Chief technology officer Gavin Williams began working with F1 Arcade in 2021, when the founding team presented a list of challenges to overcome while developing the concept.
Speaking at MCA’s Hostech conference, Williams explained the key issue was to make a racing experience that appealed to everybody, and a game accessible to the masses – “something that anybody could drive.”
The Formula 1-inspired competitive socialising concept now has seven locations – one in London, one in Birmingham, and five in the US – and has worked to build a seamless tech and guest experience as it expands, Williams told delegates.
“We needed to make it work across 83 simulators, and make them work flawlessly every single time,” he said. “We also needed to find a way to build a seamless guest experience, and not just do this once, but do it globally across multiple time zones.
“So the biggest thing for me is making sure tech is an enabler.”
F1 Arcade partnered with Access to build its own online booking and check-in journey, allowing it to have “something quite unique to us in the first half of the [customer] journey.”
The brand then developed four difficulty modes, later adding in a fifth. Building its own tech has enabled it to develop, test, and deploy products rapidly, as Williams explained.
“We found people wanted something more challenging, and built an ‘elite’ race mode,” he continued. “The benefit of building this tech ourselves is that we’re able to adapt quickly to the market.”
F1 Arcade currently offers team-based racing (primarily for corporate bookings and big groups) alongside head-to-head racing. It will introduce a new ‘challenger’ mode next year, “for those who want more of a challenge and to compete against other people.”
Since launch, the group has also introduced its version of a loyalty scheme to capture data while understanding and rewarding its audience.
The majority of guests register through the Arcade Hub and are rewarded for playing with ‘arcadians’, which can be exchanged for rewards like free drinks.
Along with capturing data, the goal is to ensure it can successfully deliver the F1 experience across geographies as the brand grows.
“Everything is remotely deployable, to any venue we want at any time,” Williams explained. “What’s really hard is that when a game crashed, we don’t know what the problem is – whether it’s the processor or a hardware or software issue.
“So our entire system is built around observability. If something goes wrong, we can link it to a booking and rectify it as soon as possible.”
The dashboard allows complete remote access to every single simulator across the estate, serving the team from both a tech and operational perspective.
As a result, F1 Arcade has achieved a 99.9% tech success rate as well as seeing a majority of customers opting in for driver profile registrations through the Arcade Hub.
“Now we’re in a position where we have very few issues and we’re really focusing on scale and optimising performance.
“We’ve opened four venues in two years, and there’s more to come.”
