To get from 0 to 60 in Formula 1 engine design while competing against organizations with much more experience, Red Bull Ford Powertrains will need extra help (and, no, that boost won’t come in the form of a certain energy drink).
The Red Bull-Ford collaborative venture is turning to the cloud by leaning on its software-giant sponsor’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“We avoided the need to build a new data center,” says Matt Cadieux, CIO of Oracle Red Bull Racing, the parent firm of Powertrains. “It allowed us to get started pretty much immediately.”
That puts this F1 organization in a different lane from other automotive companies that have long employed digital-twin technology to design engines and fine-tune their operation and maintenance, but have relied on in-house computing resources for that work.
Cadieux calls simulating an engine design’s performance “a massive, massive computational problem” and credits recent advances in rapid cloud scalability for making it possible to run those simulations off-premise: “Five years ago, to scale up to the number we needed to run would have been very challenging.”
F1 builders like Powertrains—the team is a part of Red Bull Technology based at that offshoot’s Milton Keynes, UK, campus—also occupy an entirely different road from the consumer automotive industry. Their work is a tightly circumscribed practice, with specifications for vehicles and engines drawn up years in advance by the sport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile.
“It is frustrating, but it’s also an opportunity to be creative, to find ways to be smarter than our competitors,” Cadieux says of FIA’s detailed specifications—which didn’t let teams put a 2026-compliant engine in a car on a test track in 2025, instead of confining them to running prototype engines on dynamometer test rigs.
