real-time visualization dashboard and the other into OCI Streaming and landing, in real time, into an Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, where it can be accessed live by OCI’s suite of machine learning and AI tools.
“When we go into our Esports Series, we have four of those dashboards running at one time,” says Soltysik. “That’s almost 600,000 data points per second running through Java ingestion during the race in the professional esports league.”
The telemetry data that is saved in the database is also used for post-race analysis and for creating machine learning–based predictive models that can be used to boost team performance through more-informed strategy calls. The team is also using its access to extensive esports practice data to bolster the predictive models. By using ARM chips on OCI, the data capture, processing, and analytics can be scaled up and down, making it a cost-effective platform to improve driver performance.
The team also plans to load drivers’ telemetry data into Oracle Analytics Cloud to dive deeper into the nuances of their performance, overlaying lap data to analyze how things such as pit stops and tire choices effected the outcome of the race.
“Drivers can then compare themselves in a way that is so quick and easy, which saves them time, makes them faster racers more quickly, shows where they're going wrong quicker, and then allows them to formulate a strategy in the actual race themselves, based on data,” says Soltysik. “Sim racing itself hasn't ever really had a tool this advanced.”
Prior to the use of the custom real-time dashboard to ingest telemetry data and visualize driver performance, the esports team’s data collection capabilities were limited by the functionality of the EA Sports video game; all drivers had was their time, so they’d have to just test different strategies over and over.
“As soon as we started to work with tools that have been made in F1, and trying to expand on that aspect of it and bring the esports world into F1, then we were able to ingest 150,000 data points per second and store it in Oracle Cloud and use Oracle Analytics tools to see what's actually happening within the data,” says Smith.
Esports racers can drive from anywhere, so it helps that Oracle has cloud regions throughout the world to tap into. OCI makes it simple for the Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing team to set up stable connections between the team’s data-collection systems and the gaming machines of its Sim Racing drivers. These drivers simply connect to one of Oracle’s cloud servers designated by the team and the data streams automatically.
“Which means that we never miss collecting any data from drivers, because as soon as they turn on their device, and they’re starting to record some laps, we’re also recording those laps, and we’ve got them stored in the cloud,” Smith says. “So, we never have to say to them, Did you remember to save your telemetry? It’s all automatic.”
The team’s Oracle Virtual Laps effort shows how organizations can use data not only to improve their own performance but also to connect in exciting new ways with their customers. At Oracle Red Bull Racing, the team is always brainstorming new ways to build closer ties to fans and to reach new people who haven’t been diehard racing fans.
In the current iteration of Oracle Virtual Laps, fans can watch Verstappen or Pérez drive a lap on a grand prix circuit, and there’s live telemetry data streaming behind the professional driver through the real-time dashboard. That gives fans a unique perspective that’s similar to what F1 engineers actually look at on the pit wall during a race. The Virtual Lap experience and telemetry data from Verstappen and Pérez are all posted in The Paddock, the media-rich team’s fan application and website that runs on Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement.
In the future, the team plans to push the boundaries of data sharing even further by inviting gamers to send their telemetry outputs to Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing via a specific IP and port address so that it can be combined with the visualization of Verstappen or Pérez. The overlaying data will show fans how their racing skills compare to the performance of a pro driver. The feature isn’t available yet, but the team is excited about its potential to help them get closer than ever to their fans.
“The goal is to bring as many people into Oracle Red Bull Racing as possible and make them feel part of the team in a way that they've never been able to before,” says Soltysik. “It creates a really nice touch point for gamers to be able to say, I'm faster than Max, or I'm as quick as Max around Austria. That is remarkable, and the fact that we can then potentially reward fans for how fast they go or for even just taking part, I think that's amazing. The goal really is just to be as close to our fans as possible.”
The team’s contest will put one fan’s livery design on the track during each of the three US races.
Oracle Red Bull Racing runs billions of race-strategy simulations on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), helping give drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez their best chances to win.