Red Bull Ford Powertrains Using Oracle Cloud Technology

September 18, 2023 10:11 am

Ford shocked the world when the automaker announced that it would be making its long-awaited return to Formula 1 racing back in February, though that move had been quietly in the works for years. FoMoCo chose to partner with the powerhouse Oracle Red Bull Racing team in what is a true collaborative effort that will see the former develop power units for the latter, which in turn will also help The Blue Oval further its electrified powertrain development. However, Red Bull Ford Powertrains – the future supplier of hybrid power units for Oracle Red Bull Racing and Scuderia AlphaTauri starting in the 2026 season – is also leaning on Oracle’s cloud technology to develop these new powertrains, too.

These next-generation power units will utilize Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), specifically, which is able to supply significant processing power – giving engineers the ability to use digital simulations to evaluate concepts and refine designs before building a physical prototype. OTI also eliminates the added expense and time required to implement a large scale on-premises high performance computing (HPC) solution, which allowed the engineering team to get started on designing and delivering new power units more quickly.

This is notable because the Red Bull Ford Powertrains team is essentially starring from scratch with zero historical product data to lean on. To compete with other teams, it needs to maximize every technical advantage possible, which in this case including relying on digital simulations to find the optimal shapes and configurations for the initial power unit designs, which was made possible thanks to OCI.

“Our powertrains team is operating at an incredibly high speed to debut competitive power units that use 100-percent sustainable fuels by 2026,” said Christian Horner, Oracle Red Bull Racing Team Principal and CEO. “Oracle gives us the best infrastructure and the expertise to integrate it with our processes, so we can accelerate our powertrain development and meet the substantial challenge ahead.”

We’ll have more on Ford’s return to F1 soon, so sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for more Ford motorsports news and 24/7 Ford news coverage.

By Brett Foote

Brett's lost track of all the Fords he's owned over the years and how much he's spent modifying them, but his current money pits include an S550 Mustang and 13th gen F-150.