AWS and Formula 1: Revolutionizing Race Narratives
At Circuit of the Americas, the story starts long before the lights go out.
On a quiet Austin morning, before a single car had rolled out of the pit lane, Ruth Buscombe sat over a coffee at Soho House and summed up what this place means to Formula 1: COTA is where “F1 remembers to be fun.” No lap times yet. No tire degradation curves. No Kimi Antonelli world title – that would come a week later in Mexico. But the United States Grand Prix narrative, the one beamed into homes around the world, was already being assembled.
By Sunday night, Antonelli had converted pole into victory on a razor‑sharp one‑stop strategy, a drive that dragged him to within two points of the championship he would seal in Mexico. The race looked clean, simple, inevitable.
It was anything but. And that’s where Amazon Web Services steps in.
Turning a black box into a story
AWS has been F1’s technology partner since 2018, and its fingerprints are now all over the way the sport is presented. Two dozen insight graphics. Systems chewing through millions of data points every second. An invisible engine turning raw telemetry, weather feeds, and strategy calls into the on‑screen explanations that try to keep 1.8 billion viewers in step with what’s unfolding.
In Austin, as at every stop on the calendar, the work starts with a blend of history, live data, and human expertise. People like Buscombe, a seasoned strategist, sit alongside AWS engineers and F1’s production team to prise open the black box of performance and decision‑making.
Fans at home see the polished end product. The graphic that appears just as you’re wondering why a driver stayed out. The stint projection that explains why Antonelli can afford to nurse his tires. The pit window overlay that turns a blur of cars into a clear strategic picture.
Behind that, there’s a constant argument over what earns the right to be on screen.
COTA, casual fans, and a changing audience
Buscombe has been walking the COTA paddock since the circuit’s first F1 race in 2012, long before Liberty Media rewired the sport’s relationship with the United States. Back then there was no Drive to Survive, no Apple TV shoulder programming, no AWS‑powered insight layer.
Now, the American rounds – and Austin in particular – carry a very specific weight. COTA pulls in millions of casual viewers, many of them tuning in for a single race rather than a full season, and this year a chunk of them did so via Apple TV rather than traditional F1 platforms.
That crowd is not the old guard.
“Our sport is watched by millions of people worldwide. 43% are under 35. 42% are female, and the biggest growing demographic is females aged 11 to 25. So many of our fans haven't been watching for the last 30 years. They haven't even been alive for the last 30 years," Buscombe points out.
This is the gap AWS is trying to fill. On the F1 app, it powers personalization. On the world feed, its F1 Insights try to act like a strategist sitting on your couch, explaining why a car is suddenly quick, why another is fading, why one team gambles on softs while another bolts on hards.
“We want it to be that if you're turning on Formula 1 for the first time, or you've watched it for 20 years, you can learn something. To learn a sport is to love it. Once you understand the story, you can fall in love with it,” Buscombe says.
For AWS, that “falling in love” moment comes when a viewer feels they’re not just watching the race but participating in its logic.
Playing strategist: Insight Track’s glimpse of the future
In Austin, AWS gave a glimpse of where that could lead with its Insight Track demo. It’s not on the market yet, but the idea is simple and seductive: let fans play strategist in real time.
A user can prod the system with questions: what if Charles Leclerc had gone to hard tires instead of mediums? What if Lando Norris had stopped two laps earlier? The tool reruns the race with those choices, showing alternate outcomes, putting the fan in the hot seat that Buscombe and her peers occupy on the pit wall.
It’s a game, but it’s also a statement of intent. The future F1 viewer doesn’t just want to know what happened. They want to know what could have happened – and who to blame when “bad strategy calls” ruin their Sunday.
From 300 sensors to a single graphic
The machinery behind all this is staggering. Michael Aghataher, who leads the F1 partnership for AWS, describes the raw feed that pours out of each car.
“There are 300 sensors on the car, 1.1 million data points per second per car per race, and on top of that, there are 20-plus weather stations capturing things like temperature, humidity, and wind speed. Every 150 meters, there are timing loops, so you get to see where the cars are on track at any particular time,” he explains.
All of that data funnels into F1’s Event Technology Center. From there, it’s fired to Biggin Hill and AWS for processing, then back again. The whole loop has to close in under 1.5 seconds so that a director can cut to the right camera, call up the right graphic, and keep the story moving.
“Formula 1 then gets to determine how they can use this to maximize fan engagement, either through Track Pulse or through F1 Insights powered by AWS, which is the suite of graphics that the F1 production team uses to educate fans about what's happening on track,” Aghataher says.
The system was pushed hard just weeks before COTA at Sepang. There, almost no modern track data existed. AWS wasn’t around the last time F1 raced in Malaysia, so the teams and the broadcasters went in almost blind.
Buscombe did too.
“I don't have a Formula 1 car, just like our fans at home don't. I prepared all of my technical analysis, all of my projections and all of my strategy based on the AWS tools that we had during the race weekend,” she says.
To the viewer, it looked seamless. That’s the point. The scaffolding is never meant to show.
Earning space on the screen
At the sharp end of the pipeline sits Dean Locke, F1’s director of broadcast and media. His team decides what the world actually sees. Their output stretches beyond F1TV and Sky Sports: they also produce feeds for fans at the circuit, pulling in around half a million viewers each weekend.
More channels mean more competition for space. Every graphic fights with onboard shots, replays, radio messages, and live action for a slice of the screen.
“Each graphic on the screen has really got to earn its real estate. I watch other sports and sometimes I'm not sure what the graphic is telling me, so we go through a rigorous process of: 'is this earning the real estate on the screen, is it telling the story, and is it completely understandable?'” Locke says.
Strategy Insights, launched only a few races ago, has already become one of the most valuable tools in that arsenal. It exists to answer the questions that erupt in the production gallery.
“The team is sitting in the gallery and all of a sudden I hear them go, 'hold on, why have they not stopped or why have they done this?' If you're asking it in the gallery, the fans are asking that at home, and we have to explain that. We have the data to use to create that story,” Locke adds.
The hunt for better ways to tell that story doesn’t stop at the paddock gates. Locke and his team borrow from film, gaming, and other sports. The upcoming F1 movie has already sparked ideas: if that kind of cinematic technology can work in a controlled shoot, how much of it can be dragged into a live environment at 200 mph?
The answer, increasingly, runs through AWS.
From racing purists to fashion and fandom
The AWS–F1 partnership signed in 2018 was supposed to be about modernizing the broadcast for hardcore fans. Then 2020 happened. Drive to Survive exploded, and the sport’s profile with it.
“What we hadn't predicted was the explosion that came following 2020 with Drive to Survive. We entered the partnership for the racing purists and that has expanded into fandom, lifestyle and fashion, so we get eyeballs on our partnership that we didn't anticipate at the beginning,” Aghataher admits.
Drive to Survive exposed a simple truth: the sport needed better, clearer storytelling. Track Pulse arrived in 2021 as a direct response. As F1’s boom continued through 2023 and beyond, especially among casual fans, the need deepened. F1 Strategy Insights followed in 2026, designed to sit right at the intersection of data and narrative.
Aghataher now calls AWS the “intelligence layer” of the sport – a layer that has to evolve at the same pace as the audience consuming it.
That layer has spread beyond F1’s commercial world and into its rulebook. Shortly after this year’s United States Grand Prix, the FIA named AWS its Official AI, Cloud, Computing, Machine Learning, and Cloud Infrastructure Partner across all of its properties. The same technology used to explain Antonelli’s one‑stop masterclass can now help analyze track limits, speed violations, and a host of other regulatory flashpoints.
Back at Soho House, before a single car had turned a wheel in Austin, Buscombe was already sketching Sunday’s race in her head. The same technology that helped her decode the United States Grand Prix now runs through every corner of the sport, from race control to the fan’s phone.
It keeps being refined, rewritten, reimagined, all in service of one idea: that to learn a sport is to love it, and that once you understand the story, you can’t help but fall for it.
In a championship where titles are decided by tenths and tire calls, the real question now is not whether F1 can tell its story – but how far this data‑driven storytelling can reshape what it means to watch a Grand Prix at all.
