Lotus F1: 38°C? Sand in your Vblocks? Must be building a data center in Bahrain again If you think your IT role is demanding, imagine needing to do a major install every couple of weeks. You only have a day to do it, you can't visit the site before, and it may be in incredibly hot, wet or dusty conditions. What you install has to deal with huge quantities of data and be 100 per cent reliable. Nine nines is not …
The "Lotus" F1 car is as much a product of Lotus as my "Bugatti" cigar lighter (which I got for free) is a product of Bugatti. Lotus Cars doesn't do the chassis and the engine is a Merc. The team is owned by Genii Capital.
As far as IT, the article is fascinating in a way that F1 ceased to be years ago.
Lotus Cars doesn't do the chassis and the engine is a Merc.
You can tell it's not made by Lotus by the way it completes the distance without breaking down...
Nevertheless, the GP's point was almost certainly about the financial issues faced by the F1 team, not Lotus Cars.
Vic.
[ Former Esprit S3 owner ]
You say these things, but when your drivers have fan websites like hasmaldonadocrashedtoday.com/ how can you say it's boring?
I've worked with a number of engineers from F1 teams who have come to the company I work for after they've had enough of the pace of the sport, they're very good guys both personally and technically, but have all said it's a thoroughly exhausting job, chasing ever-diminishing returns. Hats off to them though! It's these types of things that give a chance to new technologies to prove themselves so that we as a wider society benefit from them in the future.
"How long before the cars are driven by standardized robots as well, to completely remove the human factor?"
I honestly don't believe it will happen in F1, given that a lot of the purists want to strip the ground effects, spoilers, front wings, traction control and most of the electronics, assuming they got their way. Their logic was given the rate of technology being infused into these vehicles, what does the driver do other than monitor gauges?
The car's launch from the pit or from a dead stop is all computer controlled and only when it's moving close to speed does the driver take over.
Personally, I hope the human element is never stripped from f1, because that's what keeps it exciting for me. I mean it's basically driver's skill and engineering efforts. Good discussion tho...
... and active (blown) ground effect
Ahh, the Brabham BT46B.
"Nah, guv' it's not sucking the car onto the track! It's for cooling..."
Not sure how effective the ground-effect was, but it sure cleaned the driving line quite well, and there aren't many 200MPH vacuum cleaners in the world!
The main problem they had to start with was that none of their springs were stiff enough. The drivers sat in the pits, blipping the throttle, and the car flexed up and down as the fan kicked in. On the track, they just drove round the other cars in the corners.
In practical terms it was a bit of a dead-end, since there's no off-track application for it, and taken to its extremes on track you'd have ended up with cars pulling more Gs in the corners & braking than the drivers could have coped with. But a marvellously inventive way to get round the fact that everyone else was running a V-configured engine & could do "passive" ground effect with venturis; simply not something we get to see under modern regs. (along with 6 wheelers and the like...)
Many years ago I worked in an F1 team, doing telemetry (HQ and test track based not travelling with the races). I got the job because I was an active radio amateur and I knew the people already there (who were also radio amateurs). We would attempt to pickup a batch of packets as the car passed the pit wall and would get them perhaps on 1 out of every 3 passes.
Telemetry was in its infancy then, and has moved on exponentially since, gone way out of my league now.
"Did anyone else read this and immediately start thinking about how interesting it would be to design statistical models of the demographics of the Roman Catholic Church using modern GIS techniques and general census data?"
You think TheRomanCatholicCorportion isn't doing that exact thing?
" F1 has absolutely zero to do with reality in the real world."
Thanks for that interjection. Did somebody suggest it needs a connection to the automotive real world?
As far as I know it's categorised as a sport and try as I might, I can't make a connection between the Triple Jump and my everyday life either.
Funny that.
F1 does have a connection to the real world though. It's a proving ground for advanced automotive technologies. The efficiency gains that are sought to squeeze every tiny performance advantage out of an F1 car do eventually end up cycled out into the commercial automotive world, first in the luxury sports cars and then onward to everyone else.
F1 is the skunkworks of automobile design.
When watching F1 most laps are exactly the same. In that spirit this really interesting quote on page 4 stood out as a repetition from page 3
"From the car, we are looking at a range data sets from sensors, from temperatures, strain gauges, pressure sensors, displacements, RPM, and so on. Pretty much anything you can measure. For example, the upright in each wheel has a triple axis accelerometer on it, we measure brake disk and caliper temperature, brake pad displacement along with brake (hydraulic) pressure."
"When watching F1 most laps are exactly the same"
As is normal in motor-racing, some races are boring, some are exciting, most lie somewhere in between. Ideally you have 2-3 closely matched teams with 4-6 closely matched cars to have some excitement, but really the action is usually concentrated in a few laps with positions being stable for most of the race. MotoGP is similar except that you can get more bikes fighting each other for position at once in a smaller space. But even then a super-thriller like last weekend's in Australia is a rarity.
@Steve Davies 3 - all of the above, plus you can actually wander into the paddock and talk to the crews and drivers, even sit in the cars at some events. The vintage guys do it for love, not money, and will (mostly) happily talk to an interested spectator; not something you'll be able to do at an F1 race.
I noticed these 2 quotes: "The cars can't run without the computer systems" and "If we haven't got the back-end systems, we can't send the car out"
I understand that because of the huge amount of telemetry involved you'd want to have your systems up and running whenever the car is, and that some things on the car must be programmed for it to run optimally or even at all.
But is it literally the case that it is physically impossible to start up an F1 car and drive it off without the back-end servers being online? I would seriously doubt that since for a team it's better to send out a sub-optimal* car for a qualifying or race session than keep it in the garage.
*ie without optimal setup and no telemetry, but can run, as long as it's safe of course.
Not sure if they can't run at all - but given the cost of repair if it went catastrophically wrong, would they want to?
In a similar vein, I know that there's a whole generation of Group C Le Mans racers that are unlikely ever to turn a wheel again as they run the earliest iterations of engine management software. When the teams broke up/were sold off, the cars went in a different direction to the computer kit and no-one had the tools to get them running/remapped. A far cry from the rebuild of the BRM V16; someone went & copied the numbers off the wall of the shed where they'd been scribbled during development work before the shed got knocked down...
Indeed. Back in 2002 I was at Donington Park at a historic meeting where some enterprising types had got themselves Damon Hill's Arrows (F)A-18 from 1997. Unfortunately they were having a few problems getting the thing started. The engine cover was off, a laptop was connected to the car, and I recall people looking through a several inch thick manual...
Unfortunately it didn't run at all that weekend, but I do know that it has been up and running in the past year or so.
All this is completely at odds with a large selection of 1960-80s F1 cars where many a time it's not too far off a Cosworth DFV and Hewland 'box attached to a tub, which is a lot easier to get started and maintain.
Yes, but I think that was originally aimed at the body panels... John Wyer, team manager at Aston Martin in the 50s and 60s, subsequently confirmed that management regarded the body work as "consumables" - although they'd never actually shared that particular element of management strategy with the drivers. And indeed they're still disposable today... http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/Huge-drama-dominates-Castle-Combe-Circuit-s/story-27940805-detail/story.html
But is it literally the case that it is physically impossible to start up an F1 car and drive it off without the back-end servers being online?
Of course. Didn't you notice the heave involvement of Microsoft here? You don't really expect the onboard computers to work without a license check on startup, do you? At least 50% of the cars bandwidth is reserved for patching and updates.
Joking aside, I suspect the cars may have a "limp home" mode if for no other reason that they need to be able to get out of the way if comms break down instead of just stalling on the spot, but if I see how deep the F1 regulations go it would not surprise me if some of that data streaming is mandatory.
Perhaps the author would care to comment?
The F1 rules state "Pit to car telemetry is prohibited." so I would imagine that it is possible for a car on the track to be run without the computer systems, however without computer guided pre-race set-up, and giving during the race information relayed verbally to the driver they probably wouldn't run that well.
But in my experience of being an IT bod at a large well known F1 company, the IT supplier and sponsorship arrangement wasn't just about, as you put it "making the car go faster" it was also very much about getting the equipment and funds to just keep the racing team and associated "businesses" solvent so they could build "a" car in the first place.
I'm struggling to remember specifics, but as far as the onboard computerisation is concerned I can think of at least two occasions this season when problems with the onboard computer systems have been rectified by doing just that; fortunately not in the middle of the race though!
My ideal job. F1 and IT
Probably not.
I used to work with a guy who'd spent time as pit crew in F1. He got into the job because of his love of racing. He got out because of his love of racing. As he put it - "whenever the Grand Prix is on, you're stuck at work".
Vic.
no i disagree i think. Lewis's Merc wasn't even shown 2 races back when he was in front uncontested all race, but if fighting happens at the back it gets shown, especially when you have the likes of Alonso back there, one of the best drivers in a rubbish car to throw around out of frustration, the camera goes where the excitement is and that's not usually P1 30 seconds ahead unless he's coming up on backmarkers
Ah, that was because the sponsors didn't give the TV director a big enough brown envelope.
It is all down to the directors choice. There are many times when crucial action is missed because he has cut to something unintersting such as a long legged blonde in the Pits.
I only watch the starts of F1 races. The exicting bits are the crashes. By lap 5 it is almost always a procession and boring as hell.
YMMV
No matter what part of an F1 team you participate in, it is a tough 24/7 grind. Lotus may have nice computers but unfortunately they have run out of money and are being bought by Renault. Three years ago Lotus was a front runner but now they are mid-field runners. It takes about $400 million per season to operate a competitive F1 team once you have all the infrastructure in place. The IT systems are crucial to the very operations of an F1 team and they need to be top of the line hardware and software to get the necessary results.
Hint - I managed HPC systems at an F1 team.
At Lotus?
Because Page 1 of the article tells us :-
The front-line computer systems are VCE Vblocks. These come ready to run with systems built by Cisco, EMC and VMware on a Windows platform
And Page 2 claims :-
the Microsoft Dynamics logos are a reflection that Lotus F1 is very much a Microsoft house
So although you might be right, you are directly contradicting the article; a little evidence might be a good plan...
Vic.
Vic
that article is mostly about the trackside systems at Lotus, which will run Windows.
Later in the article it discusses the Mistral HPC cluster which was installed in that underground server room, for running CFD calculations. Completely different things.
No, I didn't work at Renault but I worked with aero engineers who came from there.
Completely different things.
Yes, I know that. But the article claims that Lotus is a Microsoft shop, and given how hard MS plugs the relationship in their TV advertising, this is entirely likely. MS would certainly be pushing for Windows to be used throughout the operation.
And you're telling us that that isn't the case. So I asked for evidence to substantiate your position. You haven't given us any...
Vic.
F1 is so heavily regulated, it seems that races are won or lost by telemetry: Car 1 beats Car 2 because they dipped their flap by 2 degrees more. How much room is left for driver skill or significant engineering innovation?
I stopped watching F1 a few years back because it was getting too dull. All the cars look the same, powered in the same way, running on the same tires. Wake me up when the rules say you can show up with whatever you like so long as it fits in X cubic feet and isn't going to kill anyone. You can see why da kidz prefer to go street racing, law be damned.
Most people miss the point about F1. It was always was, is, and always will be a manufacturers championship. Thats where the $$ is.
The constructors championship is what it is all about. The drivers championship is just a side show.
I have long said they ought to have a separate drivers championship race in the morning in equal cars. But then no one would watch the 'main event' so that will never fly.
As I say to friends who are bemused by it 'If you want to watch cutting edge technology thrashed within an atom of its life then watch F1. If you want to watch racing then watch another formula'
Personally I love and watch F1 for what it really is - a technological race... the only real interest is which member of a team wins as they are the only drivers really racing one another.
To get my racing kicks I watch other stuff.
The only positive thing to say about it is I remember going racing with a touring car team in the late 80s to Silverstone (before they ruined it) where we were support for F1. I asked the team where I should go and watch F1 qualifying for the first time and they said the inside of the old Becketts. 'And tell us what you think about F1 drivers when you get back'.
The slow cars came out first, down Hangar straight at approaching 200mph and then hearing them lift and turn in. Impressive.
And then the big boys came out. Flat all the way. He'll lift any second, he'll lift any sec......... errrr f*ck he never lifted. How the HELL did he do that ? And again. And faster. OMG....
After an hour I got back somewhat shellshocked at what I had seen. 'So what do you think?' said they.
"They are not like us.... I'm not sure if they are entirely sane"
"Ah" said they. "Now you understand.... "
So forget the racing. Qualifying is the best bit. One man, one ridiculous machine, one lap, balls out. Wrestling with a demon in a way that us mortals cannot possibly conceive.
For me thats what makes F1 great :-)
"It must be 100% reliable, 9 nines is not good enough" is the sort of bullshit that managers or other statistically illiterate people say. I would have though that most Register readers (and maybe even some of the writers) would know that 100% reliability is completely impossible (do you really require it to keep working through a direct meteor strike, which is a significant factor at that level of probability?)
99.9999999% reliability for 20 races a year means one failure every 50 million years. I'd say that's good enough.
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