AI Newbies Set World Record: How Generative AI Empowers Motorsport Innovation
- Generative AI technologies may promote innovation across multiple sectors by lowering the barriers of entry.
- A record-breaking motorsport hackathon’s 1,130 participants had no “direct skills” in AI.
- AI-powered race cars are posting lap times some 30 seconds out from human race drivers.
After a record-breaking hackathon and the introduction of an autonomous vehicle racing league, could the perfect testing ground for artificial intelligence (AI) be within motorsports?
AI Motorsports Hackathon
Electric vehicle (EV) motorsports league, Formula E, paired up with Google to showcase these cutting-edge technologies in a record-breaking generative AI hackathon in July 2024. At the event, 1,130 participants teams gathered to use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini 2.5 Flash to tackle various challenges.
Participants were given exclusive final race preparations of 11 elite racing teams during their practice sessions pitlane tours, and live racing data amongst other datasets.
Teams were tasked with rebuilding and enhancing”Driverbots” and developing AI safety systems that identify on-track incidents. It also included designing AI-powered sustainability scorecards for Formula E Gen3 cars, operational efficiency, post-race content, and much more.
The hackathon was a world record-breaking event and was officially acknowledged by the Guinness World Record records as the largest in-person generative AI hackathon of all time. Notably, approximately 60% of participants had no “direct skills ” with AI.
AI-Powered Racing
In April 2024, the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) held the world’s first AI-powered car race, with some surprising and rather funny results.
Racing across the Yas Marina Circuit, a 5km track with 16 turns over 16 laps, the “world’s most advanced autonomous vehicles” were pushed to the very limits of their capabilities.
These limitations were discovered rather early on and the only barriers being broken were the ones around the racing circuit. Vehicles crashed, spun out, and registered 6-minute lap time differences. At one point, they stopped altogether.
Eight teams from around the world competed for the $2.25 million prize pool. A2RL filled the stadium with modified Dalara race cars, similar to those found in Japan’s Super Formula series. However, instead of a driver, they have a variety of cameras, sensors, and computers driving the car.
Over the course of the first lap, these systems would monitor tire performance, attempt to overtake one another in defensive driving challenges and establish the perfect racing line. Though marred with some rather entertaining errors, the racing teams still managed to set some decent lap times.
The fastest team was Polimove with a time of 2:00.653. To put this into perspective, the fastest F1 lap record around the circuit was 1:26.103. The fastest F2 lapped the track in 1:37.445. Although the ‘spectacle’ was more of an experiment, the racing event was a testament to the great advances made in AI technologies.
Generative AI Access
As highlighted by the 60% of Formula E x Google hackathon participants with no real AI experience, generative AI technologies lower entry barriers. More specifically, they allow users to explore and query problems, and then intuitively create solutions.
Formula E x Google hackathon participants managed to create very advanced systems that were able to not only monitor the performance of cars, their sustainability, and other deeply technical aspects but also in tertiary fields such as post-race content creation.
Looking at driverless cars, the first “golden goose” of commercially available AI products, it would appear as though the automotive industry was the earliest testing ground for AI. Naturally, this would progress into motorsports, where the AI’s ability to make dozens of calculations and decisions in milliseconds at high speeds really counts.
