Telemetry Stream Rate
60 Hz
Edge Processing Latency
<10ms
Incidents That Motivated Apex
3 Weekends
Public Debut
April 4, 2026
WHY THIS MATTERS
Formula 1's Invisible Security Gap
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The 2026 hybrid regulations created a thermal + electrical + software attack surface that didn't exist before
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Drivers operate at cognitive maximum - anomalies in the data stream are invisible to the human in the car
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No dedicated integrity validation layer exists in F1 today
Corrupted sensor data at 300 kph is not a data quality problem. It is a safety problem.
PROJECT APEX
A Physics Validation Layer for the Edge
Validates every telemetry packet against MCL40 2026 physics baselines - vertical energy, engine temperature, and rear ride height - in under 10ms.
Physics-Aware Detection
GREEN / YELLOW / RED Severity
Each event is tagged with a deterministic severity level. No black box. No ML guesswork. Human-verifiable rules that race engineers can override at any time.
Splunk Mission Control
Enriched telemetry forwards to Splunk Enterprise in real time. Race engineers see physics-validated, severity-tagged data - not raw sensor noise.
Project Apex: Mission Control Dashboard - Real-time physics validation and severity visualization across both McLaren cars.
Suzuka - March 29, 2026 - 50G Impact
THE INCIDENT THAT MADE THE CASE
Zero Warning. Two Cars at Full Throttle
Oliver Bearman's 50G collision at Spoon Curve on March 29, 2026 - six days before the talk - demonstrated exactly the gap Project Apex was designed to address. The system had no mechanism to surface the energy-state differential between the two cars before it became a wall impact.
FIA issued an official statement the same night acknowledging the closing speed visibility gap.
ABOUT THE TALK
Presented to the Professional Security Community
Formula 1's 2026 technical regulations introduced a 50:50 hybrid power unit architecture that created an attack surface spanning thermal, electrical, and software interdependencies simultaneously. Project Apex addresses the resulting integrity gap: a real-time, physics-aware validation layer that classifies every telemetry event against MCL40's physical envelope, assigns a deterministic severity level, and surfaces anomalies to engineers in under 10 milliseconds - before a sensor fault, software bug, or adversarial input can propagate into a sofety-critical decision.
CONFERENCE BSides San Diego 2026
DATE April 4, 2026
VENUE SDSU Student Union, San Diego, CA
AUDIENCE Security engineers, architects, CISOs,
and technical leadership
FORMAT 45-minute talk with Q&A
TRACK Main (Hardware & Physical Security)
Timothy D. Harmon, CISSP
Lead Enterprise Architect - Project Apex
