Formula One Partners With AWS To Design 2021 Season Car

Formula One Group has sought the services of Amazon Web Services to complete a Computational Fluid Dynamics project to simulate the aerodynamics of cars when racing.

The goal is to create car designs for the 2021 season.

The project utilized over 1150 computational cores to run detailed scenarios that comprised over 550 million data points, which would model the effect of a car’s aerodynamic wake on another.

The announcement was made at AWS on Monday in Las Vegas, and Formula 1 claimed they would be able to reduce the run time of the simulations by at least 70 percent on Amazon’s platform, which means it would now take 18 hours as opposed to 60.

The collaboration ran for six months and utilized Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud C5N instances. According to the firms, the play delivered the performance equivalent of a supercomputer at a reduced cost.

The increased excitement for fans through allowing wheel-to-wheel racing was one of the tenets that were included for the project. The downforce created by the aerodynamics is the most significant differentiator on driver performance.

It is because the downforce allows the cars to travel faster through corners. The current generations of formula one cars have a loss of downforce, especially when they are side by side. That reduces the ability of the driver to sustain close racing, and it makes it harder to overtake.

A car that is running a car length behind another would lose upwards of 50 percent of the downforce.

To reduce the loss of downforce, Formula 1 partnered with AWS to investigate how the aerodynamics of the cars interact when they are racing in close proximity.

The simulations looked at the cars in the usual racing situations, and the results drove the changes to the proposed design for 2021.

Formula One has since been able to design a car that only has 15 percent downforce loss at the same time, which is one car length distance.

The 2021 car is going to feature a new bodywork design that has a new front wing shape, simplified suspension, and new rear end layout. The car will also come available with wheel wake control devices that run on 18-inch wheels with low profile tires.

The AWS vice president of Compute Services, Matt Garman, claimed customers utilize AWS for the CFD projects to design all things from the medical to aircraft devices. He added it would be exciting to be part of the design for the next generation race cars.