Oracle Red Bull Racing is building a successful 2022 season on the heels of a 2021 Drivers Championship and second-place finish in the Team Constructors Championship. One would think the success of these two seasons are linked, but in fact the RB18 car on track this year is an entirely new car with very few similarities to the 2021 RB16B. Not a single part of the 2022 car was carried over from the championship winning car from 2021. Even more compelling is that the race team had to continue building and adjusting the championship winning car late into 2021 while they were simultaneously concepting and building the 2022 car.
Citrix supported the team in building two successful cars during a time of increased cost caps, massive engineering changes, regulation changes, and restricted resources, says Craig Skinner, Chief Designer and a 16-year veteran of Oracle Red Bull Racing. “During my tenure with the race team, this year has been the most challenging ever to get the car on track as absolutely everything is new,” he says. “Citrix is a long-standing partner of the race team and has helped us tremendously by allowing our design team to be even more efficient and minimize disruptions.”
The new 2022 cars are ground-effect cars, so they generate most of their downforce by the air flowing underneath the car rather than over it. It’s substantially different from how cars have been designed in previous years, so there was an overhaul of the entire design process. Skinner’s team spent 14 months concepting and designing a new car, but then only had six days of preseason testing to identify problems and get driver feedback on car performance, and then a short time scale to fix any issues before the race season started.
“It was a much tighter timeline than in previous years, so it was very hard to quickly understand the problems and see what items didn’t co-relate,” Skinner says. “Because the changes on how the car generates downforce is so big, what the driver wants is very different than in past years. We adapt the car to accommodate the driver’s requests to give them what they need to perform.”
Putting entirely new cars on track in 2022 also means there is no historical data on the cars’ performance to review, which creates a massive push to get more data from the car to the factory to analyze. The race team can access data remotely from the track as soon as the car comes back into the garage. Data is downloaded immediately.
“Thanks to Citrix there is no need to wait,” Skinner says. “That’s a big advantage and allows us to be more agile and efficient. We can process the data live and then make changes on the car from a morning to afternoon session on the same day. It’s about speed of understanding the data and then making changes to the car as quickly as possible. From a design perspective, Citrix helps with every piece of the car — having a continuous access and stream of data is key — access to track data, CAD systems, and wind tunnel data. We can load up an installation for a car with thousands of parts which we wouldn’t be able to run locally on our own machine. Manipulating and analyzing all of this together without delay is extraordinarily helpful.”
To add to the difficulty of concepting and building a new car in 2021, the race team also had to intensely focus efforts on continued development and success of Max Verstappen’s 2021 car so he could continue pushing to win the title. Oracle Red Bull Racing was developing two championship-worthy cars at once and making additional adjustments to accommodate two drivers. Citrix contributed significantly to this successful process through its DaaS technology.
“Our design team is able to switch between different workstations and workloads to work on both cars at the same time,” Skinner says. “We are also able to view and manipulate very heavy files, such as CAD drawings, and Citrix technology makes this process seamless. Whether trackside or at the factory, our team has a plug-in place solution to work quickly and efficiently.”
Speed and efficiency are essential in Formula 1, which is why the efficiency building of this year’s car started back in 2020. “With the COVID pandemic and budget caps, the race team has had a massive push of the entire business on efficiency and driving efficiency — how to complete projects and build race components more quickly and in a more cost-effective way,” says Zoe Chilton, Head of Strategic Partnerships. “Citrix technology helps us to make more informed decisions to ensure we continue to be effective in a cost cap environment.”
This is one place where Oracle Red Bull Racing has focused its efforts over recent years, and Citrix has been a key part of that. “Getting access to data whenever you need it have been massively important for us,” Chilton says. “The world around us has changed and the pressures are different — we’ve always talked about efficiency but now we’re being measured on this in quite an aggressive way. Citrix products have scaled and flexed to meet the challenges of our race team, and the impact of existing Citrix tools and software are massively bigger than before. Competitive advantage in Formula 1 used to be about how much money was spent, but now it’s about efficiency and how well and effectively you use the resources given to you.”
From top to bottom, Citrix touches every life cycle of the business — from concept and design through to manufacturing and racing, says Matt Cadieux, Chief Information Officer at Oracle Red Bull Racing. “Citrix helps us get data, content, and applications to key decision makers or people operating race equipment where they can make split-second decisions in an already fast paced environment. Citrix technology and technical staff help us get the most out of these solutions which really helps us to raise the bar and perform at a high level.”
From a racing and business performance perspective, the fact that Oracle Red Bull Racing mastered the development of two completely different yet successful race cars simultaneously is unprecedented. But it didn’t happen over just one or two years, nor without the collaboration and dedication of a workforce of more than 700 people at the race team’s headquarters in the UK as well as their extended partner network. The team’s success has been an evolution, a complex journey of more than several years hard work and when you’re finally on top of the grid, it’s even more difficult to stay there.
“Ultimately, we’re a racing team and we’re here to build race cars that win races and Championships,” Christian Horner, Team Principal, says. “But we’re equally looking to collaborate with partners — partners like Citrix — to pioneer new technologies and really test and push the boundaries both on and off the track. We are about working collectively and collaboratively. Pushing boundaries. Pushing technology. Spurring each other on.”
Oracle Red Bull Racing are currently maintaining the lead in both the Driver’s and Constructor’s World Championships as all Formula 1 race teams power down for a two-week mandatory shutdown in mid-August. It has been a long lead-in to the recent success of Oracle Red Bull Racing, and Citrix has been there every step of the way.
Learn more about how Citrix is helping Oracle Red Bull Racing build the new world of work.
