Montreal – Racing sensation Lewis Hamilton of England won the recently concluded Grand Prix du Canada in Montreal. The 22-year phenomenon had the poll-position to start the race and was faster than the runner up Nick Heidfeld by 4.3 seconds.
Coming in third that day was Alexandre Wurz of the Williams F1 team. He completed the 70 lap race just 5.3 seconds slower than Hamilton. An argument can be made that Wurz, who has been called the most technically astute Formula 1 driver today, was faster than any racer because he started the race 19 cars back of Hamilton. Only three other racers were behind Wurz at the start of the Grand Prix that day.
Having a technically astute driver such as Wurz can be an advantage given the amount of data a team such as Williams captures, stores and reviews.
Williams’ yearly IT budget is between two and three million British pounds ($4.2 million to $6.3 million in Canadian dollars) and every cent is spent on winning races.
At the head of this organization is Alex Burns, the COO. He has been running the team’s business for five years.
Burns is also the defacto CIO of Williams with an IT staff of 15. Williams is a complicated mid-size business with more than 500 employees on a 40 hectare technology campus located in Oxfordshire, U.K. Burns said instead of focusing on profit the company’s main goal is to be faster on the track than any other of the nine teams on the Formula 1 campaign this year.
Burns described the importance of computing to his operation in one word: “Massive!”
“To us on one level we are a large medium-size business and we are international and we travel. The pace of our business is very fast. The decision making is quick and people need to be in touch quickly, which pressures us to be mobile. On top of that, we are also an extreme prototyping and engineering business. We are on the bleeding edge with our technology,” Burns said.
Once a car is designed and built it goes through a lot of calculations and simulation work in a wind-tunnel. Then it is shipped to many places around the world. The car is not only parked inside a garage it is also connected to two server racks near at the back end of the space where data is collected and sent back to the U.K. campus.
“This is the core of what we do,” Burns said.
Williams is also a team with a storied past. Started in 1977 by Sir Frank Williams and Patrick Head, the F1 team has won 16 Formula 1 championships, the last of which was captured by Canadian Jacques Villeneuve in 1997. Williams is among the four best known brands in Formula 1 along with Ferrari, McLaren, and Monaco.
But, Williams is also a team in transition. It is no longer a factory team since BMW left. This has affected its IT budget, but it hasn’t changed the way its cars and drivers have performed on the track, Burns said.
Williams now uses Toyota and Burns calls the switch: “different.”
“We have a remote provider of engines. We have engineers and support from Toyota at the circuit similar to what we had with BMW. So it is not a massive change,” he added.
Despite not being a factory team on the F1 circuit, Williams main technology pain points deal with meeting people’s expectations rather than the scope of its IT operation.
According to Burns, the staff always wants more.
“They want to do more computing and faster computing and the reliability of the system, which is already high, is an ongoing march for speed,” he said.
Williams data collection is on a steep growth curve. At the Grand Prix du Canada in Montreal, for example, over three days the cars will generate 8 TB of data, which will be stored at the garage and sent over to the U.K. campus.
Approximately eight technicians are working inside the garage in intense heat since the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is one of the smallest garage set ups in F1. The server boxes are specially made by Lenovo running Windows XP with an Oracle database. Most of the data is telemetry data, but there are operations for chassis and fuel.
Each driver and car has one race engineer and four mechanics, with one of those being a head mechanic. The garage set up has a notebook in front of the car which monitors the parameters of the engine and can retrieve data while the car is at 1,900 RPMs.
Williams usually designs its own programs because of the specific nature of the sport. Burns did say that from time to time the team does employ other solution providers.
The real time information from the car is downloaded via cable called the umbilical cord, which dangles from the roof of the garage and is plugged into the car.
After each qualifying session drivers such as Wurz and his teammate Nico Rosberg spend two hours pouring over data with engineers behind the garage so that the driver can bring his real world track insight to the data collected, said Sam Michael, the technical director at Williams.
“There is a fine line between the engine, the car and the factory and all of them are checking the data to make the car go faster and be more reliable. Nothing slows us down from an IT standpoint,” Michael said.
In part two Willams describes in detail how IT plays a major part in its wind tunnels and other parts of its business. Check out part two of Computing in the fast lane tomorrow.