The new Formula 1 season is just around the corner and it’s building up to be one of the best season on record. Jenson Button, fresh from winning his first world championship with Brawn, has moved to Vodafone McLaren Mercedes to team up with Lewis Hamilton to form a British dream team. Seven-time champion Michael Schumacher makes a return to the sport after a 3-year absence and many are predicting the tightest championship for many years.
Last season was a particularly difficult time for F1; power struggle, fights over budget caps, breakaway threats and the Renault Singapore crash controversy have dominated the headlines this year, along with the perennial debate over the environmental impact of F1 and whether it’s appropriate to put on such an expensive sport as we struggle through a recession.
There is another side to F1, however, one that I think gets overlooked by a number of its critics. The technology involved in getting the cars around the track – and the mammoth operation that goes on behind the scenes – is incredibly advanced. It also has a major impact outside F1, technology developed for the sport often finds a way into “everyday” life.
I recently caught up with Red Bull Racing and Platform Computing to take a look behind the scenes…
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It all boils down to one bloke driving a car around a track, but the technical support behind him is very impressive.
“There are four tiers to the operation,” Red Bull‘s business development manager Steve Nevey told me. “We’ve got the guys on the pit wall talking to the driver, the guys in the garage, engineers in the office and what we call Houston Mission Control. There are three tiers of stations with around 21 screens and the guys there are in communication with the rest of the team.”
This impressive team of about 150 puts together an operation that is so advanced, the cars could essentially drive around the tracks themselves, without the aid of a driver. “The thing is though,” Nevey says, “you remove one vital element: the driver’s guts. You’re putting a kid out there who is risking his life. I always think of them as gladiators – top athletes at the peak of fitness pitching their lives against each other.”
Nevey rejected another of F1’s age-old criticisms – that success is more to do with the car than the driver. The mix is about 50/50, he claims, but pointed out that the best drivers will always be picked up by the teams with the best cars. This year is different, he says, mainly due to the huge changes in regulations. “The guys at the front are the guys with the best cars. Look at Jenson Button, a lot of people had written him off, but he’s a fantastic driver and is showing that this year.”
To those not involved in the sport, the money spent on the design and development side of things may seem obscene. Nevey, however, believes that the technology innovation has the potential for a far wider impact.
“We call them innovation partners rather than technology partners. We consider ourselves innovative, so we thought that term was more appropriate. We don’t just want people to bring us technology, we want to use their knowledge and experience,” he says of their relationship with HPC vendor Platform Computing.
“It’s a very fertile environment for innovation – we can afford to take a few risks. If they want to experiment with new software innovations, we are in a position to do that,” Nevey says.
The innovation in Formula 1 does trickle down into everyday life, Nevey says, but not in the way that many may think. “You do see it in road cars, but it’s much broader than that. An F1 race car is much more similar to an airplane from a technology point of view,” he says. “If you look at a lot of the components on an F1 car, they are very similar to aerospace design. The weight in absolutely critical as is aerodynamics.”
Although it may not seem like it, some of the technology is comparable or applicable to other sectors such as medical and defence industries, Nevey claims. “I know it may sound odd but it’s also similar to the mobile communication industry. We share incredible pressures for time to market, we have to innovate very quickly. There is product packaging, advanced materials, technology and there is the aesthetic angle,” he says.
Red Bull’s aim, of course, is to produce a faster car, but the sharing of technology and ideas with their “innovation partners” means they can step back and take the technology to the “real world”. This is something that a lot of people miss, Nevey believes.
“Where the technology transfer happens, I think it is almost in a clandestine way when it filters into other industries. That’s where the benefit is, but it’s not promoted,” he says. “What we need to do, as a sport, is to capture the IP we develop and disseminate it to be seen as a real technology innovator. I think we’ve missed a trick here, and we could make ourselves far more relevant by actively creating and disseminating IP.”
That doesn’t happen at the moment, Nevey believes, because a lot of contracts are covered by non-disclosure and exclusivity deals, mainly to stop “the guys from next door getting hold of it”, as Nevey puts. It’s up to the sport to take an active role in disseminating its IP, rather than relying on its partners, he believes.
After a year of bad headlines, maybe this is a real chance for F1 to change its wider public perception and show the world that it is a hugely innovative and relevant industry.
