From Track to Tech: How IP Addresses Power Formula 1 Cars

One of the best things about researching IP addresses and its impact on technology in general is the fact that they are actually a lot more common than we thought and they show up in one of the most unusual, coolest and in this case: fastest places on the planet. Case in point: an F1 car has an IP address.

Dan Drury, a systems engineer who has previously worked with F1 vehicles, dropped this random yet cool piece of nugget on X:

“Not current job, but a cool little bit from the last one:

An F1 car has an IP address”

Dan posted this in response to a question posted by @SoniaCuff on X: “As an I.T. worker or systems administrator, what's one thing you wish people knew about your job?”

There’s a lot to unpack here in this awesome response by an experienced and well versed systems engineer who has worked with incredibly fast vehicles.

IP Address Just Makes Sense

If you really think about it, an F1 car definitely should have an IP address. These incredible machines are being monitored in a plethora of ways before, during and after the race.

These racing machines have onboard sensors that transmit data to race engineers in real time so they could provide updates to their drivers for performance and safety purposes. It should be noted as well that each vehicle has hundreds of sensors - from speed to temperature, everything is monitored every time.

Without an IP address, an F1 car would have to find another way to communicate in real time. But these sensors are basically IOTs that push data and an email to race engineers when the vehicle is going more than 200 mph is not an ideal scenario.

IP Address Hacking - Remote Controlled F1 Cars?

If an F1 car has an IP address, is it possible that the vehicle could be hacked in real time and controlled by an unknown individual?

It’s a really scary scenario if you think about it. You don’t want to hear a world-class driver complaining to his race engineers that he can’t control his machine and is headed to a fatal collision. Fortunately, F1 has already addressed this way earlier than any hacking is possible. To avoid race engineers to assist their drivers through remote control F1 is banning two-way telemetry. This means drivers have complete control of their vehicle and their race engineers are only limited to telling them what happens when they do it. They could provide the data in real time but they can’t control it in any form. A hack would just mean they have the data at hand but can’t do anything to harm the driver and F1 with all their resources have established security to prevent any hacking from happening.

The danger of an IP address associated with an F1 car is actually not on hacking but on errors associated with the tech itself. Dan explained further on X that internal problems can occur such as someone could upload a test data to the actual vehicle instead of using it on a simulation. Fortunately, that kind of problem hasn’t happened yet.

An IP address on an F1 vehicle is definitely a cool thing to know as it implies a technology that has proven to be efficient even in one of the fastest vehicles on earth today.