CSC Smart Business UK Edition December - The Wheel Deal
The wheel deal
Reviewing recorded pit stops is helping Marussia Virgin Racing's F1 team improve pit stop performance
Efficiency and consistency are highly prized goals all managers want to achieve in multi-departmental teams. While major IT integration work can certainly help deliver a fast-paced, reliable service, it can also be the comparatively small, logical steps that can make a large impact. This has certainly been the experience at the Marussia Virgin Racing F1 team where a simple video camera system, set up by IT partners CSC, is helping to make pit stops faster and more consistent.
Like many businesses, the need for improved training was highlighted at MVR as the Oxfordshire-based team faced up to changing regulations in Formula One. For the average company more efficient practices may come from retraining staff to being compliant with revised obligations around data protection, new working directives or revised financial sales stipulations. For MVR it was the abolition of fuelling during pit stops which made it all the more necessary to get its F1 cars back on the track in the most consistent and shortest time possible.
In the days of cars waiting eight seconds or more for their tank to be refuelled, engineers had more time to detach old wheels and tyres and put on a new set. With safety concerns ruling out refuelling, though, an F1 car stopping for new tyres is now ideally only static for around three seconds. The pressure is on teams, then, to consistently perform to their optimum efficiency without risking the safety of the car and driver.
Time is money
In a sport where tens of millions of pounds are spent developing new car designs to shave hundredths of a second off a lap time, the relatively simple video camera solution is already delivering results. It is impossible to attribute every pit stop advance to the camera system but allowing the team to review practice and race stops is certainly believed to be making a major contribution towards improvements.
Already this season the team has managed to reduce the pit stop time (including turning off and rejoining the track) at the Hungarian Grand Prix from 22.069 seconds in 2010 to 20.613in 2011. At top speed, of 300kph, equating to around 83m on the track, this could be the equivalent to two or three positions in an F1 race; a two second improvement is a major achievement.
The advances are not only being made on the stopwatch, though, they are also being seen on the track. At the Indian Grand Prix at the end of October an improved pit stop performance late in the race allowed driver Jerome D'Ambrosio to make up a track position against rival Daniel Ricciardo from HRT.
Rugged but simple
The video camera solution from CSC is relatively simple. It uses a standard industrial quality camera placed on a carbon fibre boom which positions the camera approximately two metres above the driver's head. The camera needs to be of an industrial design to survive being shipped around the world and withstand trackside temperatures which can cause the camera to reach 50 degrees centigrade. In fact, a lower grade video camera overheated and shut down in the heat at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, prompting the move to a more rugged, industrial device.
From immediately above the driver's head, a wide angle lens can record every movement before and after the car arrives. According to Ian Jackson, Track Side IT Engineer at CSC for the MVR team, this gives the team an opportunity to watch every part of a stop, frame by frame.
“A pit stop takes a huge amount of team effort so it's vital everyone can stop to see if there are any lessons to be learned,” he says.
“There are three people on each wheel alone and so they need to be working in the most efficient way possible to ensure the whole process is as fast as it can be and, most importantly, that it's consistent. The team practices pit stops twenty or thirty times per day for the four days running up to the race and then there's the race day itself. We record every stop and each engineer can then review each stop frame by frame on a PC. We don't put it up on a big screen in the garage for all to see because each video clip is designed to be seen by just the team and not a passing member of the public or another team.”
Small lessons add up
In pit stop practice Ian Jackson and two other team members push the car in to position with the engine turned off to prevent it overheating, a stand-in driver operates the steering and operates the brakes. Within a tenth of a second the front jack will normally have the front of the car off the ground, followed by the rear within half a second. Three seconds or so later and all four wheels will be replaced and the car lowered back on the ground, ready to move off. To the untrained eye the repetitive process will look the same each time. However, to the engineers, each recording is a valuable insight in to whether each member of the pit crew is performing to their optimum potential.
“There are tiny variations in where the wheels are placed, where the gun is and where people stand which can shave tiny amounts of time off a pit stop,” says Jackson.
“These add up to make a big difference and so the engineers each know what they're looking for and how to review their own performance and that of their team members'. They can look at how the fastest to get their wheel on and off did it and see if there are any techniques they can learn from.”
Small steps, big gain
While the progress made so far this season speaks for itself, the CSC team is currently working on improvements that would add audio to the recording. This would enable the video to include the audible 40 and 20 second warnings the pit crew receive before the car approaches as well as any communication between the driver and engineers during each stop.
The MVR engineers believe this will add a more life-like feel and CSC is hopeful the audio and video feeds could be synced in time for next season.
For the CSC team the pit lane camera system not only helps deliver improved and consistent pit stops, it also underlines how a relatively simple idea can make a big impact on performance. In business the principles could be applied to systems which measure performance among multi-departmental teams, to iron out delays in, for example, business processes. In addition each team member could be shown how their performance compared with others within the team and so find out how they might learn from others to help deliver projects more consistently.
Learn more about CSC’s work with: MVR F1