Formula One is an innovative and high performance arena where speed, precision and accuracy is of the essence at all times. To maintain pole position, Oracle Red Bull Racing has been in a long-term technical partnership with Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division. Machinery heard more at the F1 team’s Milton Keynes factory.
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Oracle Red Bull Racing (ORBR) is at the top of its game winning races at a canter in recent seasons and has arguably had the biggest impact on Formula One of any other team over the last two decades since it joined the grid.
The Milton Keynes-based team has totally dominated F1 for the last three years and since its first race at the 2005 Australian Grand Prix, it has secured the World Drivers’ Championship seven times, including the last three with Max Verstappen and it has also won the World Constructors’ Championships six times.
In order to maximise its performance, consistently manufacture the most innovative, fastest and best-performing F1 cars with the utmost accuracy and precision, ORBR has been in a long-term partnership with Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division.
Innovation day
Last month, ORBR and Hexagon held an Innovation Day for journalists at ORBR’s Technology Campus to explain more about the partnership, the benefits that it brings to both, while giving a behind the scenes look at what keeps F1’s grid-leading team in pole position.
Kat Farmer, ORBR’s senior technical partnership manager, explains that the Hexagon laser scanners, coordinate measuring machines (CMM), portable measuring arms and software they operate is used every day to build, develop and improve ORBR’s F1 cars.
Farmer notes: “We select our partners at ORBR very carefully. We have lots of people knocking on the commercial team’s doors every day and say they want to partner with us and have their logo on our car.
“We are in a very fortuitous position, where we don’t just partner with anybody and we want to partner with the best and we have our innovation partners of which Hexagon is one of them.
“We have a long-standing relationship with Hexagon and there is a reason we partner with them, because they are the best in their field and their knowledge, expertise and equipment is top-notch.”
The technical partnership between ORBR and Hexagon has been running for the 18 years. It does not just take on any technical partner and each one has to be of the highest quality and provide clear added value in driving the F1 team’s performance.
Building components on site
ORBR manufactures the vast majority of its parts and components on site. In the ORBR machine shop there are a sizeable fleet of the latest DMG Mori machines that machine parts and components.
The F1 racing team needs to make sure every part is the right size and weight and ensure there are no issues that impact performance and its through partnership with Hexagon and the products it utilises across its manufacturing, it can push right to the edge and limit of what is possible.
From Hexagon’s side, the partnership also has huge benefits as F1 is all about speed and accuracy and it is as innovative as any other industry so through the partnership, its technology is pushed to the limit of its performance and it gains invaluable feedback from the way they are used.
ORBR also suggests new potential ideas of development as it is always looking to extract the smallest of gains over their rivals so it can gain competitive advantage in the manufacturing and set-up of their cars.
Stephen Chadwick, president EMEA, Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, explains that the innovation partnership is all about “working together, living together and solving the problems together”.
He adds: “It is a true partnership and not a sponsorship deal. We are actively involved in the way they develop their technology and cars. They then help us in return for how we develop the best practices and the way that we deliver quality and inspection of design.”
During the Innovation Day, Mark Foden, head of quality control at Red Bull Powertrains and Craig Freestone, ORBR quality assurance engineer, explained that ORBR utilises different products from across Hexagon’s portfolio, in both manufacturing and inspection.
He says: ““In Powertrains we have 13 Hexagon high-accuracy Leitz CMMs, which are used for all areas of manufacturing – in-process and in final inspection.“We also use volume-graphic software supplied by Hexagon which we use within our CT scanning as we have a large CT suite, including one that will take a full engine.
“In Powertrains, we have an internal and external inspection area. One of them has three CMMs and the other has eight and you will find that all of them are running various pieces of power unit on them for 2026.”
Large surface inspection scanning
Among the Hexagon technology that ORBR utilises is the Absolute Scanner AS1-XL modular 3D laser scanner designed for large surface inspection, for use with both its laser tracker and portable measuring arm devices.
It is built on the same SHINE technology as its flagship Absolute Scanner AS1, allowing it to collect extremely clean 3D data at very high speeds and is designed for inspecting large surfaces and deep cavities.
ORBR sees the quality departments as “value-added” and they are embedded into the manufacture of its race cars to ensure it is at the front of the grid.
All the data that gets produced is used right across the design process and the data is fed back into the design team and used to look at how parts will perform on circuits and to help determine want kind of front wing is needed, for example.
F1 teams like ORBR have to turnaround parts quickly to either customise them for a particular circuit or to fix parts that are damaged. This has to be done quickly so it uses a CMM or scanner depending on what fits its needs.
Says Foden: “It is all about getting the fastest and most accurate data that we can. Speed is the driving factor in this industry,” he says. “We work on a two-week lifecycle on a component which can change with back-to-back races when it is reduced.”
Foden notes: “We are always pushing the boundaries using the equipment beyond where it was capable and we use it in a way that has never been considered before. We maximise performance to ensure that parts are exact as possible.”
