In a sport where success can be won or lost by fractions of a second, ensuring your technology stack is as effective as it can be is vital for every Formula 1 team.
With budgets being continuously scrutinized and new regulations coming in for the 2026 Formula 1 season, each team needs to ensure its workforce is as efficient and productive as possible.
Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 (AMF1) recently announced it would be renewing its partnership with ServiceNow, and TechRadar Pro was invited to the team’s Silverstone HQ to find out more.
"Redefining the core"
ServiceNow is many things to many customers, but for an organization as wide and varied as AMF1, the company has played a key role in the team’s continued digital transformation - although AMF1 may not necessarily use that term.
“I'm not a big fan of the word digital transformation - as for me, that suggests that it's done,” Sioned Edwards, IT Operations Director at Aston Martin F1, tells us, “to me, digital transformation is incremental change and delivering technology into an organization, so trying to say it's done is never going to fly - and it's never going to be done here!”
“We're always on this endless cycle of trying to improve technology, implementing technology, trying new things - so we're constantly digitally transforming.”
“In many cases, digital transformation misses one of the biggest points - it's the byproduct of organizational change - we talk about business transformation, AI transformation,” says ServiceNow chief innovation officer, Paul Hardy.
“Digital transformation done right is amazing…it’s redefining the core of what you do, redefining why you do it - and what impact does this have on your business - but it can’t be done well without business transformation or organizational change.”
Hardy adds that AMF1 is undertaking what he calls, “a real digital transformation journey…and it’s not something you do in 12 months - it takes time - but that’s what we’ve done (for customers) for the last 20 years!”
“Part of implementing ServiceNow is ensuring value now, value today, and value tomorrow,” he notes, “we know the use cases, so we can walk in and say, you might be a Formula 1 team, but I guarantee you’re going to be doing onboarding moves, ads changes, offboarding…and guess who else has that same challenge? Banks, healthcare services, and others - so we’re not just building a product for it, we’re building the narrative.”
Edwards notes that Formula 1 is such an ever-changing landscape, IT has to play a vital role, but there is a transience to this. In 18 months’ time, a team’s set-up could be entirely different to what it has now, so having a reliable partner with ServiceNow has been crucial.
“The way we’ve approached the ServiceNow implementation is to keep it incremental, keep having small wins and small pockets of work to echo what we try and do with the organization on performance gains,” she says, noting that AMF1 itself as an entity was only formed in 2021, as the next generation of the former Racing Point team, meaning a strong foundation was needed when it came to IT - which is where ServiceNow came in.
“It’s delivering value, rather than one big band solution - as sometimes when you do big projects, certainly from an IT perspective, the value gets lost - with an incremental change, it’s easy for people (in the team) to get on board with.”
“The ServiceNow implementation offered us the opportunity to do it right the first time…it was literally a blank sheet of paper!”
This makes it much like a Formula 1 car itself, as the vehicle which takes to the grid in the last race of season will be completely different to that which started in the first race, such is the rapid pace of development in the sport.
Edwards notes that once the messaging was tweaked to appeal to bosses who are trying to win Formula 1 races, the advantages of working with a partner like ServiceNow were obvious.
Even cybersecurity can be tied to stopping the car taking to the track, she notes, so linking it back to the team’s core values of being here to win, and to race, is vital.
“It’s really important to not only have the best technology, but also the most reliable technology,” Edwards adds, “you need a laptop to start the car, and if that laptop doesn’t work, the car doesn’t start!”
Looking forward
New regulations are coming into force in Formula 1 in 2026, with new challenges facing the entire team, so I ask Edwards if this has affected her priorities in any way.
“A cost cap in any other words is just a budget - just with some very interesting exclusions and rules,” she notes, “any leader in IT has to make decisions…how much performance is it going to add to the car, and how big a risk are we mitigating?”
“We operate with quite a high risk appetite, but there are some areas where we’re not willing to accept risk.”
“There’s a lot of work being pushed into the IT department, driven from the business and the organization - new tooling, new software, new hardware,” she notes, highlighting ever-changing new cybersecurity threats as another key consideration.
“So we have to look at deadlines - the first test is never going to change, so we have to make a priority call - there’s lots of long hours, lots of people that we’ve got to move around…so it’s a whole piece of not only technology work, but also logistical work.”
I ask Hardy if there were any specific existing customer use cases which helped ServiceNow adapt to the fast-paced world of Formula 1.
“Every millisecond counts, and you get the feeling when you work with the team that they’ve just got a passion for success - and I think we work with a lot of companies where people want to change things for good - and the energy you get for something that’s so fast-paced is electric.”
“It’s unanimous across all industries - every industry is having to reduce risk, every industry is having to cut costs, be more efficient, and wants their people to be more productive…and we’re in a good place to position ourselves to answer to that.”
“What customers say to us is that we’re moving at such a pace, the expectation from businesses is growing like never before - and yet we absolutely know this is the slowest we’re ever going to move - and the future is tomorrow, it’s not five years away any more.”
“We want the world to work - there’s a lot of things happening, and if we can change it a little bit, if we can add a little bit to that, we’re not just doing good for our customers, we’re doing better for humanity too.”
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