Why every F1 car is basically a rolling communication platform, and what your business can learn from it

Why F1 teams depend on unified communications

An F1 team is, at its core, a distributed organisation working under extreme pressure. On any given race weekend, hundreds of people are involved: engineers on the pit wall, strategists in the garage, aerodynamicists and data scientists back at the factory, logistics teams moving equipment across continents.

They all need to be in sync. A strategy call takes seconds. A tyre decision can define a season. And the information that feeds those decisions flows through the unified communications infrastructure the team has built.

Zoom was an official partner of Oracle Red Bull Racing for several seasons — not just as a logo on the car, but as the communication backbone the team relied on to keep hundreds of people connected across time zones and race weekends. It is a partnership that demonstrates how seriously the top teams take their collaboration platform.

But communication infrastructure is only half the equation. The other half is the people who use it, and how well they trust each other to act on the information it delivers. During a race, the call of when to pit is made by the strategist, not the driver. The driver trusts that call completely, because roles are clear and the system is designed for speed. That level of organisational clarity does not happen by accident. It is built through culture, repeated practice, and tools that make the right information available to the right person at exactly the right moment.

Every top team on the grid has a technology partner embedded in their operation, providing computing infrastructure, collaborative tools, and digital solutions used across the entire organisation. Some focus on transforming how workflows are structured, using AI and collaboration tools to create operational gains both on and off the track. Others bring remote connectivity and real-time data capabilities that keep engineers, strategists, and leadership aligned, wherever they are in the world.

The specifics differ from team to team, but the intent is the same: make communication faster, make decisions better, and reduce the friction that gets in the way of performance.

What this means for your organisation

Most companies will never have a pit crew or a race strategy to worry about. But the underlying challenge is identical: how do you keep people aligned, informed, and moving in the same direction — especially in a hybrid working environment where teams are not all in the same room?

Hybrid working is now simply how most organisations operate. Teams span offices, cities, and time zones. Decisions need to be made quickly. Context needs to travel with the work. And the people doing the work need to feel connected to each other and to a shared purpose.

That is exactly what the right collaboration platform enables. Not just video calls and chat, but a unified environment where communication, decisions, documents, and people come together — so that the distance between colleagues stops being a friction point and starts being irrelevant.

Four things worth getting right in your collaboration platform

Communication should be unified. In F1, information cannot afford to get lost between systems. The same applies to any ambitious team. When chat, meetings, telephony, and shared workspaces live in one place, things move faster and fewer things fall through the cracks.

Remote should feel equal. The people who are not physically in the room should have the same quality of experience as those who are. That means investing in the tools and habits that make hybrid working genuinely work — not just for the people in the office, but for everyone.

Less time on overhead, more time on the work itself. F1 strategists do not spend time summarising what was just discussed — they act on it. AI-assisted features like Zoom’s AI Companion automatically summarise meetings and surface action items, helping any team get closer to that ideal.

Data should inform decisions, not make them. F1 teams collect gigabytes of data per race weekend, yet when conditions change unexpectedly – a safety car, a sudden rain shower, a rival pitting early – it is human judgment that adapts the plan. The technology surfaces the insight. The person makes the call. The same principle applies in any organisation: AI summaries and dashboards are only as valuable as the decisions they enable.

Getting the most out of a collaboration platform

There is one more thing F1 teaches us about performance under pressure: standing still is not an option. Top teams update roughly 80 per cent of their cars’ components over a single season. The moment they stop iterating, they start falling behind. The same applies to how organisations use their collaboration tools. Deploying a platform is not the finish line — it is the starting grid. The teams that pull ahead are the ones that keep refining how they work, adopt new features as they become available, and treat their tooling as something to be continuously optimised rather than simply maintained.

“Businesses tend to think in terms of costs. But investing in a platform like Zoom is really an investment in efficiency, and in people. It can feel complex because there is so much you can do, and the new AI features do not always make that easier to navigate. We understand that completely. That is why we are here. As the most trusted Zoom partner in the Benelux, we translate an organisation’s challenges into a Zoom setup that truly fits. We provide strategic advice and keep teams up to date on new features, developments, and updates as they arrive. You get more out of Zoom when an expert understands what your organisation actually needs to perform at its best. We transform Zoom from a communications platform into a strategic instrument that delivers measurably more value than it costs.”

— Sven Lagerweij, CEO, Duppal

The technology is there. The question is whether you use it well.

F1 teams have shown what is possible when organisations take their collaboration infrastructure seriously. The technology partners on those cars are not just sponsors; they are proof that the world’s most high-performance teams understand that how people work together matters as much as what they are working on.

When the lights go out this weekend, every team on that grid will have shown up fully prepared — strategy in place, tools connected, people aligned. The question worth asking is whether your organisation is just as well set up. Because in business, as in Formula 1, the season does not wait for anyone.