McLaren Formula 1 Team revs up network security with Cisco

As the team enjoys an impressive start to the 2024 Formula 1 season, McLaren Racing has found another gear in its partnership with Cisco, with end-to-end visibility across its network including heightened threat intelligence and simplified security management across the team’s network operations.

McLaren Racing was founded by racing driver Bruce McLaren in 1963. The team entered its first Formula 1 race in 1966. McLaren has since won 20 Formula 1 world championships, 184 Formula 1 Grands Prix, the Indianapolis 500 three times, and Le Mans 24 Hours at its first attempt.

In all, the team currently competes across six racing series. In addition to Formula 1, it is active NTT INDYCAR, the Formula E World Championship, the Extreme E Championship, the F1 Academy and F1 Sim Racing Championship.

Through the agreement, Cisco will become an official security partner of the McLaren F1 Team, building on the company’s existing role as technology partner. This will see the racing team upgrade its network security infrastructure via a combination of on-premise hardware and cloud-based software, including Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco XDR, among other offerings.

Explaining what it believes the new working relationship can bring, Cisco noted that the ability to anticipate, act and simplify operations is essential in the highly competitive, always-on world of Formula 1.

It was confident that its Firewall offering would help the McLaren F1 Team with end-to-end visibility, simplified security management and network segmentation across distributed and hybrid networks the team relies on to deliver mission-critical information and data.

The XDR functionality would see use in allowing McLaren Racing to investigate, prioritise and remediate highest-priority incidents with what Cisco assure would be “AI-enhanced speed, efficiency and decisiveness”.

The McLaren F1 Team will also make use of technology from Splunk, recently acquired by Cisco and another of the team’s long-time technology partners, to enhance digital resiliency across its entire digital environment.

“Cisco has proven time and again to be a dynamic partner for McLaren Racing, with their technology playing a crucial role in our success both on and off the track,” said McLaren Racing co-chief commercial officer Matt Dennington. “This next phase of our partnership focuses on advancing this further by leveraging their security technology to keep our complex and distributed organisation connected and protected.”

Cisco senior vice-president and chief marketing officer Carrie Palin added: “The McLaren Formula 1 Team is an incredible proof point to showcase why leading organisations trust Cisco – our technology portfolio delivers across dynamic global environments, helps achieve meaningful results, and powerfully impacts McLaren Racing through our collaboration and partnership.

“We believe our breadth of security solutions will serve to accelerate the narrative and highlight why Cisco gives businesses the confidence and insight they need to operate securely.”

Cisco has served as an Official Technology Partner of the McLaren Formula 1 team since 2022, providing networking infrastructure across multiple facets of the team’s global operations.

McLaren also makes use of Cisco’s ThousandEyes on race days to assure the delivery of race data and telemetry over remote networking environments, and operates the Webex by Cisco suite of cloud-based collaboration tools, enabling the team to collaborate and implement flexible and secure hybrid working environments.