In the lead-up to the kick-off of the 2014 Formula One season with the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, SAP hosted events in Sydney and Melbourne to provide a peek into how the McLaren Mercedes F1 racing team is using SAP technologies to race even faster.
150 sensors collecting telemetry information through every practice session and race. 6.5 billion pieces of data collected per car, per race. One gigabyte of data collected in a single lap of a race track, and 3 terabytes of data in a single race.
They’re the kind of data volumes the McLaren Mercedes F1 team are generating. And with the smallest adjustments to a racing line or strategy resulting in massive differences in performance, extra speed and analytics capability could literally be a race winner.
The McLaren Group, which includes McLaren Applied Technologies, McLaren Electronic Systems and McLaren Automotive, has had a long-standing relationship with SAP, beginning with an implementation of SAP Business One for its spare parts business. Over the years, this relationship has expanded to a significant technology partnership for both the corporate group, which now runs its operations through HANA Enterprise Cloud and the F1 racing team.
The McLaren Mercedes team is in the process of implementing HANA, and while they were hopeful of having the system in place in time for the Australian Grand Prix, it will now be up and running a couple of races into the 2014 season.
During each race, telemetry information from the car’s sensors is sent back in real time to the pit wall, the garage and to the engineers in mission control, which is based in the McLaren factory in the UK.
This data is used to make real-time decisions about racing strategy. Once HANA is up and running, the engineers will also be able to access and utilise 10 years’ worth of historical racing data and information about weather conditions to inform their decisions on how to set up the car for optimal performance. HANA is expected to make this information available around 14,000 times faster than previously – helpful when you have drivers racing around the track at 300 kilometres per hour. Moving their data into the cloud has also helped the team access information from anywhere in the world much faster.
This data can also be run against predictive models to head off potential issues – for example, if analysis of a racing line predicts a problem with a tyre, the team can bring the car into a pit stop before a race-ending blowout.
SAP Lumira is also used for advanced analysis and visualisation, such as plotting data against a replica of the track, based on location coordinates.
Visitors to the SAP event were able to interact with a replica pit wall and watch a simulation of a race while selecting pieces of the car to view the real-time telemetry information that is transmitted to mission control.
After a disappointing season in 2013, McLaren Mercedes are hopeful of better results with veteran driver Jenson Button and rookie Kevin Magnusson this year – with HANA to help them along the way.
This article was first published in Inside SAP Autumn 2014.
