And Why the Name on the Car is the Least Important Part.
There’s a version of this story the market tells every time a technology company shows up on a race car, and most of the time it’s accurate. The logo goes on the bodywork, the photographs get taken, the brand gets in front of a few hundred million viewers over the course of a season and everybody shakes hands and goes back to what they were doing. It’s a sponsorship, and sponsorships are fine.
This isn’t one of those.
This weekend at the race in Austin, TENEX.AI becomes an Official Partner of TGR Haas F1 Team, and our name goes on the engine cover and halo of the VF-26 for the first time, which we are proud of and will not pretend otherwise. But the reason this partnership exists has very little to do with paint. Starting now, TENEX.AI is running fully agentic, human-led security operations across the team’s global digital infrastructure, the same way we run it for every customer we protect, and once you understand what that involves in a race environment, the logo starts to look like the smallest part of the deal.
The Fastest Operation in Sport Is Also One of the Most Exposed
A team is one of the most connected operations in sport, and it isn’t close. High-speed telemetry, remote engineering data and trackside networks move between the circuit and the factory constantly, strategy calls get made in seconds on the back of that data, and a pit call that arrives a few seconds late can cost a race the team spent a year preparing for. Everything the team does runs on a clock measured in tenths, and the security protecting all of it has to run on that same clock.
Most of the industry still doesn’t. In a typical security operation a threat can sit in a queue for hours waiting for an analyst to get to it, and that’s a real problem for any organization, but for a team whose entire competitive advantage is built on moving data faster than everyone else on the grid it’s something closer to a liability. The connectivity that makes a modern team fast is exactly what makes it a target, and the people doing the targeting don’t care about the sport. They’re the same people going after hospitals, banks and manufacturers every day, they care about what they can take, disrupt or hold for ransom, and the car just happens to be the most visible thing in the building.
On the Car, and in the Fight
Here’s what the partnership actually looks like from the inside: starting this weekend, TENEX.AI delivers fully agentic, human-led Security Operations Center capabilities and 24/7/365 threat detection for TGR Haas F1 Team. Agentic AI investigates every alert the team receives, 100% of them, in seconds, builds the full context around each one and hands a complete case to a named TENEX.AI analyst who owns the decision. Obvious attacks get stopped at machine speed and escalated for validation afterward, the team’s data stays in the team’s environment, and every step along the way is visible and auditable, so there is never a question of what the AI did, what the human did or why.
AI handles the volume. Humans handle the judgment. We’ve been saying that since the day we launched, and it isn’t something we dressed up for an audience, it’s how we run security operations for every customer we protect and it’s exactly why an team looked at the way we work and decided that’s how they wanted theirs run. While their engineers are watching tire temps and lap deltas, our analysts are watching their network, and the team gets to think about the car.
Why TGR Haas F1 Team Chose TENEX
“We’re delighted to welcome TENEX.AI to TGR Haas F1 Team as an Official Partner. In modern Formula 1, data protection and rapid cyber incident response are as vital to performance as aerodynamic efficiency. TENEX.AI’s fully agentic, human-led approach will give our engineers and strategists the confidence to focus entirely on track performance. We look forward to building a powerful, technology-driven partnership together for the remainder of 2026 and the seasons ahead.”
— Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal, TGR Haas F1 Team
Read that quote again, because there’s something in it that most partnership announcements don’t have. A Team Principal is putting cyber incident response in the same sentence as aerodynamic efficiency, and he’s doing it in the week his team races at home. That’s not a courtesy. It’s a statement about what it takes to compete at the top of this sport in 2026, and it’s the same conclusion the best security leaders in every industry are arriving at right now, whether they’re running a race team, a hospital system or a global bank.
“A Formula 1 team is one of the most connected operations in sport, and it moves at a pace where a threat sitting in a queue for hours is a real problem. That is what TENEX.AI was built for. Agentic AI investigates every alert in seconds, and a named analyst owns every consequential decision. We’re proud to bring that to TGR Haas F1 Team, and proud to put our name on an American team competing at the top of the sport.”
— Eric Foster, Founder and CEO, TENEX.AI
The Mission Is Real
We talk a lot at TENEX.AI about fighting evil, and we mean it literally. The bad guys have been winning for a long time, not because they’re smarter than the people defending against them but because they move faster, and agentic AI with exceptional humans making the calls that matter is how that finally changes. Protecting a Formula 1 team is a proof point, not a pitch, because if this approach holds up in an environment where everything moves at race pace, every second is measured and every weekend is a deadline, it holds up anywhere.
This one is also personal for us. TGR Haas F1 Team is an American owned team competing at the very top of a global sport, TENEX.AI is an American company built to do the best work in the fight against cybercrime, and from the first conversation, putting those two things together on the same car felt like the obvious thing to do.
What’s on the VF-26, and What Comes Next
For the rest of the 2026 season you’ll find TENEX.AI on the engine cover and halo of the VF-26, and beginning in 2027 the partnership extends to the driver race suits, team and management apparel and the team’s Academy assets. The branding will grow over the seasons ahead, but the work started this week, and the work is the part we care about most.
TGR Haas F1 Team races at home this weekend at, with practice Friday, qualifying Saturday and lights out Sunday. If you’re in Austin, look for the name on the engine cover. If you’re responsible for security somewhere that moves fast, we’d like to talk.
Read the full announcement: tenex.ai/tgr-haas-f1-team-announces-multi-year-partnership-with-tenex-ai-for-2026-and-beyond
Fully Agentic. Human-Led. Together, doing the best work in the fight against cybercrime.
TENEX.AI is a fully agentic, human-led security operations company. Learn more at TENEX.AI.
