Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where we’re wondering if the FIA president trying to get rid of FIA presidential term limits when nobody likes the FIA’s new Formula 1 cars is like me saying, “Well I’m never leaving!” when someone corrects a typo. Maybe not. Who can say?I’m Patrick, and Madeline Coleman will be along later. Let’s get to it.Should F1 mimic SailGP?Hey, why is there a sailing story on my F1 home page?Let me explain.SailGP is an annual international sailing competition featuring 13 teams that race identical high-performance catamarans. SailGP runs its boats with around 35,000 unique data points flowing off each vessel per second. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure processes roughly 80 billion pieces of information over a typical race weekend. (This may sound familiar to you — AWS does similar things at the F1 series level, while companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM work with individual teams.)And then — here’s the part where F1 folks start sweating — SailGP teams just … give that data to everyone. Seriously. We wrote about it and everything.Alex Reid, SailGP’s director of performance engineering, said visitors walk into the data center and immediately ask if they’re allowed to take pictures. “We encourage it,” Reid said.I have tried to imagine Toto Wolff encouraging a rival team to photograph his data center. I can’t. The human brain has limits.That’s because secrecy is built into F1. “Spygate” remains the sport’s defining corporate-espionage scandal nearly 20 years later. Everyone has been even more jumpy about protecting data ever since.And yet, SailGP has had seven different winners across 12 events this season. F1 has had two winners (from the same team) across five races.You could see a consistency argument here, if you squint. F1 teams buy engines from other teams (McLaren, Alpine and Williams buy Mercedes; Haas and Cadillac buy Ferrari). Shouldn’t smaller teams be allowed to buy data from larger teams, too? After all, the open-data sailing league is producing more competitive racing than the closed-wall “pinnacle of motorsport.”Well … SailGP can share all that data freely because there is only one boat, and everyone already has it. The data points don’t reveal how to build a faster boat, but how well a crew is sailing. Human stuff. Harder to manufacture.In F1, the data is the car. It is the competitive edge. Mercedes’ telemetry doesn’t just tell you how fast they’re going; it tells you why, and how to build your car to catch up. The data is the whole thing.So SailGP’s open-data philosophy isn’t really a philosophy so much as an inevitability of choosing hardware parity. Whether F1 could (or should) get there someday is an interesting thought experiment. But too much of its identity lives in the answer being no.