 Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk.com here in the virtual studios in Silicon Valley broadcasting around the world's virtual event. I'm John Furrier, you're a host of theCUBE. Got a great guest, Zach Brown, Chief Executive Officer of McLaren Racing. Really looking forward to this interview, Zach. Welcome to theCUBE. Well, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So we have a huge fan base in the tech community. A lot of geeks, a lot of the nerds, they love the tech behind the sport and Netflix's Driving to Survive series has absolutely catapulted the popularity of F1 in the tech community. So congratulations on all the success in that program and then on the track. Thank you very much. It's been a good run. We've won our first race in a while, but we still have a ways to go to getting that world championship that we're hunting for. So for the techies out there and the folks in our audience that aren't familiar with the specifics of the racing team and the dynamics line, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. So McLaren Racing, which has a variety of racing teams, a Formula One team and IndyCar team and Extremee team and an Esports team, were the second most successful Formula One team and the history of sport. Now 183 wins, 182 when I joined 20 world championships and we're close to 1,000 people to run a couple of racing cars and currently third in the championship with Lando Norris and Daniel Ricardo. So talk about the dynamics of the sport. Obviously data is a big part of it. We see a lot of the coverage. You can see anything can happen overnight, it's very quick. Technology's been playing a big role in the sport. What's your vision on how that's evolving? Are you happy with where things are and where do you see it going? Yeah, some interesting stats. So the car that qualifies first at the beginning of the year, if you didn't touch it, would be last by the end of the year. So that's the pace of development of a Formula One car. We change and develop a new part on the car every 14 minutes, 365 days a year. And technology plays a huge role. It's probably the most technical evolved sport in the world. Both safety, data, the innovation, it's awesome. And what a lot of people don't know is a lot of what we develop on a Formula One car ends up in other parts of the world, whether it was the ventilators that we helped develop for the UK government to working with our various partners or safety and innovation in the automotive industry. You know, I love, I always love the IoT Internet of Things story around cars because sensors and instrumentation is a big part of it. And it all comes together. So it's pretty, it's not simple. No. Give it a taste a little bit about what's it, how complicated is it, how you guys pay attention to the details, what's important. Take us through some of the inside the ropes around the IoT of the sensors and all the data coming together. Yes, we have over 300 sensors on our race car. We collect the one and a half terabytes of data every race weekend. And we have a thousand people. And the strong majority of those are working around data and technology, as opposed to physically touching the car out of those thousand people. You probably only have about 60 or 70 that actually touch the race car at a race weekend. We've been doing connected cars for about 25 years. So that's kind of a new thing here to most people, but we've been communicating back and forth with our race car for decades all around the world. And what a lot of people don't realize is it all starts in our mission control back in our factory in Woking, England. So wherever we are around the world, the racing team actually starts in England. So I want to ask you about the personalities on the team. How big is the staff? What's the makeup of the personalities? You've got the drivers, they're critical and they're a very dynamic personalities. We'll come to that slide question on that later. But what's the staff look like on, when you guys put this together, so you get race day and you got back office support. What's the team look like? Yeah, so you've got about a thousand people that make up the collective team. You'll have about a hundred in marketing. You'll have about a hundred in finance, HR, and then you kind of get to the racing team if you'd like, 800 people. You have about a hundred people traveling to each race. About 50 people back at the factory working with data and communications at a Grand Prix weekend and then everybody else is designing, manufacturing, production, laminating. So we run 24-7 shifts, three shifts in certain parts. We develop 85% of the car changes of what's allowed to be changed from start of the year to the end of the year. So the development is unbelievable. I know you're here in the U.S. for the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin. Coming up, I'm just curious how the cars get transported. So when we're traveling around the world, they travel on 747s and are flown around the world. And then when we're in Europe, we have about 18 trucks that we're communing around when we're kind of in the European part of the circuit is usually the middle of the year, but when we're going to Australia, Singapore, Bahrain, those are on planes. Formula One actually does that. They give us an allocation of space and then we have to write a check if we need more space than we're allowed. Yeah, and that brings up the security question because obviously there's a lot of fans. A lot of people are into it. Also, there's potentially security risks. Have you guys thought about that? Obviously like physical moving the supply chain around from event to event, but also technology risk. How do you guys think about security? Yeah, it's critically important. We've had, fortunately, we've not had any breach of our technology. We have had a breach in the late 90s of our radio communications. And it was in Australia, Mika Hakkinen and a fan who I think was probably having some fun and were able to break into our radio channel and actually asked Mika to pit. He pitted. Team wasn't ready. And fortunately we were running one too but we actually had to reverse the drivers so security is critically important. Yeah, probably Kitty Scrivner in there. Oh, look, I just hacked the radio, I was talking to the driver. That is like a funny story, but it could be serious. I mean, now you have all kinds of stuff going on. Yeah, and there's a lot of money at stake. So we were fortunate in this particular instance it didn't hurt us because we were running one too so we could reverse the drivers and the right guy one. But that could decide a world championship and you have tens of millions of dollars online but even besides the economics, we want to win races. You know, what's funny is that you guys have a lot of serious on the line stakes with these races but you're known for having a lot of fun. The team, team dynamic, I have to ask you when you finish on the podium one and two you did a shoey with the drivers, how'd that go down? It was pretty big spectacle online and on TV. Yeah, it was good fun. That's something obviously Daniel Ricardo has kind of developed as his thing when he wins and when we were, before we went on the podium he said to me, you're going to do the shoey. Yes, of course I'm going to do the shoey. You got to do the shoey. So we acted like a bunch of 12 year old kids on the podium but we're just big kids going motor racing at the end of the day. Well, I got to say, you guys come across really strong as a team and I love the fun and competitive side. So congratulations on that, it's always good. On the competitive side, take me through the advantage driving the advantage with data because that's really the theme here at .conf which is Splunk, which they're a big partner as well as your other sponsors. Data's big and it's driving an advantage. Where do you see that coming from? Take us through where you guys see the advantages. Yeah, so everything we do is precision. Every second, every 10th counts and you can get all this data in but what do you do with this data and the humans can't react as quickly as people like Splunk who can help us not only collect data but help us understand data and typically there's one pit stop which can be the difference between winning and losing. You have all these different scenarios playing out with weather, with tire wear, competition and so we live by data. We didn't win in Russia when we could have and it was because we got a bit emotionally caught up in the excitement of trying to win the race instead of staying disciplined and focused on data and so it's a very data-driven sport. When I'm on the pit wall there's a thing called racer instinct which is my 30 years in the sport and your experience and your gut to make decisions and every time our team makes a decision that I'm sitting there going I'm not sure that was the right decision, they're staring at data, I'm not, I'm trusting my 30 years of experience, they beat me nine out of 10 times. Yeah, and this is a huge topic too in the industry, explainable AI is one of the hottest trends in computer science where there's so much algorithms involved, the gut instinct is now coming back, what algorithms are available, knowing when to deploy what algorithms or what data to pay attention to is a huge new gut factor. Can you explain how the young drivers and the experienced folks in the industry are dealing with this new instinctful data-driven piece? Yeah, that's what we have 50 people back at the factory doing and they're looking at all sorts of information coming in and then they're taking that information and they're feeding it to our head of strategy who's then feeding it to our racing director who's getting all these data points in from tire to performance to reliability and then the human data from both drivers coming through their engineers and then he gets all that information in, he has to process it immediately and make decisions but it's a data-driven sport. I saw Lando walking around, got a selfie with him, it was great, everyone's loving it on Twitter, my family's like get on autograph. The future of the sport, he's a young driver so that instinct's coming in. The future of the sport comes up all the time. The tires are a big discussion point but also you got a lot of presets going on, a lot of data, a lot of going on. You see the future where there's remote, you know, kind of video game, you're in the pit wall and you can make decisions and deploy on behalf of the drivers, is that something that's- Well that technology's there and we used to do that but now it's been outlawed because there's a real push to make sure the drivers are driving the car so that technology is here, has been deployed in the past, we could do it but we're trying to find as a sport the balance between, you know, letting the driver do it so he or she might make a mistake and add a little bit of excitement to it. So we now, there are certain protocols on what we communicate. We can't, everything has to be driver fed into the car so we can now hear all sorts of codes that we're talking through which there are about 300 different adjustments the driver can make on the steering wheel which is unbelievable and so that's us seeing information, getting data in, coming to conclusions that we're giving him or her information that we think will help make the car faster. A lot of new dimensions for drivers to think about when they're being successful with the gut, the track, data, everything's kind of coming together. Yeah, it's amazing, when you listen to these drivers on the radio you forget that they're going 200 plus miles an hour because they sound quite relaxed in this very, you know, open and easy communication of here's what I'm feeling with, again we're talking all those codes and then we all, because we can hear each other, there's a lot of trickery that goes on. So for a driver to be going 200 miles an hour, taking this information and then know what code we're talking or we kind of throwing a code out there to throw the competition off is pretty amazing that they can take this all in. You know, I wish I was younger again like we're old school and the younger generation I've been having a few conversations with a lot of the young audience. They wanted me to ask you, when are you guys going to metaverse the tracks? When can I get involved and participate and maybe even make the team? Or how do I become more active, engaged with the McLaren racing team? So that technology is almost here. We're actually, that's in development. So I think it won't be long before, you know, Sunday you can log on and race Lando around Monaco and be in the race. So that technology is around the corner. That's the shadow thing too developing. I see that eSports just quick. I know you've got a gun, but last minute we have here. eSports, what's the future of eSports with the team? eSports been great for the sport. You know, it's gone from, you know, when I was growing up, it was video games and now it's real simulation. And so we've held, I think we're going four years into it. Now we were the first team to really develop an eSports platform and we've had competitors go on to help us with our simulation. So it's real race and we developed the race car before it goes on the racetrack. It's in simulation and that's where eSports is. This is the new advantage. This is a new normal. This is where you guys see the data driving the advantage. Definitely. And I think the other thing it is, you know, stick and ball sports, you can play in school and motor racing is historically been carding, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now with eSports, you have a less expensive platform to let young men and women around the world put a steering wheel in their hand and go motor racing. So I think it's also going to kind of bring that younger generation a fan into the sport. There's so much collective intelligence, potentially competitive advantage, again data coming up. Final word to end the segment, Splunk. Big partner on the data side, obviously helping you guys financially as well as you do need some sponsorship support to make the team run. What's the relationship with Splunk? Take a minute to talk about the plug. It's been great. You know, they're two big contributors. We need a lot of money to run the racing team. So they're a great partner in that respect, but more importantly, they're helping us with our whole data journey, making smarter, quicker decisions. So their contribution to being part of the race team and we use their technology has been great. And I think, you know, if I look at our technology partners, we have many that all contribute to making us a better racing team. I mean, it really is nice. It's data inaction. It's teamwork is competitive. It's fun. That's kind of a good rubric. I think fun is the center of everything that we do. It's the center of everything that Splunk does. Because I think if you have fun, people enjoy kind of working a little bit harder, we're seven days a week and, you know, a lot of teammates, you got to work well together. So I think if you're having fun, you enjoy what you're doing, then it doesn't feel like work. Congratulations on climbing up on the rankings and everything on your team. Two great drivers. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. Thank you. All right, we're here at theCUBE. We'd like to have fun here and get all the action on the tech side. Obviously F1 is technology enabled, data driving the advantage, and driving to survive is a great Netflix series. Check it out. McLaren's featured heavily in there and got a great team. Zach Brown, see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thank you for watching.