With its legions of fans worldwide, and a dramatised Netflix series to boot, Formula One is enjoying a boom in popularity, culminating in the Formula One group doubling revenue to $360 million in Q1 of 2022, and seeing a profit of $19 million – compared to losing $47 million in the first quarter of 2021.
Through the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the 2020-21 season delayed and motor races taking place without fans, Formula One has had an increasingly busy race schedule, a healthy mix of car manufacturers and independent teams vying for the driver and constructor championships, and with countries fighting to add their track to the race calendar.
On the track, meanwhile, regulation changes have seen 2022 cars aerodynamically engineered to allow for closer racing, while an enforced budget cap has been introduced to tighten the gap between race leaders and the rest of the pack.
For Nathan Sykes, CIO and data science director at mid-field team Alpine, achieving high performance on the track comes down to proving the return on investment (ROI) of data science, adopting low-code to improve efficiency, and resetting the value of IT.
Reimaging the IT department as business systems
Sykes’ official title at Alpine F1 is IT Business Systems and Data Science Director, a role he carried over from the team’s days as Renault Sport Racing, since rebranded as Renault’s motorsport arm, Alpine, for the 2021 season. He says he consciously chose business systems because it offered a wider breadth of responsibilities, befitting of his own varied background.
“I’ve done 16-odd years [in F1], as aerodynamicist building my way up from engineer, all the way through to pretty much managing and getting all the data together,” says Sykes.
Alpine F1 team CIO and data science director Nathan Sykes
Renault Group
Data science has become his own differentiator. At Renault Sport Racing, he initially joined as head of data science before being promoted to CDO, and he would later change titles again to IT Business Systems and Data Science Director.
In doing so, however, cracks would emerge. The team’s data was in a poor state, costs were spiralling through third parties, and IT appeared to be a back-office function with minimal engagement with an organisation that offers services spanning from motor racing to road cars and apparel.
“IT was not in a very good position,” admits Sykes. “They were trying to help the business, but it wasn’t happening. We had lots of external contractors that we’re working with, which are expensive.”
“We had the business, who weren’t quite giving us the processes as to how they wanted to work. We never really got the full picture as to how they wanted to work. Therefore, sat at the bottom of it all, was the IT department trying to do their best to give the solutions that they wanted – and really struggling to get on top of it.”
Sykes sought to change the culture, empowering team members to work collaboratively with different departments, and to put business systems at the fore.
By this, Sykes suggests that business systems changed the focus from the business defining what they wanted from IT to a more data-driven, impartial view of current and future requirements. In short, any project would align the defined requirements and scope of the project with the business processes and these in turn would inform the data model.
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