Inside F1’s Tech Center
To coincide with the recent F1’s 2015 United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas, Ars Technica got an inside view of the technical nerve centre that supports the data and networking requirements for hosting an F1 Grand Prix.
From the outside it was a relatively anonymous temporary building, one of many that travel with the teams and organizers to the so-called flyaway races—events that take place outside of F1’s traditional but endangered heartland of Europe, where the cars and equipment are trucked from track to base and back again. Instead, for the races in the Americas, Asia, and beyond, everything gets loaded into freight 747s. In luggage terms, the tech center alone is responsible for a single jumbo—130 tonnes of servers, networking hardware, cabling, and so on.
Nuts.