Formula 1 teams are becoming increasingly reliant on technology, with sensors, servers, connectivity, unified communications, and cybersecurity solutions crucial for enabling the analysis of data to improve cars and raceday strategies.
We look into how tech companies and connectivity providers like AT&T are helping F1 teams like Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, Mercedes-AMG Petronas, and Scuderia Ferrari get a head start in the championship kicking off this weekend in Melbourne, Australia.
DATA AND COMMS: THE NEW LIFEBLOOD OF FORMULA 1
Succeeding in Formula 1 is now all about the cycle of racing, measuring, analysing, developing, and then continually repeating this process, head of Technical Partnerships at Aston Martin Red Bull Racing Zoe Chilton said, with the team producing somewhere in the range of 1,000 new designs between every race in the calendar, or 30,000 for the season.
"Everything we do is data driven," Chilton told ZDNet. "It's always about data, and it's always about planning ahead."
Data is gathered from hundreds of sensors spread out over its cars during testing and racing, compiling information on performance and conditions to inform changes that should be made to the cars or driving strategies.
"Our car in racing trim has about 120 sensors across it, and they're looking at all sorts of different features," Chilton told ZDNet. "In the engine alone, you've probably got 40 or 50 which are looking at temperatures, pressures, timings, and just making sure the engine is healthy, and that data goes to Renault as our engine manufacturer.
"And then across the rest of the car, we've got various sensors looking at airflow and air pressure to help us understand our aerodynamic position. And also things looking at temperature, making sure our brakes and our tyres are not overheating; making sure that everything is behaving itself, essentially."
This data is connected back to the garage using radio with limited bandwidth, she said, so while the team cannot get all the data it would like during the race, it still gets "a good amount". It is then shared via trackside LAN with all team members present at the location, and around 400GB of data per race weekend is sent over an AT&T-provided network back to Red Bull Racing's UK headquarters.
AT&T is therefore the team's "most crucial technical partner", according to Chilton. It provides a range of different services to the team, with the core being the global SD-WAN connection. With the team's decision-making time frame on whether a car needs to be brought into the pit sometimes in the range of just 45 seconds, Red Bull Racing is reliant on real-time communications between all engineers both trackside and in HQ, she said.
"That kind of underpins everything that we do across race weekend. Included in that is a lot of support with unified comms tech," she added.
Latency between the AT&T operations room in the UK and Melbourne -- the furthest race away from HQ -- is around 300 milliseconds, she said.
Jason Yu, director of Strategy and Innovation for AT&T Australia and New Zealand, said it typically sends a team a couple of weeks before each Grand Prix to establish connectivity, so that when Red Bull Racing arrives they are ready to instantly plug in and go.
According to Yu, AT&T -- which has been an "innovation partner" of Red Bull Racing for seven years -- provides the team with the "building blocks" of software-defined networking (SDN), collaboration, mobility, and security.
"In terms of the network piece, we provide the global MPLS [multiprotocol label switching] network connectivity from each of the racetracks back through to the UK headquarters," Yu told ZDNet.
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