Verstappen's title bid supported by eight billion laps of Las Vegas

LONDON : When Max Verstappen goes to Las Vegas chasing a fourth successive Formula One title, he will be racing around a floodlit track his Red Bull team have simulated some eight billion times already.

The Saturday night race on a street circuit that runs along the Nevada City's famed Strip is on Nov. 23, and a win would clinch the championship for Verstappen with two rounds remaining.

"We run four billion simulations before we arrive at the track," Jack Harington, Red Bull's partnerships group lead who works with software giant and title sponsor Oracle, told Reuters.

"And then we take the data from FP1 and FP2 (first and second practice) and introduce those into the simulations and run those four billion again."

Billion, he emphasised, not million - although not many guesses are needed on who will win the title this year, given Verstappen is 62 points clear of McLaren's Lando Norris.

"There's always that saying that you have to sometimes just stick your hand out to see if it's raining in the pitlane but there's always variables that are going to catch you by surprise," said Harington.

"The more simulations you run, the more things you see and the more chance you will have of being able to react to them efficiently."

Red Bull use Oracle's cloud infrastructure to run the simulations to hone strategy and be prepared for every eventuality.

Red Bull are also building their own engine for 2026 and Oracle's senior director of product management Taylor Newill said high-performance computing was playing a big role in development simulation there too.

Race simulations are run through the year but particularly when there is a major decision coming up, such as when might be the best to take an engine penalty - as Verstappen did last