CSC Smart Business UK Edition April - Data driven
Data driven
Pat Symonds, Technical Consultant at Marussia F1, explains how acting on data can push the team up the grid
It may have household names courageously driving at speeds exceeding 200mph, but F1 is like any other business, insists Pat Symonds, Technical Consultant at the Marussia F1 team. You need to focus on constant improvements by short listing objectives and then using the best IT to help guide those big decisions which, ultimately, a human will always make.
Before joining the Marussia F1 Team, Symonds was Michael Schumacher's race engineer and then Technical Director at Benetton, which later became Renault. He believes the similarities between an F1 team and any other engineering or data-driven company is not always realised by the general public, who will generally only ever see the team racing.
"We're like any other engineering company, it's just we work closer to the frontiers of engineering than the average widget maker," he says.
"People think of us as a racing team but that's only correct 20 days of the year, the rest of the time we're an R&D company focussed on change management to make the car perform that little bit better the next time it races."
Guiding change
This constant evolution of the car means that project management software can be employed but, ultimately, there needs to be a guiding hand offering advice and setting priorities. Aside from the years of F1 experience he brings to Marussia, this role is the most important part of the job, Symonds believes.
"We have a weekly Monday morning briefing where I set projects and goals for each part of the team," he says.
"We've got to the point where we can measure just about anything we could want to know about the car as well as store it. That gives us terabytes of data but you need humans to ultimately make sense of those squiggly lines they see on the screen. So you need someone sitting in the middle taking charge of the whole process. That's what I do, it sometimes feels like I'm a conductor pointing my baton at a different part of the team and by the end of the piece, everything should have come together."
Managing regulations
These directions are, of course, subject to a regulatory regime within F1 which changes regularly. Marussia must keep on top of the latest changes to racing and car design rules, which is sometimes easier said than done.
"Everyone in our team knows they have three priorities and you may be surprised to know the car's performance is actually in third place," says Symonds.
"The number one is safety and number two is regulatory. The safety of the driver, team and spectators is always the top priority and there's no point having a car faster than any other if it doesn't meet the regulations.
"All businesses have to deal with changing regulation but we have a huge, thick guidebook for each year which then has several amendments published after teams raise issues. There's not one place, or computer, that holds it all. It's all on paper and in our understanding of the amendments. So it's imperative there is someone in the middle who understands the rules and can read in to the nuances to see what the FIA, the governing body for world motor sport, are looking to achieve."
Have LAN, will travel
For there to be constant change, there needs to be persistent testing of the current set-up of each car as well as potential modifications to see if they increase performance. For these measurements to be acted on, data from each car must be captured and fed back to the team's Oxfordshire base every time the team is at a test circuit or a Grand Prix.
"We're like any other engineering company, only we have the challenge of setting up a remote local area network every two weeks," says Symonds.
"That's where having IT experts provided by CSC really helps because it's a very complex task to set everything up and get the right IT infrastructure within the garage as well as a good link back to our HQ in Banbury. India and Brazil provide particular connectivity challenges but we get there each time. We have people back in England who can look at the data if something goes wrong so they can help decide why it went wrong and what we can do about it."
Big decisions
Similar to many businesses dealing with market and regulatory change, Marussia has had to look at its current position and make some very big decisions ahead of the 2012 season. One major decision has been to end a partnership developing its cars with a third party company. Marussia will now instead develop its own cars with Symonds as consultant. This has led to the other major development for the 2012 season car; a wind tunnel sharing deal with McLaren F1.
The two previous seasons' models were entirely designed using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to mimic the effects of wind rushing over the car at speed. This was unique in F1 and was a lot more cost effective than building or hiring a wind tunnel. The team has what is believed to be the largest CFD array in Europe. Named after the Swahili word for wardrobe, Kabati has four clusters with just over 600 servers which provide 72 teraflops of power, equivalent to making 72 trillion floating point calculations per second. However, F1 regulations prevent the team going over 40TF at any one time.
This cluster has still been responsible for the vast majority of the design and testing of the 2012 car but those findings are now being tested in a wind tunnel, using spare capacity at the relatively nearby McLaren F1 team.
"It actually backs up our belief in designing and testing the car in CFD," explains Symonds. "A wind tunnel is not the final arbiter; it's just an extra tool we're using this season to test out the findings we make from our computer testing. A wind tunnel only tells you so much. With CFD we can try out different scenarios to find out what works best and then confirm that in the wind tunnel without having to make tens of thousands of pounds worth of parts which end up being thrown away."
Team work is key
Ultimately Symonds believes Marussia is like any other company that has to deal with mountains of data. His belief is you are only in a position to interpret and implement findings from data if there is good team work because, fundamentally, all businesses revolve around their people. This is especially true of the F1 business where two young talented drivers from each team put their lives on the line every time they squeeze in to their racing seat.
"We expect a lot of our staff here," he explains. "A 60 hour working week is common. We get the best from them by creating teams within the team. Each small team is competitive with the others to provide performance but ultimately they are all part of the big team and the team spirit associated with that. We all love competition but no one works for the drivers or for themselves. It's drummed in to everyone that first and foremost they work for the organisation."
With the F1 season underway these teams within the team can monitor the progress achieved through their combined efforts. For the first time Marussia's approach of combining CFD and wind tunnel development is being put to the test against rival teams, supported by engineers scanning multiple streams of performance data both trackside and in its Oxfordshire HQ.
Learn more about CSC’s work in: Marussia F1