RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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As the world's fastest and most glamorous sport, Formula 1 has long attracted fans of all ages around the globe - and in recent years, the success of Netflix's Drive to Survive series has helped this grow even further.
With CEO Stefano Domenicali recently stating his hope for over a billion Formula 1 fans within the next few years, the need for a resolute technology stack to handle all of the data for these fans is more important than ever.
The organization has been working with Salesforce for some time now to do just that, and at the recent Salesforce World Tour London 2026 event, I sat down with key Formula 1 tech minds to find out more.
Augmenting and speeding forward
Having first started working together in 2019, the 2026 season marks the next level of Formula 1's partnership with Salesforce, Claire Sparks, its Head of Tech Initiatives, says, bringing in, “a maturity, a shift, a re-energization of the work we do to together…really challenging one other to do things differently, to think differently, to deliver new things.”
2026 is a key year for Formula 1 in more ways than one, as the biggest shake-up in rules and regulations for several seasons has meant major changes up and down the grid.
To help explain the changes, Formula 1 developed Tech Director, a new application built on AgentForce to take complex technical rules and distil them down for fans of all levels of expertise.
This service also looks to provide a single location for fans to get the information they need, so there is no need to switch between different apps, building customer loyalty with real-time, accurate data in a sport where change happens fast.
Matt Kemp, Head of Customer Data Operations at Formula 1, notes that when looking to improve and upgrade its tech stack, the organization has the view of "how does technology disrupt technology".
“We use the technology to augment our teams, to improve the way we’re thinking about how we engage with our fans, and really take it to the next level," he notes.
(Image credit: Salesforce)
In particular, Kemp highlights how Salesforce's Data360 platform has brought together all of the company's tools in one platform, massively reducing complexity, especially when working alongside its other data partner, AWS.
Sparks agrees, saying that this move away from individual solutions towards a platform-based landscape has shifted how Formula 1 thinks about technology as a whole, moving from previously wanting a point solution for everything, towards now wanting a platform-layer of technology that can bring cross-functional tools across the business.
“The strategic shift with Salesforce has also meant that we’ve had a mental model shift on how we approach technology, our choices, our evaluation, our view of it, and how we talk about it in the business," she says.
"We’re now joining the dots in all of our solutions and all of our functions within the business to really start to see this technology in a much more powerful way."
Maximum engagement
So what does this partnership look like in action for Formula 1 fans? Quite simply, Kemp and Sparks say, it should mean that fans get quicker access to more accurate data, and a much smoother all-round user experience.
Kemp notes that a million data points are being generated each minute of a Formula 1 race, which can now be made customer-ready within three seconds.
Push notifications are a common way that Formula 1 delivers these updates to its fans, but previously, some of these alerts had been taking up to 20 minutes to deliver due to the sheer scale of the fandom. However Kemp notes that Salesforce was able to develop a new push notification system which can push millions of notifications in a minute
"In a sport where every millisecond can make a difference, that’s massive for us to engage with our fans on that sort of speed," Sparks adds.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Overall, working seamlessly is the key for Formula 1, especially when it comes to making the fan user experience a more engaging and enriching experience.
"Ultimately sport is about connection," Sparks says, outlining the ongoing challenge for Formula 1 of bringing in new fans, with a roadmap of moving from, “a sort of fairly clinical personalization, to focusing on how do we really connect on an emotional level with our fans."
As Kemp adds, “when you stop thinking of customization as a one-way traffic, and start to think of it as a conversational piece, that will really open up the doors and tap into emotions/find out what a fan wants as opposed to what we think they want."
In such a data-driven sport, the goal will always be getting the most out of every bit of information, whether it's the teams and drivers searching for marginal gains to push performance, or the Formula 1 organization looking for a way to better communicate with its fans thanks to Salesforce's suite of tools and services.
As Kemp puts it, “we want to manage it all together - that sounds really hard, and really complex, because it is today, but with the agentic layer on top of that, and all of these tools…all of a sudden it becomes a reality."
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