The Importance of Data in F1 Today

Before their car launch this year, McLaren announced that they had started a partnership with Splunk. At the end of last year, McLaren also started a partnership with Automation Anywhere. Mercedes is partnered with Qualcomm and Red Bull is partnered with AT&T. So, why are telecommunication and data companies increasing their presence in F1?

With technology progressing at the rate that it is, it will prove almost impossible to create technology without the help of a major tech giant. Many companies have proven time and time again that technology has progressed beyond a simple electronic control unit that stores data to be analysed at the end of the race. Nowadays, 2GB of data is sent to the team telemetry every LAP. The data accumulated over a race can be as much as 3TB. This has meant that new technologies have been created to transfer data n ot per lap, but per corner.

So, when did telemetry become commonplace in F1? In the early '90s, Honda and Renault were the first engine manufacturers who installed an electronic control unit in their engines. However, teams soon realised that they would have to create their own ECUs in order to avoid impartiality from engine manufacturers. McLaren was the first teams to realise that using simulators would help them to improve their lap times. This was the first time major telecommunications companies got involved in F1. Red Bull went one step furhter by starting to match lap times to their simulator data with the help of AT&T.

By 2010, many teams had started to adapt these techniques to their cars. By 2015, Mclaren with SAP, Mercedes with Qualcomm and Red Bull with AT&T started to get lap-by-lap data from their cars and matching it every lap to their simulator's telemetry. This proved to be a huge benefit for teams that had this technology because the race engineers could easily see where drivers slow, or fast, or where they were making mistakes by checking their lap's telemetry with the simulator telemetry.

So, why are teams placing so much emphasis on technology? To find the answer to this, you simply need to look at the device you are using to read this article. Compare it to device from 5 years ago and you immediately start noticing differences. The thing is, everything is evolving really quickly, so anyone who doesn't respond to an evolution is going to start lagging behind. We have seen this in F1 when teams fail to respond to a regulation change with an innovative solution.

Nowadays, with CFD, CAD, CAM all developing to become extremely useful tools of the trade, so the teams that can develop these softwares with great graphics, good response times and larger memory, will be able to get ahead of the competition. So, the entire point of having technology in Formula 1 comes down to the will of a team to be faster than its competition. If it allows a team to develop their car in way that makes them fast, the team will utilise the software until it cannot make them faster anymore, then they will upgrade this software to improve.