How AI helps the McLaren F1 Team make every second count
Published on November 12, 2025
The world record for fastest pit stop—a mere 1.8 seconds—was set by the McLaren F1 Team at the Qatar Grand Prix in 2023. It’s an incredible feat of speed and choreography; a pit stop that fast can’t happen without a team of people operating at peak human performance. But as Dan Keyworth explains, AI plays a crucial role, too. As the Director of Business Technology at McLaren Racing, Dan is responsible for helping the whole team perform at their best—and that starts with having the right tools.
Everything ties back to performance in some way, both on and off the track. Whether it’s the firehose of sensor data coming off a race car, video analysis of the pit crew in action, or marketing analytics for the next Grand Prix, AI helps the McLaren F1 team make the right decisions—and make them fast.
On season two of the Dropbox podcast Working Smarter, Dan talks about the importance of getting simple answers from complex data, how they use Dropbox Dash, and why we shouldn’t think of AI as labor replacement so much as laborious replacement.
You can read an excerpt of our conversation with Dan below.
~ ~ ~
When one of your drivers comes in for a pit stop, how does AI help the team in that moment?
The amount of data you can get from a pit stop is huge. Similar to a race car, we've got 300 sensors that are throwing information at you. That’s more than the human brain can actually digest, process, and take action against. And we've only got milliseconds in this game. Time is precious and I think we're at that space with pit stops now where—there is so much information around that very short moment—that we now rely on things like AI to interpret and point out things like anomalies compared to a good pit stop. The angle the tire has approached the car, the angle the driver comes into the box—we’re analyzing all these things all the time.
Although it's a very technical sport, and the people that operate in the sport are incredibly intelligent, simplification of the scenario is important for us. We get a hundred thousand parameters of telemetry coming off the car per second. Our role is to take something that is not processable by the human, and then turn it into something that is genuinely actionable and creates good outcomes in the race. It's really how we harness that information, weed out the stuff that's just noise, and focus on the stuff that really matters.
Dropbox Dash: The AI teammate that understands your workWhere else is the McLaren F1 Team using AI tools day-to-day?
There are three main areas. One is business technology. Yes, we're a Formula 1 team, but we are also just an entity that turns up to work and we perform our daily duties. Therefore, how do we get more out of the individuals that work for the organization? And I think AI plays a key role there. Not to replace humans, but to actually take the mundane and the laborious out of their role. We say it's not labor replacement, it's laborious replacement—because you want to free people up to be scientists, be engineers, be creative. That's where they're at their best.
Then we have performance technology, which is our secret sauce. This is where we apply AI into the world of racing: designing the car, building it, and going racing. All of that has the ability to help us make better decisions, and also go faster. Finally, on the commercial side of the business, 500 million fans are up for grabs inside the sport for us. How do you serve people in different time zones and that have different preferences—who either like to go to races or don't, or like the technical side over the social side? AI plays a huge role in that commercial engine as the audience we're serving continues to grow.
What’s an example of AI being used for that “laborious replacement” you described a second ago?
On the commercial side, we generate regular reports on how people are talking about McLaren. We want people to be spending their time interpreting that information and responding to it. With AI, what we've been able to do is not only harness the data, but also the generative creation of those information packs that are shared with multiple people. Then they can spend more time being creative and asking, “What's this information actually telling me?” and not just be there turning the handle and creating it.
The general feedback—to this, and anything we approach that's had a similar outcome—is, “Wow, this has just saved me a lot of time and a lot of headache on the things I just do not enjoy doing in my job.” So not only are you increasing satisfaction in their role, you're also increasing headspace. And that's a massive thing, especially in a sport where headspace is super important for making good decisions. If you're on the pit wall and you haven't got headspace, it's really difficult in those moments to make millisecond decisions that can be the difference between winning and losing.
One of the AI tools your commercial team uses is Dropbox Dash. How has Dash helped create more of that headspace in their jobs?
We’re not locked into a single ecosystem. We've got multiple other technology partners and people using different tech because of the area they work in. Dropbox Dash allows you to connect into all of those sources and get a single view. There's not a product on the market like that at the moment. I can find the thing I know is relevant to a project we might be working on. And not only can people go and find the thing—which they've probably forgotten where they've stored it and where it is in the ecosystem—it also helps people to arrange and organize their work. So we can pull projects together without having to physically move information. And you can also ask natural language questions, and ask it to create content for you against that information.
Why do you think humans will always be essential to the work that you do?
The sport isn't what it is without the humans involved, and I think that will ring true forever. That's where the entertainment and the excitement happens. And we always want a level of uncertainty in this sport. As fans, that's what we get out of bed for.
This interview has been edited and condensed. For more interviews and past episodes, visit workingsmarter.ai
The Author
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/hero_square%20(1).webp)
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/hero_wide%20(1).webp)
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/hero_square%20(3).webp)
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/blog%20(1).webp)
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/hero%20(1).webp)
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/hero_wide%20(1).webp)
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/1080x1080%20(1).webp)
.gif)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpg)
.jpg)
