The Saturday night race on a street circuit running along Nevada City's famous strip is on November 23, and a win will win the championship for Worst.
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When Max Verstappen heads to Las Vegas in pursuit of a fourth consecutive Formula One title, he will be racing around a flooded track his Red Bull team has already simulated about eight billion times.
The Saturday night race on a street circuit running along Nevada City's famous strip is on November 23, and a win would clinch the championship for Verstappen with two rounds remaining.
“We run four billion simulations before we get to the track,” Jack Harrington, head of Red Bull's partnerships group, which works with software giant and title sponsor Oracle, told Reuters.
“And then we take the data from FP1 and FP2 (the first and second exercises) and introduce them into the simulation and run those four billion times again.”
Billions, not millions, he stressed – although there's no need to speculate too much on who will win the title this year, given that Verstappen is 62 points ahead of McLaren's Lando Norris.
“It's always been said that sometimes you have to stick your hand out to see if it's raining in the pitlane, but there are always changes that will surprise you,” Harrington said.
“The more simulations you run, the more things you'll see and the more chance you'll have of being able to react to them efficiently.”
Red Bull uses Oracle's cloud infrastructure to run simulations to hone strategy and be prepared for every situation.
Red Bull is also building its own engine for 2026 and Taylor Newill, senior director of product management at Oracle, said high-performance computing is playing a big role in development simulations there too.
Race simulations are run all year round, but especially when there is a big decision coming up, such as when might be best to take an engine penalty – as Verstappen did in Brazil last weekend when he finished 17th Had raced on the spot.
That wet race was further complicated by accidents, red flags and safety cars.
Red Bull's strategy was risky, with Verstappen staying out during the safety car period after losing to McLaren title rival Lando Norris, but it paid off when the race was stopped due to worsening conditions.
“For more detailed planning of in-event strategy, we will start about two weeks in advance,” said Stephen Knowles, Red Bull senior race strategy engineer.
“Preliminary simulations illustrate a wide range of possible outcomes in terms of tire and car performance, as well as a wide range of possible events and their timing.
“This allows us to plan our weekend and especially our tire usage ahead of time, with the aim of scoring as many points as possible, but also having enough contingency to deal with the unexpected.”
Harrington said using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) also has cost and stability benefits as teams operate under tight cost limits.
“We can switch to the cloud before race weekend… run this large amount of simulation, turn the cloud off and turn it on again when we need to do it again,” he said. Explained.
“Whereas before we had to invest in physical things to be able to run these, so it's also much more cost effective for us. Every race-winning strategy call we've made since 2021 has been on OCI.”
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First publication date: 11 November 2024, 08:03 am IST
