The show on race day is bright, fast, and loud. Racing has always been a sensory-rich sport, inundating fans with sounds that can be felt in the bones, colors that flash past in the blink of an eye, and the full gamut of human drama on display.

But the tools that bring that show to life are quieter, often operating unseen in the background. Take cloud computing, for example. Advances in internet bandwidth and speed, remote data storage, machine learning, and human interface with these systems have transformed the paddock. The days of race teams and sanctioning bodies constructing racks of servers at their headquarters to compile data are fading into the rearview mirror. The day of instant access to terabytes of data using remote servers has arrived.

SRO Motorsports Group, based in Austin, Texas, illustrates how thoroughly cloud computing has worked its way into all facets of motorsports. The sanction works closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), series sponsor for GT World Challenge and GT America. “We use cloud computing across our entire business,” said Greg Gill. “It is how our business is organized and stored from all aspects—vehicle registration, licensing, integration with our sanctioning body, the United States Auto Club. It gets down into the media department, how we store images, how we retrieve those images, how we work with our media partners, how we upload things to Racer TV. It touches all aspects of our business.

“And then on the race weekend experience, it goes not only from scrutineering, either post-race or pre-race, but then also to in-race management as well,” Gill continued. “When they’re watching the race and they think something has happened they need to review, we’ve got to be able to roll that footage back. Where do we get that footage? How is it being stored? Initially it’s locally to the cameras and equipment onsite, but then it’s quickly put up to the cloud so we can reference it later and use it. That then gets into long-term storage decisions. If the stewards want to look at something and review something again post-race, restoring that information again becomes easily accessible. 

“Finally, it comes into long-term technical and balance of performance aspects. We’re uploading all the information, all the data points, from all the GT sessions so we have a robust picture of what’s going on with SRO racing literally around the world. We’re able to use data from a race that might have been in China, last weekend’s race in Belgium, a race coming up in Magny-Cours, France, or a race that might be going on at Phillips Island in Australia. You couldn’t do that if you were relying on a hard drive being shipped around the world. You’ve got to have instant access to it,” added Gill.

When visualizing a modern race car, it becomes clearer how cloud computing interacts with almost every facet of racing. “In motorsports, the cars are basically rolling computers,” said Angelo Comazzetto, from the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer with AWS Security. “The timing and scoring is like a mobile data center. And you’ve got the way that the spectators watch the action, which is done with a lot of computers and technology. And all of that is based on a venue like a motorsports arena, which is physical. There are cars and engines and tires and people running around. In that particular way, motorsports itself is very similar to a modern technological enterprise, because they are one. They are in the business of gathering data, trying to get as much of it as they can, and then trying to analyze it as fast as they can so they can ask questions and do things with the data.”

Richard Childress Racing (RCR) in Welcome, North Carolina, has teamed with Rescale for cloud computing resources for its NASCAR Cup and Xfinity teams. “Cloud computing has been used for our DOE analysis tools, running scrapers, and hosting dashboards,” said Keith Rodden of RCR. “By leveraging Rescale it allows us to do intense computing without being constrained to on-premise hardware, while we also benefit from having the ability to schedule jobs to irregular hours.”

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