From all the YouTube videos, I learnt they started in 2001 (middle of August, about 4 weeks before 9/11, where for a few days afterwards very few people showed up), and their "Car-System" (which drives the cars, and even planes) is written in Pascal. For the F1 races, Gerrit (the boss who had the dream of having these races) said he wanted a real software-driven race, and thought, "Wait a minute, we have 20 cars, nowadays CPUs have more cores than that, so just give each car a core of the CPU".

In some videos you see glimpses of computer screens that control the cars, the UI looks very fascinating (lots of checkboxes, and status lines).