AWS Transforms F1 Broadcasts: Engaging Casual Fans at COTA
At Circuit of the Americas, the story starts long before the lights go out.
On a quiet Austin morning, with no engines fired and no tyre blankets humming, Ruth Buscombe sat over a coffee at Soho House and summed it up in a line: COTA is where "F1 remembers to be fun." No car had turned a wheel. Kimi Antonelli hadn’t yet clinched the World Championship. Yet the narrative that millions would watch on Sunday was already being built – not just in garages and strategy rooms, but deep inside Amazon Web Services’ servers.
A week later, Antonelli would finally seal the title in Mexico. In Texas, he settled for something slightly more modest: victory from pole on a bold one-stop strategy that left him two points shy of the crown. The drive was his; the framing of it belonged, in no small part, to AWS.
COTA, Casual Fans and a New F1 Classroom
Buscombe knows this place. She has been coming to Austin since the inaugural race in 2012, long before Liberty Media reshaped the sport’s relationship with the U.S., long before Apple TV joined the party, long before AWS spotted a glaring gap in the broadcast: fans could see everything, but they didn’t always understand what they were watching.
COTA matters to her for its character – a track that demands brains as much as bravery – but also for who tunes in. The United States Grand Prix pulls in a huge casual audience, many of them seeing a full F1 race for the first time. This year, a significant chunk watched not on traditional F1 platforms, but via Apple TV.
That crowd is not the old guard. It’s the growth engine.
The numbers Buscombe cites are stark. Millions watch F1 worldwide. Forty‑three percent are under 35. Forty‑two percent are female. The fastest-growing group? Women aged 11 to 25. A generation that hasn’t spent three decades memorising tyre codes and refuelling strategies. Many of them weren’t even born when V10s screamed around the same circuits.
That is where AWS has found its true purpose. Inside the F1 app, it powers personalised experiences. On the world feed, its F1 Insights do the job of a race strategist on behalf of the viewer: why one car is flying and another is stuck in traffic, why a team chooses soft over hard, why a pit wall gambles or plays safe.
The philosophy is simple enough: if you can learn a sport, you can love it. Once you understand the story, you can fall in love with it.
Turning Fans into Strategists
In Austin’s paddock, AWS pulled back the curtain on what that future might look like with its Insight Track demo. It was presented as a game, but the implications run far deeper.
The premise: let the fan play strategist. Ask the system, “What if Charles had pitted for hards instead of mediums?” or “What if Norris had stopped two laps earlier?” and watch the race re-simulate in front of you. It’s choose‑your‑own‑adventure, but with tyre degradation curves and fuel loads.
This is more than a novelty. It’s a glimpse of a world where an F1 fan doesn’t just shout at the TV about a “bad strategy call” – they can test their theory against the same kind of modelling tools the teams lean on. Where the barrier between armchair and pit wall feels thinner than ever.
Insight Track isn’t on the market yet. Strategy Insights, though, already are – and they’ve become one of the most powerful tools in the modern broadcast.
From 300 Sensors to One Graphic
Every graphic you see on screen starts in the car.
Michael Aghataher, who leads the F1 partnership for AWS, can rattle off the numbers. Three hundred sensors on each car. Around 1.1 million data points per second, per car, per race. Over 20 weather stations scattered around the circuit, logging temperature, humidity, wind speed. Timing loops every 150 metres to nail down track position with forensic precision.
All of it flows into F1’s Event Technology Center. From there, the data splits: to Biggin Hill, to AWS for processing, and back again, all before the broadcast director has to make a decision in under 1.5 seconds. The clock is ruthless.
Out of that firehose, F1 chooses what matters. Some of it feeds Track Pulse. Some of it becomes the F1 Insights graphics that try to explain, in a clean, simple frame, why a leader is undercutting, why a midfield car is suddenly the fastest thing on track, or why a one‑stop gamble might actually work.
The system was pushed to its limits at Sepang just weeks before COTA. There, the sport returned to a circuit that hadn’t hosted F1 in years. No fresh mountain of team data. No recent baselines. AWS wasn’t even part of the sport the last time they raced there.
Buscombe found herself in the same position as a fan at home: no car, no private simulator, no legacy models to lean on. So she prepared her technical analysis, projections and strategies using only the AWS tools available that weekend.
From the outside, you wouldn’t have noticed the difference. That, of course, is the point.
Earning Space on the Screen
At the other end of this pipeline sits Dean Locke, F1’s director of broadcast and media. His team decides what survives the cut. And the competition for space is fierce.
F1 doesn’t just pump pictures to F1TV and Sky Sports. It also feeds dedicated channels for fans at the track, pulling in around half a million viewers each weekend. Every additional data layer, every extra graphic, fights for the same real estate.
Locke’s rule is blunt: every graphic has to earn its place.
He watches other sports, sees cluttered overlays, and asks the same question many viewers do: what is this actually telling me? So F1 puts each new idea through a ruthless test: does it justify the space, does it push the story forward, and can a casual viewer understand it instantly?
Strategy Insights, launched only a few races ago, is the clearest example of that philosophy paying off. Locke describes moments in the production gallery when his own team suddenly starts asking, “Why haven’t they stopped?” or “Why on earth did they pit now?” If the people surrounded by monitors and timing feeds are asking it, he knows the fans at home are too.
Now, they have the tools to answer those questions in real time, using hard data rather than guesswork.
The creative inspiration doesn’t just come from within the paddock. Locke’s group raids film, gaming and other sports for ideas. Even the upcoming F1 movie has sparked conversations: if this is what’s possible in a controlled, cinematic environment, how much of that can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into live coverage?
The solutions might be sketched on a commute or over a coffee, but they all run through the same technological backbone: the partnership with AWS.
From Purists to Pop Culture
When AWS first signed with F1 in 2018, the mission sounded straightforward: modernise the broadcast, give the purists more depth, sharpen the analytical edge.
Then came 2020. Then came Drive to Survive.
The Netflix series detonated the sport into mainstream culture. What began as a partnership for hardcore race fans suddenly found itself at the heart of a boom that reached lifestyle, fashion, and casual fandom on a scale nobody had fully anticipated.
The response inside F1 was clear: storytelling had to improve. Track Pulse arrived in 2021, born from that realisation. The sport kept growing through 2023 and beyond, especially among new and casual fans. F1 Strategy Insights followed in 2026, an evolution rather than an add‑on.
Aghataher now describes AWS as F1’s “intelligence layer,” a shifting, learning presence that has to grow in lockstep with the audience it serves.
That layer has expanded beyond the commercial side of the sport. After this year’s United States Grand Prix, the FIA named AWS its Official AI, Cloud, Computing, Machine Learning and Cloud Infrastructure Partner across all its properties. The same technology that helps explain a tyre strategy can now be used to analyse track limit violations, speed infringements and more.
The data that once lived only in garages and timing rooms now feeds into race control and regulation. The black box is being prised open from every angle.
Writing Tomorrow’s Story Before the First Lap
Which brings us back to that table at Soho House in Austin. No lap times. No sector splits. No radio meltdowns. Just a strategist, a laptop, and a sport that is learning to tell its own story better.
By the time Antonelli converted pole into victory on a one‑stop masterclass, the scaffolding around that narrative was already in place. The technology that helped Buscombe explain his race to the world is the same technology that now touches every corner of Formula 1.
It is being refined constantly, race by race, season by season, not just to show who wins, but to explain why. To turn confusion into clarity. To turn a casual glance into a lasting obsession.
“To learn a sport is to love it,” Buscombe says. Once you understand the story, you can fall in love with it.
Right now, AWS sits at the heart of F1’s attempt to make sure that when the next generation falls, they fall hard.
