Crestron Electronics, prominent in workplace collaboration solutions, announced the sponsorship of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One (F1) Team. The Rockleigh, N.J.-based company will be a Regional Partner for all North American races. The first one is the Miami Grand Prix on May 6. The partnership began when Crestron installed its technology throughout the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team headquarters in Brackley, U.K. The headquarters is a state-of-the-art technology center for the design and development of the F1 cars.
Though videoconferencing has been a factor in F1 racing for quite some time, it exploded during the pandemic and the increased adoption of hybrid work. The Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team was well prepared for this transition. For this, it integrated Crestron room control systems including Crestron touch screens and DM NVX AV-over-IP technology into Brackley facilities.
Video Collaboration More Important Than Ever
The F1 Team adds that it wanted to more fully support a corporate culture built on immediate, in-person communication. Thus, it installed Crestron to further equip the meeting places and over a thousand of employees with frictionless collaboration solutions that prioritized performance and reliability.
Several teams used the Crestron Flex Digital Workplace platform for videoconferencing throughout the 2021 Formula One season. These included engineers, designers, IT teams, pit crews, factory technicians, business operations teams and executives. According to a statement, the innovation and engineering helped them break already impressive records.
“One of the main reasons we chose Crestron was they were synonymous with meeting room technology. That proved to us that not only did they have a track record of past performance, but also that we could rely upon them as an innovative partner for the long term,” shares David Cadywould, head of core technology for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team.
Minimizing Friction Amid Mass Communication
Performance is paramount in the world of racing, especially with regard to video collaboration technology. For teams like Mercedes F1, collaboration technologies must provide both speed and reliability. Thus, when people walk into meeting spaces, everything works straight away, regardless of how many people are participating or where they are joining from.
“There are times when our senior engineering community will fly straight from one race location to the next without returning to the U.K. That’s exactly where the link between the track and the factory is so critical,” adds Cadywould. “Following each of the race events, there are a series of race debriefs where an immense amount of information and data gathered at the track needs to be disseminated to the factory and around each department of the business, and we can’t afford any lag time.”
“Crestron and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team are both high-performing teams with an intense desire to deliver excellence. We’re thrilled to play a role in their success, whether that’s through cutting edge technology or sponsoring the team across the series of North American events,” remarks Brad Hintze, executive vice president, global marketing for Crestron.
Hintze adds that both Crestron and the Team wanted to maintain a frictionless experience. According to him, anything that slows down the collaboration process leads to diminished performance on the track.
He goes on to praise the solutions that reliably enable immediate meeting experiences from various spaces. These include the factory, the paddock, debrief rooms and other collaboration areas.
Performance and Reliability
“Crestron was the right way to go based on the fact we’ve used their technologies for quite some time, and it’s always been reliable. We talk about performance quite a lot, being the type of team we are. But it’s actually reliability that we chase and that makes some of our decision making quite straightforward,” concludes Cadywould.
According to a statement, Crestron will present the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team case study during the Digital Workplace Experience 2022 event presented by Reworked. The event will take place on May 4, at 2:30 pm ET.
The races begin with the Miami Grand Prix on May 8. The Canadian Grand Prix will be in Montreal on June 19. Meanwhile, the United States Grand Prix will take place in Austin, Texas on October 23.
