F1 fans rejoice! The 2021 Formula One season is revving up with its season opener, the Bahrain Grand Prix, set for March 28. Unveiling its 2021 car, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team is poised to continue its record-setting winning streak, partnering with Pure Storage® to help drive performance and innovation. 

We’re ready to make history together—and maybe win a “duel in the desert” or two.

Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton Return with a New Livery

Keep an eye out for the car’s new black-base livery, designed to highlight the team’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. And, we’ll see the return of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team drivers Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton is the most-winning driver in F1 history.

This year’s car, the W12 E Performance, is built on the solid base of its predecessor with aerodynamic advancements and improvements to its suspension, cooling system, and power unit. This is the first car to use the “E Performance” designation, signifying Pure’s closer alignment to the Mercedes-AMG performance division of the future. It will be thrilling to see how the car handles 57 laps of challenging temperature fluctuations, wind, and the super-tight Turn 10.

A Partnership Built for Performance

In F1, data is relentlessly used to make both instantaneous decisions on the track and performance-driven strategies in the factory. With data critical to understanding what generates and inhibits performance at the engineering, environmental, and driver level, Pure is a natural technology partner for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team.  

For the past five years, Pure has helped the team maintain its record-setting pace by providing an all-flash storage infrastructure to support performance-critical workloads. Cars are fitted with more than 200 physical data sensors that gather over 400GB of data every race weekend. It’s easy to understand why the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team chose Pure FlashArray™ to help support its goal of ever-improving performance.

A Modern Data Experience™ Will Yield an Unfair Advantage

Some call the partnership between Pure and Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team an unfair advantage. We believe it’s a winning combination that highlights how a Modern Data Experience maximizes the value of data assets to help drive competitive advantage—as well as one of the fastest vehicles on the planet.  

The team’s data demands are incredibly vast, leveraged for everything from design and prototyping to manufacturing and testing from the factory to the track. With FlashArray, the team’s IT infrastructure has been transformed. They’ve slashed key database queries by 95%, and the time needed to open critical data has been reduced by two-thirds. And with the small footprint of the Pure array, data rack space has been reduced by nearly 70%. That means substantial savings on operating costs and simple, on-site assembly and disassembly of IT equipment.  

The ability to run myriad applications on one storage system is a massive benefit to the team. This includes using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to test components of a car while simulating race conditions. The data-intensive process enables the team to adapt the car to each racing circuit throughout the season. CFD requires about 20 hours of processing time per simulation. With Pure, the team has been able to cut components of this computation process by up to 15%. 

In a sport where every second counts, this time savings is literally game-changing. 

See Pure at the Start-line

Look for the W12 E Performance at the Bahrain Grand Prix and throughout the F1 season. And stay tuned as we follow the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team on the path to its eighth straight championship win.