Cadillac’s F1 Car May Carry More Than 10 Miles of Wiring. Here’s What It’s For
A new What Makes Fast episode traces how the MAC-26’s sensor data travels from the track to engineers in Silverstone and Charlotte while the race is still running.
A Formula 1 car is as much a rolling data center as a race car, and Cadillac has now put a number on that idea. There could be more than 10 miles of wiring packed inside the team's MAC-26, according to an estimate from one of its own experts.
The figure comes from the latest episode of GM's What Makes Fast YouTube series, the same show that recently explained why Cadillac builds its F1 seats from flax instead of carbon fiber. This time the cameras follow the data: how it is gathered on the car, and how it reaches engineers while the race is still underway.
GM says the car's sensors track the power unit's output, tire pressures, and even the speed of the air moving over the bodywork. The smallest change of direction is logged too, with component behavior recorded down to the millisecond.
All of it is sent to engineers at the circuit and passed between the team's two bases: its race headquarters in Silverstone, England, and GM's technical center in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Why the data matters more than the wiring
Cadillac hasn't said how many sensors the MAC-26 carries or how much data it produces. For a sense of scale, F1's technology partner AWS says each car on the grid has 300 sensors generating more than 1.1 million telemetry data points per second.
That stream does two jobs. It tells engineers how the car is behaving right now, which shapes the adjustments they make during a race. It also feeds GM's Driver-in-the-Loop simulator in Charlotte, where the team prepares for the next event.
The second job is the bigger one. As GM has explained before, F1's rules tightly restrict on-track running, so most of the car's development happens in the virtual world. Driver Valtteri Bottas is back in the Charlotte simulator within days of a race to check that the digital car matches what he felt on track. The better the data, the closer that match.
Cadillac needs it to be close. The brand swept all three IMSA GTP titles this season, but its first year in F1 has been much harder: the team sits 11th and last in the constructors' standings and is still looking for its first point. Its best result so far is a 13th place for Bottas in China. Meanwhile, another American name is already winning, though it's fair to ask how much of Ford's winning F1 engine is really Ford's.
The people keeping the data flowing feel that pressure.
"It's definitely a weight on our shoulders," says Ryan Tincher, IT Operations Manager at GM Motorsports. "But it's not anything the team shies away from… it's part of what brings everybody back every weekend."
The full episode is available on YouTube.
