Ferrari Throttles Data Innovation for Consumers, Fans
In Formula 1 (F1), innovation is often focused on the vehicle. Very little innovation filters down to the consumers and fans.
F1 teams and brands are now looking at their digital experience with fans and potential consumers mainly staying at home because of COVID-19 restrictions. A new partnership between AWS and Ferrari is about to make a massive leap forward in creating a unique digital experience for engineers, consumers, and F1 fans.
The new partnership deal will see AWS becoming Ferrari’s official cloud, machine learning, and AI provider. According to the official announcement, they are hoping to drive innovation across the entire organization, including the road cars department, GT Competitions, the Ferrari Challenge, and the Scuderia Ferrari FORMULA 1 (F1) team.
AWS’s advanced analytics, machine learning, compute, storage, and database capabilities will help Ferrari engineers to gain new insights into car design and performance on the road and track. It will leverage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS Graviton2-based instances to run complex simulations that test car performance under a wide variety of driving conditions and racing scenarios.
When Ferrari moves from simulation to assembly of its new road vehicle prototypes, it will use AWS analytics and Amazon SageMaker to gain deeper insights into how its parts and cars perform under real-world conditions. The company will also build a data lake on Amazon S3 and use AWS Lake Formation to quickly and securely gather catalogs and clean hundreds of petabytes of data.
As a result, the company’s engineers can now pursue an agile approach to experimentation with new designs and strategies to accelerate their pace of innovation.
“We chose AWS because of their relentless focus on innovation, unmatched portfolio of capabilities, and proven experience supporting partners in the automotive and sports industries. Throughout our storied history, Ferrari has had racing and innovation at our core, and now we look forward to applying AWS machine learning, advanced analytics, and high-performance computing across the company to deliver deeper insights and even more powerful cars,” said Mattia Binotto, principal of Scuderia Ferrari.
What’s more exciting is how Ferrari is looking to use the AWS partnership to change their consumer and F1 fan experience.
Using Amazon EKS and Amazon DynamoDB, Ferrari will quickly create, deploy, and scale improved digital experiences such as the Ferrari Car Configurator.
Consumers can use the Configurator to custom-build their car and immerse themselves in high-resolution 2-D and 3-D visualizations. Ferrari’s Vehicle Information Hub, also powered by AWS, will centralize and manage car information. For consumers, it means access to proactive, personalized information related to servicing and maintenance.
For F1 racing fans, Scuderia Ferrari will use AWS compute, containers, and media services to power a new digital fan engagement platform via its mobile app. The new app aims to inform, educate, and entertain its fans. Upon creating customized profiles, fans will receive exclusive content such as virtual access to the Scuderia Ferrari garage and hospitality suite on race days.
Moving forward, Ferrari plans to build VR and AR experiences on AWS that bring fans into the garage to interact with drivers and team personnel. Ferrari also is looking to grow a virtual fan community among the app’s millions of users and engage fans with app-based quizzes on race days.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Federico Luppi
