Formula 1 racing teams are million-rand companies in their own right and more like businesses than sport squads. On an annual basis, these groups design, build and deploy the world's most expensive cars, competing in the planet's fastest competition.
Just like big organisations, Formula 1 racing teams have CIOs, and for the Lotus Renault GP team, the man at the helm of information technology is Graeme Hackland, a former Durbanite now based in the UK.
Speaking to Brainstorm at Symantec's annual Vision conference in Barcelona last year, Hackland said racing teams share another commonality with business - they are not spared the effects of an economic downturn.
“In the past, we were backed by a major motor manufacturer in Renault and we had the funding we needed. So if we needed to buy something, we bought it,” he says.
Sounds like a lot of businesses pre-downturn. But times have changed.
Staying in the lead
We're a manufacturing company; it's just that the end product is very interesting.
Graeme Hackland, Lotus Renault
According to Hackland, the perilous economic situation the world currently finds itself in places constraints on the sport. That, along with a new set of rules in Formula 1, means his team has to be very careful about how it allocates its money now.
“If you spend money on things that don't make your car quicker, you're going to be at a disadvantage to everyone else. So I've had to start thinking more about making the car quicker and how I can avoid spending money on things that won't.”
Hackland comments that the team spends a lot of its resources on research and development, generating valuable intellectual property that must be protected - when it makes sense to do so.
“We have a factory of 520 people and we manufacture a racing car. We probably only make four or five a year, but we make thousands of parts and components all through the year, because every race, the car changes completely,” he says.
“We had five different floors last year, for example. The floor [of the car] used to be a very static thing that never changed but we had five variations last year.”
Lotus Renault is a mid-size manufacturing company in its own right, working with carbon fibre that is very expensive to manufacture. Some of the metals used in the cars are also very expensive, so tight controls are needed to make sure resources are managed effectively.
“We're a manufacturing company; it's just that the end product is very interesting,” quips Hackland.
Managing IP
Of course, manufacturing goes hand in hand with research and development. For Lotus Renault, this means making the fastest cars on Earth, but also managing the intellectual property that is generated in the process.
Ideally I want to get to the stage where I don't care what people use and the only way I can see to do that is by virtualising the client.
Graeme Hackland, Lotus Renault
This IP also needs to be protected at times, then released when it doesn't make sense to hang onto it.
“The IP for our car three years ago is of interest to nobody for next year, and the IP of other teams' cars of three years ago is of no interest to us, because the rules have changed so much over the last three years, including the rule changes we have this year,” says Hackland.
“So I've really got periods of time where the data is absolutely critical. Right now, the data about our car for next season is at its most sensitive [we spoke in October 2011] - October, November and even December is when you don't want any other team to know.
“But, once you get into January, everybody has created their cars, and is running them... so it's out, and it's not as serious. Then you want to keep all of your race data, the stuff that you're gathering when you're running around the track. You don't want them to see any of that, or the aerodynamics data throughout the year, but the actual design of the car - there's a three-month period where it's top-secret, and then, after that, it's not that serious.”
When Formula 1 teams release IP, it improves the sport for everyone and also contributes to the safety and efficiency of cars in general.
Variables
One thing that is difficult to prepare for in Formula 1 is the track. Hackland says that weather and other conditions on race day combine to produce the unexpected. His team's success depends on the intelligence it can gather in real time that is used to make adjustments and advise drivers.
“The track is really where we have a lot of the focus... so the telemetry that comes from the car, how you manipulate that, how your engineers want to see it - that's not software you can buy off the shelf,” he explains.
“It's more about who can make the best decisions in real time, during a race, and the software plays a part there. You need good people, but giving them that information in a way that will make sense to them, as they need it... the software is just a tool that helps those clever people make those decisions in real time.”
Hackland says his team is now optimising its technology using Symantec's ApplicationHA virtualisation technology. Whereas traditionally it would have to carry its entire IT systems - including servers - around the world with the team, now it is increasingly moving to a centralised data centre that can be accessed remotely from the track.
The team has chosen VMWare for its virtualisation needs running alongside Symantec's technology for applications.
“We had, up until two years ago, tried to keep everything at the track so that if the WAN link went down, the guys could still work at the track. But we've been using the same MPLS 10Mb connection for the last few years now and we've had 100% availability, so we've decided to start leaving some of the services back at the factory where we can keep them in the data centre, instead of in the back of a garage,” he says.
Hackland is also looking at virtualisation as a way of creating a vendor-agnostic IT environment for the team.
“Ideally I want to get to the stage where I don't care what people use and the only way I can see to do that is by virtualising the client. If I can virtualise the client, then if they bring a personal device, I can create a virtual environment in which they can run our applications,” he says.
“At the moment, I can't be sure that all devices will work properly with the applications that we have. If I can create a virtual client, then I'm not going to care what the underlying OS is, and that's where I want to get to. Over the next three years, we will build our virtual environment and get ready for that.“
Hackland has also seen the iPad enter his industry and says that Lotus Renault is currently working on incorporating tablet computers into its operations, with some of what was mentioned above.
For one, the iPad makes a great interactive display for analytics dashboards and could be a fantastic tool for consulting information formulated from track data.
So much for a simple car race, right?
First published in the February 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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