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RACING IS HIGH-TECH
25 August 2000

MONTREAL? "We are, in a way, the victims of too much data," says Peter Burns of the West McLaren Mercedes Formula One (F1) Team run out of Woking, England by McLaren International Inc..

Mr. Burns, the head of partner programs for the defending F1 championship team, is only half kidding. Critics of F1 have long decried its emphasis on prohibitively expensive high-technology - the complex software and hardware that some argue relegates driver skill to the back seat.

"Every team out here (at Montreal's Air Canada Grand Prix) is spending between $160-$200 million (U.S) dollars to race," says Jackie Stewart, the former three-time champion of the world's premier motorsport circuit who is now a team advisor to the Jaguar Racing Team (the former Stewart Grand Prix Team) he sold to Ford Motor Co. for this season. "The stakes are very, very high." 

|Mr. Stewart may, in fact, be underestimating the cost for a team to compete in Formula One racing. Some experts suggest that the best-financed teams might spend as much as $450 million (Canadian) to support teams of three drivers (two to race, one to test) for the full 17-race season. That's what it costs to buy the incredibly sophisticated and often customized software and hardware that supports three cars (two for race day and a spare) and a crew of more than 300 support workers. There are also drivers' salaries running in the millions, as well as wind tunnels and travelling expenses for racing a circuit covering five continents and running almost nine months, from March to November.

Despite the cost, F1 is not about to roll back the clock to a time when the cars raced without radio and microwave connections sending massive amounts of data back to race engineers in the pits. To a time when teams struggled without sophisticated software provided by companies such as Computer Associates Inc. It is that software, processing that data almost instantly, that allows engineers to do the information analysis that often results in critical racing decisions. And it's very clear that teams do not want to return to a time when, as Scott Bain of McLaren design notes, the cars themselves were hand-drawn in paper and ink and early prototype race cars were pounded together with a hammer and chisel.

Today's F1 race car is a symphony of software and hardware. The 600 kg. carbon fibre cars themselves are equipped with 150-200 individual sensors, recording data on everything from engine speed and temperature to tire pressure, fuel consumption airflow over the car's wings. The sensors also transmit data on the condition of the brakes, as well as details on electronically controlled seven-speed transmissions capable of shifting gears in 20-40 milliseconds - much, much quicker than the blink of an eye. 

Speed, of course, is the essence of racing. Nowhere is that more evident than in F1. The 750 horsepower F1 cars made of carbon fibre or Kevlar weigh just 600 kg. and are powered by 3.0-litre V10 engines turning over as fast as 17,000 revolutions per minute (RPM). With that power, they can accelerate from 0-100 km/h in two seconds (something the typical family car does in about 10 seconds). Their top speed is in excess of 350 km/h or 11 metres a second and they can come to a full stop from 160 km/h (100 mph) in two seconds.

A lot can go wrong with such a car and on race day; it's the job of engineers and technicians in the pits to do their best to make sure nothing does. To help them diagnose problems before they can affect the car and change the course of the race, each F1 car is equipped with between 150-200 sensors. So, for example, during each of the 69 laps of the Montreal race (typically car ran each lap in about 1:20), real-time data is transmitted continuously via radio frequencies back to the pits. However, in every race radio frequencies can be blocked, creating gaps in data transmission. So, about two megabytes of data (a floppy disc and a half's worth) is stored in the car's on-board electronic control unit (ECU), as well. As the car passes the pits, all the information about what's been going on with the car during that particular lap is downloaded, then transmitted to a series of laptop computers located on the pit wall and in each team's garage.

This is what is known as telemetry -- the wireless equivalent of a stethoscope permanently attached to a patient. In this case, the patient is a racing car. Except the patient-stethoscope is a rather weak metaphor for capturing the incredibly detailed amount of information available to race engineers. To glean as much information about her patient, a doctor would need to hook her up simultaneously to a heart/lung machine, MRI and CAT scanners, X-ray and ultrasound and goodness knows what besides.

In the case of Team McLaren, the computer and data-processing systems - the stethoscope and other medial accessories, if you will -- are supplied by team sponsor Sun Microsystems Inc. (look for the Sun logo on the car's mirrors) and Computer Associates. The Sun hardware used by McLaren consists of a self-contained network of seven UltraSPARC (tm) workstations which travels with the team all around the world to provide track-side telemetry. The network of workstations is placed in the garage and it is this computer system that remains in contact with the car while it is travelling around the track. This network also sends details about on-track performance to race engineers sitting in front of laptop PCs at the track wall.

One of the edges Team McLaren enjoys is its exclusive relationship with Sun. All that raw data is very nice, but it's not information available to the team in a usable form. And this is where Java technology comes in. Java code, says Richard Jacklin, McLaren engineer at Sun, can be quickly and easily modified, does not fail in the pressure-cooker of a race and a graphic user interface presents information in a an easy-to-use format. Just as important, Java technology uses the same operating system in both desktops and PCs, therefore Team McLaren can use different platforms in different places - i.e., mainframes in the garage and PCs on the pit wall.

"Java gives McLaren the ability to react to change, both from the strategists and engineers' requirements," says Mr. Jacklin. "Different circuits provide the cars, the strategists and the engineers with different challenges, so the information that benefits them most also changes race by race. Java gives us unparalleled flexibility to change the analysts code race-by-race to provide the most useful information."

So what does this mean during a race?  McLaren's Mr. Burns points to recent race in which the car being driven by David Coulthard reported an emerging problem with the transmission. Mr. Coulthard, himself, had not yet noticed it, but the race engineers saw it in the data and radioed advice to him on how to change his shift patterns in order to minimize strain on the gearbox. This advice ultimately allowed Mr. Coulthard to finish the race and score points for the team.

Of course, preparing the cars to race is just as important as keeping them running in the heat of action. And this is where a race car that will never see the track comes in. In fact, team officials concede that this car has done as much as any vehicle to help McLaren win races and last year's championship. But it's not a real car; it's a car written in software, a virtual car in you will, complete to the tiniest detail. It lies nestled in the team's computer-aided design (CAD) system provided by Catia Solutions and Sun. The beauty of this car-in-software is that it provides designers with incredible detail without the need for real-world models.

"Think of this pool of information as the car's DNA," says Mr. Bain of the McLaren design team. "Thanks to the combination of Sun (tm) hardware and Catia software, we knew almost everything about this season's car before it was ever built."

Before the season even begins, designers and engineers gather huge swathes of information on the aerodynamic shape of the car, on the car's performance in both testing and during the previous season's races, and on wind tunnel performance. 
"All that data," says Mr. Bain, "everything that actually makes up the substance of the car, plus extra background detail on the various processes that made each component, and the figures from performance tests...all that information is captures and stored in our database."

Then it's applied to a process of software-driven three-dimensional (3D) modelling that allows developers to work together concurrently on every aspect of the car, from the shape of the wings to the location of sensors, in order to maximise on-track performance.

"Now we see our car evolve months before it ever goes near a track," says Bain. "We can spot errors immediately, or double check something that doesn't look right. If we (designers and engineers) weren't all working from a single master model, that wouldn't be possible."

Henri Durrant, chief aerodynamicist for the team, says CAD-CAM (computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacture) is especially helpful in "virtually" testing every shape on the car to minimise wind drag. That's important because the slipperier car has a clear speed advantage on race day. Prior to the race season, cars are developed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as part of the CAD-CAM system. CFD treats are flowing over surfaces as fluid, thereby allowing designers to measure how every "drop" of air interacts with car components. The goal is to design a car with shapes that make for the most stable airflow, thus making it smooth and easier to drive. 

"Because of what we can do with airflow analysis, we have entered 'bumble bee' territory in F1 (according to the laws of aerodynamics, a bumble bee can't fly)," says Mr. Bain. "There are no straight lines on the car. Even the front wing undulates when you look at it closely. The car is inherently unstable because we are constantly running at the edge of the physically possible."

Embedding design in the software of a CAD-CAM system allows the team to constantly update the car with design changes that take best advantage of track conditions, and driver ability. In addition, because components on cars constantly change based on new knowledge and technology, the designers find themselves frequently tweaking a variety of car shapes to accommodate a new component - even if the fundamental design of the car has not been altered at all.

"Massive simulation: that's where we've seen the most dramatic technological change (in F1). And it's where we are likely to see still more in the next five to 10 years," says Bain. "The effect of tweaking the front wing a certain way might have taken two weeks to simulate five years ago. Now, we can do it in a day."

At the same time, F1 teams use the software to plug in the data they've acquired during testing in order to acquire a super-accurate and reliable virtual picture of how race cars will perform in real-world conditions.

"Obviously telemetry is most useful in testing," says Dick Glover, head of computer simulation at McLaren. "Though the radio updates give us the most important information, there's much more being recorded and we retrieve it by plugging a cable into the car when it returns to the pits and downloading a complete history of the session. 

"We can then (using cutomized software) match this information to the driver's analysis of his car's performance to help correct problems and define a set-up for racing. The data is also vital for our simulation program (software); it's all fed into our simulators in Woking (England) to give a super-accurate model of individual race tracks." 

But that's just today. Sun's Mr. Jacklin predicts that within two years, the way McLaren and other teams design cars will be become even more sophisticated thanks to faster 3D graphic software programs and better networking of workstations.

"The next century will be about intelligent software that liberates the enormous processing power and IT (information technology) investment that is locked into designated workstations - most of which may well be switched off during non-working hours," says Mr. Jacklin. "Sun's vision will enable corporations to draw on the processing power of its entire networked computing resource and apply it where needed. The network truly is the computer."

Clearly, all the developments in software and hardware have made and continue to make racing a challenging adventure for engineers, designers and technologists who, frankly, are for the msot part completely hopeless behind the wheel of a fast car.
"If F1 was boring for people like us that compete in it, then it would be boring for the people that watch it," says Mr. Durrant. "There is far more to F1 than who can press the throttle lever hardest."

So in today's F1, it's as much about who can crunch the numbers fastest and it is about who can hit the racing track's apexes the quickest.

SIDEBAR: McLAREN THEN AND NOW

1966: The first car was designed on two drawing boards, with two slide rules
2000: The team uses a CAD-CAM package with workstations from Sun Microsystems Inc. and software from Catia Inc. Today's care require 10 times more drawing to be done than in 1966.
1966: No data was recorded on the car. Improvements were made through intuition. 
2000: Thousands of data points are recorded per second for both engine and chassis parameters. The data sent from the car to the garage is analysed on pit-wall computers.
1966: Driver Bruce McLaren was not only the McLaren team boss, he was also the driver -- the equivalent of David Coulthard training, testing and racing all day and then going home to run the business.
2000: The 300-member Team McLaren runs on a budget estimated at $300 million a year. 
1966: The two of the leading technical positions, chief designer and technical engineer, were held by the same person.
2000: Some of the niche specialists central to the success of McLaren are data analysts, systems engineers, and electronics engineers. The team employs 13 dedicated engineers, including three full-time engine specialists, just to interpret mountains of data.
1966: Hand-held stopwatches were used to time the cars.
2000: Digital timers keep track of lap time differences in the thousands of a second.
1966: Communication amounted to shouting in pit lane and hand-held signs from the pit wall.
2000: Voice radio communications are used between the driver and his team in the garage and on the pit wall.
1966: Cars produced aerodynamic lift.
2000: Cars produce downforce - lots of it.
1966: Drivers often got by on beer and sandwiches.
2000: Computer-aided fitness tests and programmes are used to ensure drivers enjoy high fitness levels for the demands of F1 racing.

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