By Ian Harvey
here’s not much racing going on at the track in beautiful downtown Montreal, but the Formula One(F1) teams are hard at it in their pit row garages, adjusting their rides, as drivers chat with engineers about their strategies for the upcoming race here this weekend (June 11-13, 2010). Inside the AT&T Williams, garage the crew of 45 technicians have selected their engines and transmissions and have started dialing in the suspension of their two cars to be piloted by Rubens Barrichello (pic- ture, below) and Nico Hülkenberg during Sunday’s Grand Prix event through the city. “The Montreal course is the most de- manding on the brake especially with those hairpins and long straightaways where you’re going 330 km per hour and then braking very quickly down to 220 or 230 km per hour,” says Alex Burns, the chief executive officer of the AT&T Williams race team. “As they say, ‘you want to kiss the wall not embrace it.’”
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command centre where 18 large monitors display data related to component per- formance, including those rapidly heating brakes Burns was talking about. “Each race generates about 27 to 31 gigabytes of data between the two cars,” says Burns, noting each track presents a different challenge and no set up is ex- actly the same so the data from every stop and season also provides a database of in- formation for future races since the team can pick up where it left off.
“Before we’d put the data on a drive or disk and hand carry it, but today it’s not something we want to trust to baggage han- dlers at the airport,” says Burns. “It’s so much better to be able to dump it back to Oxfordshire (England) at the end of the day.”
DAY OF THE RACE
Come race day the cars of the AT&T Williams team will strip down to about 100 essential sensors allowing them to make some adjustments on the fly, but perhaps
FOR FORMULA ONE RACING TEAM, AT&T WILLIAMS, EVERY SECOND COUNTS ON THE TRACK AND IN THE PITS. SIMILARLY, EVERY PIECE OF DATA TRAVELING BETWEEN ITS CARS RACING AT BREAK-NECK SPEED AND ITS CREW OF TECHNICIANS ENSURING PEAK PERFORMANCE MUST BE FAST, SECURE AND HACKER-FREE
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And while the focus of the crowd will be on the performance of the drivers on the track, what they won’t see are the dozens of eyes meticulously scanning data from the cars during pre-race trials and at the race itself.
Nor will they see the ever-watchful eyes
of AT&T security team members monitoring a veritable Niagara Falls of data across their network ensuring it is safe from prying eyes or nefarious intent, which also includes the torrent of data surging from Montreal to the team’s headquarters in England. The track data comes from up to 250 sensors fitted to each car, some providing multiple pieces of data and all wirelessly transmitted back to the AT&T Williams
more importantly look at what went right – and wrong – in the post-race debriefing. If a car collides with another, goes off track or “kisses” the wall, says Burns, the telemetry onboard will relay the stress and deflection of suspension components so the track crew and engineers can decide if something has been pushed to the point of failure or will otherwise impact on the race and might be changed during a pit stop. Then there’s the eight or 10 staff mem- bers at Williams, headquarters back in Ox- fordshire, who will be poring over the data during practice and on race day looking for any nugget of information, which could increase lap times or head off a compo- nent failure.
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