To the fan or the casual onlooker, a Formula One race involves drivers, the car, and a pit crew. These are the visible teams that you see at the race.

Fans know there is a factory of high-end engineers who craft the cars that do battle on tracks globally, but there is another equally important and high-end team that is less visible – data.

The Bahrain Grand Prix, for example, demonstrated the power of data to win a race. In one of the closest and hardest-fought...