BWT Alpine Formula One Team and Apex Ultra have announced a new multi-year partnership that brings Apex Ultra's Engineering Superintelligence (ESI) to the design, simulation, and development of the team's Formula One cars.

Apex Ultra, the frontier AI lab building towards Engineering Superintelligence (ESI), joins BWT Alpine Formula One Team as its official AI for Engineering Partner under a new multi-year agreement. It is the first time a Formula One team has embedded a frontier AI lab's engineering intelligence across its technical operation.

Formula One is the world's most demanding engineering competition. Competitive advantage no longer comes from testing the most, but from learning the most - from every decision, every simulation, and every lap - and adapting faster. Apex Ultra’s ESI is being built for exactly that challenge: artificial intelligence that reasons across aerodynamics, structures, thermodynamics, materials and manufacturing at once, within the constraints of the regulations, and builds upon these lessons each race weekend. In early case studies, ESI compressed highly complex engineering workflows from more than two weeks of expert work to just two days.

Working within Enstone's existing design, simulation and engineering tools, ESI is being built to help the team explore far more design candidates, close the gap between simulation and on-track performance, weigh manufacturability alongside performance, and retain the full history of every development decision. Alpine's engineers remain the authority on what goes on the car; ESI widens what they can consider and shortens the time it takes to know whether an idea is right.

For fans, the impact of Apex Ultra’s ESI technology will build on track over time. Closing the gap to the front of the grid will not be easy, but the faster learning cycle is designed to accelerate upgrades, with every race weekend’s insights feeding directly into the next. Together, Alpine and Apex Ultra will redefine the limits of what is possible as we start fighting for podiums and beyond.

Denis Mars, Co-founder, Apex Ultra:

“Formula One is the AlphaGo arena for engineering: the best engineers on the planet, competing in public, with a feedback loop measured in weeks rather than years. There is no better place to learn what it means for an intelligence to engineer, and no better partner than a team that has chosen to learn faster than everyone else. This is the first time our work towards ESI leaves our lab. We wanted the first place it went to be the hardest.”

Steve Nielsen, Managing Director, BWT Alpine Formula One Team:

“Formula One has always been won by the teams that saw the next decisive technology coming, committed to it early, and learned to put it to work best. Aerodynamics drove competitive advantage in the last three decades. The next will be defined by intelligence, by how fast a team can turn everything it learns into a faster car. Bringing Apex Ultra into Enstone is that commitment. We are not adding a tool to the factory. We are changing how the team learns and adapts.”