Update
SIMULATORS – Jack Griffin Six laps into the 2008 Monaco Grand Prix Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren blew out his right rear tyre when he skidded on the rain-slicked track and clipped a barrier. Thirteen members of the team, sitting in a windowless room at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, had 30 seconds – the time it would take for Hamilton to get to the pits – to make an important call. Before the race they had run thousands of simulations on the
car’s components and settings as well as the condition of the track and the weather. After the race started the simulators continued collecting data on tyre pressure, downforce, torque and Hamilton’s position relative to other cars. The simulators’ predictive power improved as the race
progressed. Six seconds after Hamilton called in the problem the race engineer got on the radio and told the pit crew to prepare a set of intermediate tyres – not ‘full-wets’ – and to get ready to pump in more fuel when Hamilton pitted. The intermediates wouldn’t grip as well in the rain, and the weight
of the fuel would slow him down. But when the rain stopped and the other drivers pitted he would be able to stay out on the track. Within 10 laps Hamilton took the lead and held it to the chequered flag – one of the most dramatic victories in Monaco history. In 1997 Caroline Hargrove was a lecturer in mechanical engi-
neering at the University of Cambridge when she saw an ad for a position at McLaren to join a team that would develop a simulator. Think for a moment about the power of computers and the quality of the graphics in 1997. Adrian Newey was the team’s head designer and he let it be known he thought the simulator was useless. The technology and the simulator improved. Formula One
imposed very tight limits on track testing. Suddenly every team needed a simulator. And when Newey left McLaren for Red Bull in 2006, upon arrival he announced that they needed two things: a gearbox dynamometer and a simulator. In 2001 when Russell Coutts joined Alinghi he announced that
he wanted a match racing simulator so team members could learn and practise the moves and countermoves. He was introduced to Jean-Claude Monnin, a young Swiss engineer who raced with his brother Eric on the match racing circuit. Monnin was already working on a simulator which he continued to develop for Alinghi. In addition to helping the team, his PC-based simulator was a hit at Alinghi’s interactive plaza at their Auckland base, attracting sailors from
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other teams as well as the public. Meanwhile, back at McLaren, Hargrove recruited her former
Cambridge student Dan Bernasconi, who then spent six years at the team, including leading Data Analysis & Simulation, and Vehicle Modelling. He first joined the America’s Cup working for United Internet Team Germany in Valencia in 2007, then went to Alinghi for the 33rd AC – the DoG match, working on performance prediction and hydro- dynamics. When Alinghi dropped out of the AC he moved to Emirates Team New Zealand, where he was part of the group that pioneered the foiling tests leading to the foiling AC72s and now the AC75. Having met at Alinghi, Monnin and Bernasconi joined forces at
ETNZ, developing the team’s simulators. Another McLaren alumnus and enthusiastic match racer, James Roche, developed the simulator for BAR in the lead-up to the 2017 AC in Bermuda. Joseph Ozanne played a key role in developing Oracle Team USA’s sim for their AC72 cat in the 2013 San Francisco AC. Computing power, graphics processors and large data modelling
techniques have advanced at a dizzying pace since Jean-Claude Monnin’s PC-based match race sim in 2002. Parts for the boats can be tested in the sim before being fabricated. Systems can be assembled and tested in software – think of the foil wings and flaps and the systems to control them. Remarkably, wind instruments can now be calibrated taking into account not just the movement of the yacht but even the flex of the wand holding the sensors. Computing resources for the physics and graphics engines are
orders of magnitude more powerful. AI programs are capable of digesting the huge volumes of data generated by the simulators and coming off the boats. And the human machine interface – HMI – has also taken leaps
forward. In 2013 the first developer kit for the Oculus virtual reality headset became available following a successful crowdfunding project. Today’s simulator HMI includes complete full-scale mock-ups of the controls the sailors use to race the yacht. No one should try sailing a foiling yacht at 40kt without first logging many hours on land in the simulator learning the controls and the choreography of manoeuvres. The USA SailGP team recently capsized while towing out to the
racecourse in Sydney. Someone onboard pushed the wrong button and cambered the wing. The yacht went over and the wing was so badly damaged that they could not race. Evolving from virtual reality headsets, today’s sims give the sailors mixed reality – when they look up they can see the sails in the
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