Have you ever seen a fuel-injected data processing machine that travels 230mph? Today’s Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 cars generate over a million data points per second, thanks to sensors tracking heat, pressure, friction and fuel. In the world of Formula One, where milliseconds matter, IBM and Scuderia Ferrari HP are partnering to ensure fans’ digital experience matches the speed, passion and precision of the sport. “With AI, we’re creating a new blueprint for digital fan engagement that brings fans even closer to the action whether it’s race weekend or not,” says IBM’s Senior VP of Marketing and Communications, Jonathan Adashek.
In time for this year’s Miami Grand Prix, Scuderia Ferrari HP and IBM launched a new fan app built in part on IBM’s Watsonx platform. Using generative AI, the platform transforms the torrent of track data and data from various other sources into a personalized and interactive mobile app experience for Scuderia Ferrari HP’s 396 million fans around the world around the clock, 365 days a year.
Scuderia Ferrari’s diehard fans, the “tifosi,” are a special breed. They have “much more passion and much more emotion,” explained Ferrari Scuderia HP’s Team Principal Frédéric Vasseur in a lively keynote conversation with IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, at IBM Think. This fan base has been growing at a rapid clip, it has tripled in the last 3 years alone and its composition has also evolved.
“It’s not just the historic fans anymore,” Vasseur said. Some new fans are “more focused on the name of the driver’s girlfriend than lap times.” As the types and overall number of Ferrari fans multiply, understanding what those newcomers want as well as catering to Ferrari’s steadfast tifosi and Ferrari owners is only growing increasingly important.
The data generated by the Ferrari’s SF25’s racing around the track powers the new Race Center and Racing Insights, enabling Ferrari to personalize the experience for fans, says Fred Baker, IBM Sports Lead. This is the first time that Scuderia Ferrari has collected this amount of critical data in one place and the first time it has used generative AI to bring fans all-new features such as race recaps, historic stats, post-race insights, interactive polls, fan messages, and iconic race highlights.
LLMs on watsonx, transform the team’s complex race data into compelling narratives that include reflections from the Scuderia Ferrari HP drivers and the team principal. Technologies on watsonx also create dynamic visualizations that allow fans to interact with and see post-race driver and car data including telemetry, weather, track
conditions, session results, car and tire strategies. These post-race recaps of the Scuderia Ferrari HP team’s performance are now available for fans within hours of a race finish.
All of this means “We can get much more meaningful engagement with Ferrari fans with this richer, more interactive content that is possible thanks to the new architecture underpinning it: the hybrid cloud,” says IBM’s Baker. The Scuderia Ferrari HP app is built on a scalable and secure cloud platform, centralizing data from multiple sources and bringing together services from partners like AWS and Adobe.
While the former Scuderia Ferrari fan app was stacked with rich, iconic Ferrari content, it was generally static, meaning fans could not interact with it. Through the new reimaged app, fans can send messages directly to the Scuderia Ferrari HP team for the chance to be featured in key team communications such as social media posts and team blogs. In frequent polls, fans can interact with other fans by voting on a range of Scuderia Ferrari HP topics including qualifying, race performances, and historical and favorite team moments. Later in 2025, Team Radio will bring near real-time conversation between the drivers and their race directors to the millions of fans during the race, sharing key moments between drivers and the pit wall.
“With IBM’s cutting-edge AI technology and our shared commitment to innovation and excellence, we are creating a digital experience worthy of the Ferrari name,” says Lorenzo Giorgetti, Chief Racing Revenue Officer, Ferrari.
IBM worked closely with Ferrari to strike a balance between designing a mobile experience that pushes the boundaries of innovation while staying true to Ferrari’s design principles, distinctive voice and storied history.
“The beauty of the app needed to match the luxury of the brand,” explained IBM Senior Partner Shannon Miller in his Think keynote conversation with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. “The second key thing we wanted to do was get content more easily and faster to the fans.”
In practice, this meant the large language model powering the new Scuderia Ferrari HP app had to be trained to closely align “to the way Ferrari talks about a race,” says IBM’s Baker. This includes the order of topics when covering a race, and strategy and critically “ensuring we are working within the constraints of the Formula 1 ecosystem and focusing on not comparing between drivers, with other teams and their data, and not criticising or sharing important strategy considerations.”
Finally, perhaps obvious but critical, the LLM could not hallucinate or get anything wrong. IBM is no novice to addressing accuracy, security and governance. “The app is built with the same data and analytics technologies used by IBM clients across industries,” says IBM’s Adashek. In highly regulated industries like finance or healthcare, there is no real acceptable margin of error; millions of dollars or lives are always at stake. In this case, the team used an important LLM-as-a-judge stage gate within the watsonx.governance component of the solution, to test all generated content against Ferrari’s historical structure tone and other guardrails agreed.
Going forward, fans will remain the focus says Baker. There are so many different personas within that growing fanbase. With the Scuderia Ferrari HP app on watsonx,
“we can, for example, quite easily personalise the race summary to either be highly technical or written for a child or written in a more social tone. Additional interactivity and gamification of the app are other areas to expand, says Baker. “There will be new polls regularly so fans can vote on interesting data points, milestones or predictions.”
What do Scuderia Ferrari drivers like Lewis Hamilton think of the new IBM Ferrari fan app? “Next-level,” Hamilton told his 39.5 million followers in an Instagram story.
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