McLaren driver Oscar Piastri’s car is rolled to the starting line ahead of the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix sprint race at Circuit of the Americas on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025 in Austin.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
Thanks to a Netflix docuseries, a feature film starring Brad Pitt, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, Formula 1 has become the fastest-growing sport worldwide — especially in the U.S.
Fans know the teams, tracks, celebrity drivers and the luxury associated with it. Beyond the track, though, a bigger race is underway: The one for the technology that’s transforming the elite sport.
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McLaren driver Oscar Piastri of Australia is seen during the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix auto race last weekend in Austin.
Eric Gay/Associated Press
McLaren driver Lando Norris steers his car through a turn at the U.S. Grand Prix auto race last week in Austin. McLaren Racing has partnered with Dell Technologies for AI that’s transformed the sport.
Eric Gay/Associated Press
“It’s ultimately the race off the track that everybody’s doing,” said Dan Kenworthy, director of business technology for McLaren Racing, which has partnered with Dell Technologies Inc. “It’s less visible, but the better technology you have, it translates into real-time results on the track.”
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In a sport where fractions of a second can make an outsized difference in outcomes, artificial intelligence is working to separate the also-rans from those spraying champagne on the winner’s podium.
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Tech companies are striking new partnerships across F1. Red Bull Racing partners with Austin-based Oracle Corp. and Aston Martin partners with Arm on AI. Google Cloud provides data and AI infrastructure for the series; Amazon Web Services provides analytics; Lenovo supplies AI and hardware.
Among the growing roster of tech companies at the tracks is Central Texas staple Dell, which has been the official innovation partner of U.K.-based McLaren Racing. Dell’s role has been vital in McLaren’s turnaround in recent years.
Since the turn of the 21st century, McLaren had not been a consistent winner. Despite Lewis Hamilton’s maiden title with the team in 2008, McLaren was stuck in struggling partnerships and routinely failed to progress out of the first session of qualifying.
McLaren driver Lando Norris rounds turn 10 during qualifying for the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025 in Austin.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
With CEO Zak Brown taking over in 2016 and new partnerships including Dell in 2018 and Mercedes-Benz in 2021, McLaren is back to winning.
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The team set the record for fastest pit stop time, 1.8 seconds, in 2023. McLaren started that season at the back of the field but in 2024 it won the constructors’ championship for the first time since 1998. McLaren won the trophy, which goes to the team with the most total points at season’s end, again just a few weeks ago.
“We’ve had to adapt to all the changes as a racing team and we had a small collection of partners who really believed in the journey of getting us back to winning ways,” Kenworthy said. “Now, we’re sitting here as two-time world champions. Very specifically, Dell Technologies’ authenticity and joint-innovation is the centerpiece of everything we do.”
Technology now touches every facet of F1.
McLaren brings a mobile data center to every race, and the garage comes to life around it. The cars themselves — “probably the most advanced edge device that you’ve ever seen,” according to Kenworthy — carry more than 150 sensors to feed real-time data on speed, tire pressures, temperatures, individual part performance and life cycles.
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Beyond the car, the team runs more than 300 simulations in a single race weekend to test aerodynamics, pit stop scenarios, safety car possibilities and more. The astronomical amount of data from a weekend, or a single-single simulation, informs how the cars are built and run.
Oscar Piastri’s McLaren F1 team works on the car ahead of the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix sprint race at Circuit of the Americas on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025 in Austin.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
The official technology and security partner of McLaren is Cisco Systems Inc., which recently expanded its Austin footprint. It provides WiFi, security systems and customer service systems for the team.
But the sensors, data, simulations, computers and more are all “wall-to-wall Dell.”
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McLaren relies on the Dell AI factory, the company’s artificial intelligence solution and software collaboration with Nvidia, to comb through data and simulations to win every race.
As the racing team succeeds, so can Dell. It says McLaren is one of the company’s highest-profile, highest-demand customers, requiring near constant communication and rapid changes. What Dell learns from McLaren goes straight to its global customer base, said Liz Matthews, senior vice president of Dell’s global brand and creative.
“Our engineers have to listen to what it is McLaren needs and the things that we may need to do different with our technology to do better, to race better,” she said. “They are using some of our most advanced technology that applies to a number of our customers, and we take what we learn from McLaren and apply it directly to our technology and to our larger customer base.”
McLaren driver Lando Norris rounds turn 16 during the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas on Sunday, Oct. 19, 2025 in Austin.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
McLaren stretches Dell’s technology, especially its AI applications, daily. The team makes an engineering change to the car or its processes every 15 minutes before locking in the final version for race weekend, Kenworthy said.
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And Dell’s AI, Kenworthy said, is the backbone of decision-making.
“Everyone is always watching you, and the pressure is always on, and so you’ve got to trust what’s in front of you. There’s a level of trust that you need to give the data, and the AI and the technology, because as a human, you can’t process that information by yourself alone,” he said. “We’re constantly looking for those marginal gains, and everything we do has to have a tangible impact. The beauty of this sport is you get to see those results very quickly. We deliver new software applications every weekend. It’s how we can stretch the technologies and AI is that research and development to make the car go fast or react to split-second decisions.”