I was going to say the exact same thing. This is nothing like NASCAR, or even rival open-wheel racing like Indie Car.
The amount of cloud computing the teams use is staggering too - during race weekends they'll compute the model of changing every potential setting on the car (physical, mechanical, software) and then play out the race to work out the impact. As the race weekend progresses they'll continue to lock down setting and begin to extrapolate to the permutations of every rival car in order to work out strategies.
Even during the race its not just the team's two cars and some guys on the pit wall... McLaren, perhaps the most technically advanced team in F1, has a whole "Space launch style" mission control room back in the UK where 10+ people monitor every piece of data from the car and works out strategic changes on the fly by feeding the data in the computer models.
Which explains how McLaren's strategy calls can vary between brilliance - when the models get it right - and stupefyingly bizarre when the simulation diverges from reality.
The amount of cloud computing the teams use is staggering too - during race weekends they'll compute the model of changing every potential setting on the car (physical, mechanical, software) and then play out the race to work out the impact. As the race weekend progresses they'll continue to lock down setting and begin to extrapolate to the permutations of every rival car in order to work out strategies.
Even during the race its not just the team's two cars and some guys on the pit wall... McLaren, perhaps the most technically advanced team in F1, has a whole "Space launch style" mission control room back in the UK where 10+ people monitor every piece of data from the car and works out strategic changes on the fly by feeding the data in the computer models.