In this episode, we sit down with Clint Watson, Division Manager - Technology, of the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, to explore the incredible systems, infrastructure, and innovations that make one of the nation's largest and most complex events possible. From the track to the grandstands, from data networks to fan experiences – we'll deep dive into the tech that keeps the race running smoothly and securely. This is Taking Tech with Clint Watson – where high performance on the track meets high performance behind the scenes. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or [email protected] or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au   Full Episode Transcript:  (Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm really excited today. Um we're doing something a little bit different, and today I wanted to interview a customer as opposed to service providers and vendors. And I wanted to hear from a customer about what cool things they're doing with tech. And I'm really excited that Clint Watson, who is the division manager for the Grand Prix Corporation has agreed to chat with me today. Thank you so much Clint for joining. Clint Watson: Oh, thanks very much. Happy to be here. Leanne Taylor: Wonderful. So we connected on LinkedIn and I'm really grateful that you accepted the challenge to have this conversation today. And I think, you know, in technology, a lot of people enjoy the events that we have around Melbourne. Grand Prix's amazing. It's a, it's a global business. And not often people really understand what happens behind the scenes. So I'm really keen to deep dive into the tech with you today and find out, you know, all the juicy details of what actually goes on and how do we create this amazing event. And you know, I'm sure you've got some amazing stories to share as well. So, firstly, how long have you been doing this for? Clint Watson: Just started my 12th year. Probably started at the right time of year leading into a MotoGP event rather than a Formula One. I would hate to think how I could handle going straight into a Formula One brand new, because it's such a big beast. So certainly cut my teeth at MotoGP and then away we go with F1. Leanne Taylor: And what did that look like? What happens behind the scenes there? And what's the lead up time to an event of that magnitude? Clint Watson: MotoGP is a little smaller. It's very different from a tech build because it's a permanent venue. There's a lot of infrastructure there already in play. The crowd numbers are smaller and it's just a little easier to manage. For me from a, from a technology side, MotoGP is probably about a three month planning, six week build and a two week decommission. F1 on the other hand, that's got significantly bigger over time, but that's almost a, a 12 month of the year planning session if not more. It's a public park. It's a greenfield. In the 12 years I've been doing this, I've never built the same thing twice. So it's a significant challenge there. Leanne Taylor: It's going to be one of my questions. Is it the same setup year in, year out? You know, bump in, get it all set up, bump out again. What, what changes? Clint Watson: There's certainly core elements to it that need to be the same, but one of the beauties of running it out of our park is the fact that we have a clean slate to work with every year. From my side, it is, the build's 95% temporary. And trying to build that in a, in a three month period whilst it's still a public park is a significant challenge. But having a space like that means you are able to to innovate and try new things all of the time. It sort of goes hand in hand with the sport as well, right? F1 is arguably the most technologically advanced sport in the world, and we sort of need to try and keep up with that as best we can. Leanne Taylor: So from the ground up, so what's involved? I'm assuming you've got some connectivity, you've got telcos coming in, you're standing up a data centre or your switches. How, how does it actually come together? Clint Watson: I almost act as an ISP in a way. We do have some some incoming services from my side. My role there is I'm responsible for the design and build of the entire network for the whole site, which includes everything from the outside from uh ticket boxes and gates through to partner activations, hospitality suites, media and photography compounds, governing bodies, all the way through to then running the dark fibre for the teams to come and and build their networks on top of as well. So it's, it's quite a large build, as you can imagine. We would then design the network based on the physical design of the venue, how we structure that, we we very much zone that and try and build it in a way to continually enhance customer experience, patron flow and other bits and pieces along the way. I work very closely with the infrastructure team on how the venue's designed and then and then build what what is required over the top of that there. We deliver services from dark fibre through to cable networks through to stupidly high dense Wi-Fi environments for the international media to work from. And one of the biggest challenges there, you've got about 600 people in a space. We base it on to two and a half devices per person, coming from all over the world. You have no idea or no control of what devices they're going to use and how they need or want to connect. But they need to work and work very quickly and have a very high performing network to do what they need to. It's sort of time is money in this space, and the quicker they get their stories and and photographs out, the better paid they are. Leanne Taylor: Absolutely. And what about the guys in the pits, like the actual teams themselves? I'm sure you've got some interesting stories. Clint Watson: I probably don't. I've always seen them as uh, I build a workplace for them to come and work out of. There's a few, a few stressful moments in, in delivering what they need. They're only here for a short time, their requirements change. So there's certainly a lot of long days in the lead up to getting everything right for them. They sort of come in and pretty much build their own little village that they work out of for the week as well. Once it's done, I try to leave them alone and and just let them do their thing. So I I don't have too many stories on them, but a wonderful bunch of people to work with, I must say. Everyone's very understanding of the temporary nature of it all, the challenges involved, albeit with the high demand of what we do. The world's eyes are watching what we do as well. Leanne Taylor: Of course. Now from the, from a vendor perspective, is this like hardware and software and access points that are just boxed up for, you know, 11 months of the year and rolled out for that, that one event? How, how does it work with the procurement? What are some of the challenges you have getting the support from some of the technology vendors when you are really only using it for a certain period of the year? Clint Watson: You're right. It is all boxed up. We we have a shipping container full of racks of switches and boxes of wireless access points. And as I say, it's different every year. that each device is not used in the same way or the same location every year. It really helps these days with the popularity of the event. You have a look at Formula 1 cars and they have technology company logos plastered all over them. And I'm in a very lucky situation where a lot of those companies also want to work with us. So the support I get from any vendor I choose to work with is above and beyond. We try to be best of breed as much as possible, which is hard and it's hard to justify that cost at times, but it needs to work. The world's eyes are watching what you do and if this network fails and in turn there's potentially no safety system, then the cars can't be on the track or gates fail so people can't get in the venue and it's, it's a big risk. Leanne Taylor: So in terms of, you know, the buzzword at the moment is all AI, cybersecurity. Can you talk about some of the challenges or, or what that looks like in this, in this role? Clint Watson: We're pretty much just starting our AI journey really. So I can't sort of can't sort of go into too much detail on that. We're starting to try a few new things in the accreditation and access control space with AI. We'll see how things go at MotoGP. There's a couple of little things we might unveil there this year. Cybersecurity is huge. Our greatest risk as a business is reputational risk. We are in the public's eyes. For example, a few days ago, we advertised our on sale F1 next year. We've already seen new targeted attacks because of that. It happens event to event. I could pretty much build out a calendar of when and how we would be targeted in in different ways across a 12 month period. My view is defend in depth, which we sort of have to. We have multiple layers covering off every area as much as possible. Yes, there's overlap at times, but I'd rather there be that than than gaps. In the event space, it's a bit more challenging. As I said, we have people come from all over the world to come and and build their networks on top of what I provide, and you really have no idea what they want to do or how, or how they want to work. It's a bit of a fine line as well. You need to make a highly available environment that keeps everyone secure, but also enables everyone to do a job at the same time and making changes on the fly during an event is also rather risky and challenging as well. It's a strange space. Teams will come and build their own networks on top of the dark fibre that that we supply for them. They are very sensitive about their data as you as you could understand, and they certainly run off different networks that that I control as well. It keeps me up at night, put it that way. Leanne Taylor: I can imagine. So how many is in your team? Like how big's the team that pulls this event together? Clint Watson: Up until about two years ago, it was just me year round. Leanne Taylor: No way, really? Clint Watson: Yeah, yeah. As an employee of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, it was just me. We would then bring in dedicated teams to to do certain tasks at the event, whether it's, you know, to build and deploy the network on the design. They do then a lot of that support to the media centre and other bits and pieces. and you know, the event would not be possible without having these teams involved. It's been good news over the last little bit where with the increased focus on cybersecurity, with AI, with more, I guess, automation and integration between applications, we've expanded the team in here now. So we're we're now a team of four, which is great. It enables us to do so much more and innovate so much more. Leanne Taylor: That's amazing. When we originally spoke, you know, I said, is this a full time 12 months of the year job for you? But you were actually uh up at the farm doing other things. So tell me how, how do you manage your year? What does that look like? Clint Watson: Yeah. I'll tell you what, I'd be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what I do for the rest of the year. It's, it is certainly a full time job. A calendar year is interesting for me. We sort of will start the build early January for F1. And as you say, yes, I do live on a little hobby farm. February is mating season for the sheep. March is F1. Leanne Taylor: Lucky those two don't clash. Clint Watson: No, it all works out really well, actually. And then post F1, we sort of go into debriefs and and sort of audit season and a few other little projects. Come July is lambing season, so that keeps me very, very busy. And then we're coming into sort of September, October, which is MotoGP time. Then I'll probably spend a bit of time at the Spring Racing Carnival after that before uh shearing season and then Christmas and then away we go again. So that's my 12 months. Leanne Taylor: Well, spring racing's another interesting one, you know, behind the scenes, and I have uh worked in a rather large tennis environment as well. So I'm very curious to understand and I love, you know, unpacking what happens behind the scenes at some of these major events. I think a lot of Australians love to go and unless the Wi-Fi is not working, I don't think they really understand what what actually is required and what goes on behind the scenes. So how do you cope with the public Wi-Fi at Albert Park? Because what's the capacity of your crowd there? It'd be hundreds of thousands, I'd imagine. Clint Watson: Yeah, it is. In short, I don't offer public Wi-Fi for that very reason. We are certainly riding a wave of popularity in the sport at the moment. You know, we're up around 140,000 a day in the venue. It's a strange one. Over the last few years, I've worked extremely hard with Telstra to expand their temporary mobile offering. For some reason, whenever someone can't make a call or send a text message, they think it's my fault and and that I am a telco and I can control all this, which is very much not the case. We have worked very hard. Telstra bring in sort of seven temporary mobile towers to help with the expansion in the back haul, and that's improved year on year. Optus too have done a lot of work over the last couple of years to do similar pieces of work. On that though, this year's F1, I built my very own private 5G network on our own private spectrum. First major event in the country to do so. and that worked wonderfully. My initial goal out of this was to just run point of sale off it for the first year for a few reasons. One, just getting connectivity to to these remote locations around the venue is extremely hard. As you can imagine, we have food and beverage outlets that are in the middle of high traffic areas and getting cable to those is risky, unsafe in many ways and having these devices rely on public telcos, as hard as they try, there's always outages, right? So the private 5G piece was very much to try and guarantee some sort of connectivity for the vendors there, but also then reduce the amount of connections that the temporary cells have to, they have to cater for. So it, it worked wonderfully. I'm I'm very happy with that project. I've been trying to get it off the ground for a few years now. I'm very proud of it and have actually had some rather nice compliments from Formula One themselves and they've asked how they can do it in other events around the world too. So Leanne Taylor: that's so amazing. Well done. That's really awesome because I mean, most of these events now are cashless, right? And everyone's tapping and going with their mobile phone. And as a consumer, I think a lot of people don't realise when they're lining up to buy their beer and their food or what have you that you just tap and go. Everyone's seen the spindle on the the POS machine and loves to curse and swear when it doesn't go through. And that's such an amazing use case that you've been able to solve and by the sounds of it be really thought leadership in the the global sporting event space. So, well done. That's incredible. Clint Watson: Thank you. Yeah. and from here, it's just onwards and upwards. There's a whole bunch of different ideas I have. The benefit of having this private spectrum to ourselves, we can carve it up and use it as we as we please. The point of sale thing will always be its primary use case, but with us being able to manage our own physical SIMs and eSIMs, we can then carve off a piece for comms during crisis management times. We can, we can start to look at media streaming, potential new wayfinding ideas with with digital signage and other pieces around the venue and also, you know, maybe look to have a tech advanced grandstand where we can maybe one day stream live onto someone's device if possible. So there's all sorts of ideas floating around as to how we can use it. Yeah, it's been a great project and I'm, I'm very proud of it. at our event. Leanne Taylor: So Clint, can you explain to me how you guys operated during COVID? Because that was a very challenging time for a lot of, or the whole world, but also, you know, running an event could be quite challenging during that time. What did that look like for you guys? Clint Watson: It was the worst day of my career. We had the gates open on a Thursday, patrons came in, you hear some rumblings Thursday night, Friday morning sitting around in the F1 paddock was extremely eerie. And then all of a sudden the announcement comes out that that's it, gates closed, shut down. You put a lot of work into building these events, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and it was rather demoralising to be honest to see all that just be stopped at an instant. We were the biggest event in Australia to be shut down because of COVID. But conversely, once we did get through that period and we're able to run again, we were the biggest event to open up the country again. You have a product like Drive to Survive that was very much consumed during that COVID era. The popularity of the sport's gone through the roof. We sort of didn't know what we were doing really because we just, it sold out in minutes and we just had so many people there and weren't probably weren't really prepared for that first event post COVID. You know, we went through all sorts of plans during that COVID time to different venue designs, you know, just to align with all the all the regulations around trying to run a run an event during COVID, but none of those got off the ground. But there was a lot of lessons learned out of that first one and I guess gave us a lot of good grounding on on how we can continue to improve, change a venue. I think the public's expectations sort of grew a little bit as well. So we've done an enormous amount of work in customer experience, improving patron flows around the venue and other bits and pieces too. And you know, I think the venue we built this year in my view was quite possibly the greatest one we've ever done. So we've certainly come a long way. Leanne Taylor: Amazing, incredible. Were some of the teams already in country when COVID hit and they had to quickly get out of home? Clint Watson: Yeah. Yeah, they they were all here. As I say, it was it was open as a venue on a Thursday. and Friday we were, we were ready to go. Uh that would have been the first day of track activity. There were a few drivers that that got out of the country pretty quick. I don't think anyone hung around for very long at all. And I know that um some of the charities that deal with feeding the underprivileged, they got very well fed there for a little bit with all the food that was ready to go in those hospitality suites for the weekend. So it was it was great to be able to do that sort of thing. Leanne Taylor: Yeah, amazing. Yeah. Clint Watson: But yeah, it was uh, a day I'll never forget and the worst day of my career or my life. Leanne Taylor: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed this chat and it's uh very exciting and I will look at the Grand Prix next year in 2026 with a different lens and a bit more observation of, "Oh, what access points up there?" and all that sort of thing. So, I think that's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your story. (Outro music) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades) your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades)  

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