Art of Data: McLaren Shadow Studio with Oscar Piastri

Fresh from McLaren’s first podium of the F1 season down under in Australia and a stellar home GP for Oscar Piastri, we’ve put the 2023 F1 Rookie driver of the Year into the McLaren Shadow Studio to take a closer look at how resilient one of F1’s brightest stars really is. 

The gap from virtual racing to real F1 is reducing as technology improves and as we’ve touched on before, Splunk is not only a partner of McLaren F1, but also the current F1 Sim Racing champions, McLaren Shadow. 

“Last year Splunk was one of the biggest factors in us trying to fight for the championship, and thankfully we managed to do that.” - Lucas Blakeley, McLaren F1 Sim Racing driver  

We took a look at Oscar’s performance in the virtual world as he jumped in the Sim rig alongside Lucas Blakely, F1 Esports champion to tackle a few laps of Melbourne’s Albert Park race track. Using the power of Splunk’s Observability Cloud we tracked, measured and analyzed both driver’s performance in both wet and dry conditions. Oscar, the local expert also revealed his house is just 10 minutes from one of the main straights, check out the full video below: 

“Resilience is at the heart of McLaren, constantly improving is the name of the game.” - Oscar Piastri, Driver, McLaren F1

While we had Oscar in seat, we took time with George Simmons, Head Engineer at McLaren Shadow to dig further into the data behind Oscar’s performance racing around Monza…blindfolded. You often hear how people can “do this with their eyes shut” and we put this to the test with George guiding Oscar around Monza with different states of visibility. 

Looking at the race trace in Splunk, George takes Oscar through his laps to show how shining a light on Oscar’s laps helped improve visibility. Unsurprisingly, even Oscar with a blindfold took a bit of time to get round the famous Monza circuit. 

Thanks for reading and good luck to Oscar, Lando and the team next weekend as they move on to another high speed track in Suzuka for the Japanese GP.