Max Verstappen’s title bid supported by eight billion laps of Las Vegas
Max Verstappen will be racing on a floodlit track that his Red Bull team has already simulated about eight billion times when he travels to Las Vegas in pursuit of a fourth consecutive Formula One championship. Verstappen would win the title with two rounds left if he won the Saturday night race on November 23 on a street track that runs along Nevada City’s renowned Strip.
Jack Harington, the lead of Red Bull’s partnerships section, who collaborates with software behemoth and title sponsor Oracle, told me, “We run four billion simulations before we arrive at the circuit.” He continued, “After that, we run those four billion simulations again using the data from FP1 and FP2 (first and second practice).”
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He emphasized that it was a billion, not a million, but because Verstappen is 62 points ahead of McLaren’s Lando Norris, it is easy to predict who will win this year. “It is often claimed that you have to stretch your hand out to see if it is raining in the pitlane, but there are always going to be unexpected factors,” Harington added.
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According to Taylor Newill, senior director of product management at Oracle, high-performance computing is also playing a significant part in development simulation for Red Bull, which is creating its own engine for 2026. Throughout the year, race simulations are conducted, but they are especially useful when a big choice needs to be made, like when it might be preferable to incur an engine penalty, as Verstappen did last weekend in Brazil when he
