Inside the Race to Secure the F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix

Every Formula 1 race weekend is essentially a pop-up event in a different city around the world, bringing 10 teams, their cars, and their entire mobile infrastructure to Australia, Singapore, Monaco, and beyond. This weekend's Las Vegas Grand Prix is especially unscripted, though, because the event is Formula 1's debut in Sin City. Cold weather and a rogue drain cover on the track have already injected some chaos into the spectacle. But as they prepared for the event, cybersecurity specialists from McLaren Racing, the city of Las Vegas, and the security firm Darktrace told WIRED that they aren't deterred—their whole job is to expect the unexpected.

Major live sporting events are a prime target for hackers because they are prominent, highly visible, and draw international attention. Russia's notorious attempt to target the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, for example, included both disruptive attacks and hacks for information gathering. All sports now incorporate advanced elements of digital analysis and quantified performance, but Formula 1 is a particularly data-heavy sport. Race cars are essentially giant sensor arrays that are hurtling around at more than 200 miles per hour, generating massive amounts of information. The quicker teams can crunch the numbers from the track, the sooner they can determine which strategies and modifications to employ in real time or in preparation for the final race of the weekend. But a denial of service attack on any of a team’s engineering systems, one that disrupts their real-time communications, or theft of intellectual property could be disastrous for an F1 team.

“We’re a very public sport,” says Ed Green, McLaren's head of commercial technology. “Our people are known and where we’re racing is known and what we do is known. And while there are lots of unknown things about our operation, lots of what we do is public so people can find out information and start to target us. So what we’re trying to do is make sure that security is part of the team and an additive part of what we do.”

Green describes McLaren's setup at each race as “an extension of the office for the weekend.” The infrastructure is a sort of mobile data center where, for example, the pit crew on the ground is working as a remote part of the garage back at headquarters. This means that a crucial component of the entire operation is reducing latency in the digital connection between the track and home base—a geographic and network distance that varies significantly from weekend to weekend as the season plays out around the world. Green says that during the Brazil race in Sao Paulo at the beginning of November, McLaren was connected to its HQ in England with just a 223-millisecond delay.

“We pull down 1.5 terabytes of data a weekend and run 50 million simulations over the course of a weekend. And I would break down the importance of cybersecurity in a few different buckets,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown says. “We have the design IP of our race car, and that is highly confidential trade secrets that we're moving around a lot. We're dealing with third parties and racing around the world. And then we have all the data that is going on at the race track, where we're literally making split-second decisions.”

Darktrace, which provides digital defense services for McLaren and has also worked with the city of Las Vegas on its cybersecurity for years, says that phishing, business email compromise, and other scams are the types of attacks its real-time, artificial-intelligence-based threat monitoring system detects and blocks most often related to Formula 1, both day to day and on race weekends.

“One of the things that I've learned from being a partner with McLaren is the car changes continuously, every race there are things that are changing, new elements being introduced based on the track conditions,” says Nicole Eagan, Darktrace's chief strategy and AI officer. “It's a continuous updating and changing of IP that's much more dynamic than in other industries that we protect.”

All of this change and quick communication both within an organization and with third parties creates potential opportunities for scammers. But McLaren's Brown also notes that Formula 1 teams need to be wary of their position on the global stage.

“It's one thing to lock down Fort Knox—we’re moving 24 times around the world into different countries, from China to Saudi Arabia to Las Vegas,” he says. “Each one has its own challenges. With the growth of the sport, how much technology we use and where we're racing, people will attempt to use our sport sometimes in a political nature. There are bad actors that can potentially come at us from every angle and for every reason, some of which aren't personal. So therefore cybersecurity is right at the top of the list when we go through our IT needs.”

While Darktrace chief information security officer Mike Beck agrees that geopolitics and hacktivism can pose a threat to a sport with as much global reach as F1, he adds that competitive racing's simple and straightforward goal is an advantage for defenders.

“The mission is so clear, get that car around the track as fast as possible and make sure no one steals your IP and you don’t get locked out,” he says. “When you get that sort of clarity on a mission you can articulate risk really, really well.”

While preparing for the Formula 1 race weekend has been a logistical challenge in many ways, Michael Sherwood, Las Vegas' chief innovation and technology officer, says that the city is well positioned to handle the cybersecurity component because it deals with so many high-profile events throughout the year. Las Vegas has also invested in smart city infrastructure and already defends a massive array of deployed sensors and other networked devices.

Recent cyberattacks that targeted some of Las Vegas' entertainment giants, including Caesar's and MGM Resorts, have put the city on even higher alert, Sherwood says. But he adds that whether he's working on digital defenses for the Grand Prix, New Year's Eve, or just a regular night of epic Vegas partying, “there’s no resting. This is the world we live in—you’re on guard all the time, preparing and prepping.”