With the 2026 Formula 1 season restarting this weekend in Miami following an unexpected pause following the cancellation of races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the teams will be eager to get back to racing.
But following the sport’s largest-ever shake-up in terms of rules and regulations, the need for effective research and performance has never been greater.
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A seamless bridge
The team started working with 1Password shortly before the 2025 Formula 1 season, with the company’s tools now an integral part of the Oracle Red Bull Racing tech stack.
“Ultimately we’re trying to use as much of the toolset as possible,” Oracle Red Bull Racing CIO Cadieux notes – but aside from simply protecting the team’s important secrets with an enterprise password manager, 1Password’s technology has had a very tangible effect on its wind tunnel testing.
A vital part of car development, wind tunnel testing is highly regulated by the sport’s regulatory body, the FIA, meaning the team has to ensure it gets as much as it can out of the limited time it has.
Ian Brunton, the team’s Head of Software Engineering – Aerodynamics, notes the wind tunnel system is a “significantly complex system”, meaning that if some form of error were to occur while testing, a debug, shutdown or restart could be disastrous, particularly in the 24/7 world of Formula 1 where after hours work is not an exception.
Previously, the team would have had to manually restart recovery and redeployment with an expert who knew the correct restart order and the Kubernetes and Kafka setup, shutting down work while this took place.
But thanks to 1Password’s Kubernetes operators, service restoration is now fully automated, meaning this time has been reduced from up to an hour to around two minutes – a 91% reduction, meaning the team can reclaim valuable testing time and move faster during a race-critical window.
This isn’t just a proof of concept either – Brunton notes a major power outage knocked out all the team’s systems last year, requiring such a recovery process in a matter of minutes.
Elsewhere, Brunton explains how 1Password has helped speed up processes involved in Oracle Red Bull Racing CFD (computational fluid dynamics) workflows, again allowing for faster development of new parts for the car.
Development work is often spread across multiple teams and experts across Oracle Red Bull Racing, so having a system such as that provided by 1Password, where users can quickly and securely get access to the latest updates and upgrades.
Brunton calls this “a seamless bridge” between workflows, greatly reducing friction and cutting down on wasted time at a critical early stage in design.
Security and management tools are often the bane of everyday workers’ lives, sometimes restricting access at just the wrong time, but Cadieux notes that hasn’t been the case at Oracle Red Bull Racing.
“I think from a user productivity point of view, we’re better off with the tool than without,” he notes, highlighting 1Password’s password management tool as an ideal replacement for people writing down logins on pieces of paper as an obvious success, as well as ensuring secrets and privileged accounts are as secure as possible.
“We’re pretty good at actually getting genuine value from the tools that we need,” Burnton says, “the adoption has come essentially through proving that this actually does add value…it’s just organically grown.”
Push for pole
Given the growing importance of cybersecurity in high-stakes environments, can Formula 1 lead the way in encouraging businesses to boost their safety?
“I think we have the same threats as a mainstream business,” Cadieux says, “and with the world being more dangerous, and more external threats and insider threats, we’re all facing the same sort of threats and having to manage it.
“In Formula 1, it shows we can do it without slowing your business down, and we’re a good example of if you work smart, apply security, tools and procedures smartly, you can still operate and be very agile.”
Looking forward, it’s clear Oracle Red Bull Racing has had a challenging start to the season, so the focus is on improving fast and catching up with the rest of the field.
Cadieux notes that “the goal is to give engineers the best tooling, the most automation we can, so they can focus on designing the car, improving the car performance, and making the right engineering decisions at the track and not be frustrated by digital problems.”
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