How Computer Technology Has Changed F1 Racing

More than 100 sensors capture data from the F1 cars

Computer World interviewed the technology teams for BMW Sauber, McLaren Racing, Red Bull Racing, and Renault about how they run their IT systems and how technology has changed the sport. Each car has about 100 sensors which capture data and send up to 20GB back to the pits during a race. The tech guys arrive a week before a race to set everything up — the kit for BMW Sauber weighs more than 3.5 tons — and when it's over, they pack it all up and move on to the next event.

The pit crews and team management are not allowed to send data directly to the driver when they are screaming around the course, but they can advise him to make changes via a control panel on the steering wheel. And this could be the difference between first or failure.

“They are collecting four to six megabytes per lap. It depends on the track layout and the quality of the coverage but we transfer about 70 per cent in real time to the garage or the pits,” Furrer said. “The other data is downloaded when we connect the car to the network in the garage.

“When we convert data from the real time stream into data we can use I have three servers involved for each car. And then we have the file servers, the main controllers and some auto servers. They are all physical machines; we have about 32 servers on the track. Therefore we are planning to virtualize most of them [on VMware] and, afterwards, have about three or four physical servers and run all the necessary servers as virtual machines.”

Admittedly, the teams use off-the-shelf equipment for some aspects of their track side infrastructure — McLaren Racing, for example, went with a BlackBerry unified communications solution and Lenovo hardware for workstations and laptops — but the core servers are often placed in extreme conditions that include carbon dust, oil, vibration, rain, heat, variable power and a need for portability.

The Renault F1 team, for instance, travels with three special ‘shock proof’ mobile racks housing its critical IT service equipment — HP Proliant Servers for Windows and Linux services, NetApp Filers for data storage, Cisco networking, and UPS systems — and two half-height mobile racks for networking requirements.

Many of the teams build the fully sealed and air-conditioned racks in-house as they are difficult to source.

Computer World