- When we see just about any form of professional motorsport, you'll probably
see images of race engineers sitting behind an array of monitors looking at all of the data
in real time as the car goes around the racetrack and while this has been prohibitively expensive,
over time we've seen the technology mature and the cost for these systems come down
to the point where they are achievable for some club level and semi professional motorsport teams.
We're here with Ty from MoTeC Australia to talk a little bit more about telemetry.
So before we actually get into the telemetry just so our viewers have a bit of an idea of
your background, you're working for MoTeC in Australia at the moment but you've actually
got a fairly broad history in motorsport, both in Australia as well as in Europe so can you
give us a bit of a background, where did you get started with your Australian motorsport career?
Yeah look straight out of school I got involved with a Supercar team in Australia.
From there that that just lead my passion for motorsport, worked up through the ranks in
Supercars before I travelled to Europe.
Did a couple of years in F1 before I came back to Supercars and then onto MoTeC.
- OK so not a lot of people probably make it to the pinnacle which is F1 and you were
working for Williams there, what sort of roles were you doing?
- So I was an electronics technician so I managed everything on the vehicle from looms to sensors,
calibration and gearbox control.
- And then on race weekends also data management, data engineering?
- Correct yep so I'd be second backup to the data engineer, observing telemetry primarily,
more of the health of the vehicle.
You get data engineers that manage the engineering side and we managed the data health side.
- Now data regardless of how we're getting it, whether it's live via telemetry or downloaded
in the pits after a session or after a race is really critical to optimising both the chassis
and the driver as well as monitoring the engine and making sure that that's going to be healthy
but of course being able to do this live with telemetry just adds another element of being
able to pick up on things instantaneously while the car's out on the track.
Before we get into the actual system and what you're looking at there, can you tell us what's
actually necessary in order to get telemetry to the track side?
- So primarily it's that connection wire and obviously you can't have a cable follow the
car around so there's various options in terms of radio equipment that can send it over air.
And that's the primary use these days.
- So for our own system that we're using in our own club level motorsport we're
using the MoTeC T2 system with a 3G modem so where's the pros and cons of
using a cellular connection vs a radio connection?
- So there's pros and benefits with the VHF or the lower end radio, generally
you'll need good line of sight to the car.
So when you go to circuits with blind hills or crests, sometimes you can lose connection,
you'll get holes.
But the 3G, 4G obviously uses cellular connection technology.
It's got a much larger throughput so you can send a lot more data at a higher rate
which is almost similar to looking at logged data but then you obviously have some
limitations depending on the track and phone coverage but generally where there's
a phone that will work, you'll get it.
- Unfortunately in New Zealand we do tend to find that a lot of our tracks seem to be
in cellphone black spots which doesn't help so obviously if you don't have a
cell tower, you don't have cell coverage as you've said, your chances of getting
telemetry via cellphone or 3G, 4G is going to be non existant.
So that's where that radio comes in.
So sort of radio is the predominant means with some of the professional teams?
- Back in the day yes they were.
A lot of high end stuff these days have moved away to the 3G, 4G just purely for the throughput
but for the radio side, you can still get a chunk of data through at lower rates and still make
good calls on what's happening with the vehicle live.
- Now one concern is obviously if you're sending all of this data from the car to the
track side, obviously teams are secretive, they don't want other teams sharing their information
or seeing what's going on on the car.
So how is security managed with a telemetry system when all of the cars may be sending
this data?
- Yeah so with the T2 server, we have the capability to receive one car or multiple cars
and we have in the dash we have capabilities to send the data encrypted.
We can unencrypt that in the pit side with T2 server and then reencrypt it so if we want to
distribute that data to various teams, race control, broadcasters, we can set up individual
security so that they can only see the channels we want them to see.
- So obviously the teams there want complete visibility of all of the channels but as you've
mentioned there, maybe guarding some of the channels that they don't want going out.
So in terms of race control and the broadcasters, so can you give us an idea of how those channels
are being managed and what those 2 areas are seeing, the broadcasters and race control?
- Yeah so obviously the teams want to have everything that they're sending.
From a broadcaster point of view they generally will use them for the on screen graphics on TV
or they might publish it to their website live.
- So you're talking overlays there where we see RPM, speed, brake and throttle traces?
- Right the basics, the vehicle speed's obviously the big one.
And then they can do a comparison so they can have multiple cars up and see where the
drivers are hitting the brakes or changing gears.
- Now another thing we've seen at least in the Australian Supercars series this year is the ability
to actually send information back to the car in terms of flag colours if something's
gone on on track, maybe the driver hasn't actually come upon a marshall point but you can
actually send that information back to the dash, can you tell us a little bit about how
that works?
- Correct so we've been developing our race manager which allows the flag marshalls to
send in a flag state that they're hailing out and we can then display that instantly on the
team's dash.
So not only is it the flag points, we can also send blue flags, black flags, and text
message so we can put a visible text message back on their dash.
- So like pick up dinner on the way home from the track?
- That's right, yep.
- Alright so getting back to once we've actually got that data, as a race engineer, obviously you
might have potentially 100s of channels to sift through and I'm guessing you really want to
break down to the most important thing.
So for you as a race engineer when a car's out on track, looking at the telemetry, what are the key
aspects you want to keep an eye on?
- So the big ticket ones are the health of your car.
So your engine vitals, they're probably the main ones but then you're looking to what the
vehicle's doing from an engineering point of view, whether it needs some damper, spring
rates, things like that, so when the car comes back you've already got an idea of what
you need to change or what you need to go looking for when the driver's back.
- I think it's important to understand that race weekends are really busy and in most
classes your actual running time out on track is going to be very very limited so this is all
just about optimising the track time so you're not actually wasting time doing a spring change
during a session necessarily, you can be prepared?
- Correct, yeah that's right so before the car comes back, you've already got an
understanding of what the car's doing, the driver can give you feedback over the
radio so that you've got the mechanics ready or the parts ready to make the change and
exactly maximise your track time.
- Now coming back to those engine vitals and looking after things like maybe gearbox
and differential temperature as well, again there's still going to be a lot of
stuff to monitor there but you can set up alarms as well so you don't necessarily need
to be looking at a particular channel, the software will alert you if something
goes out of range?
- Correct i2 has the capability of setting up any sort of alarm and trend so you can
see if something's heating up or you get a pre warning before it actually gets to a
trigger point.
- The other aspect here, and this is something we've actually been using a little bit ourselves
is using telemetry for driver training, we've got multiple drivers and this really comes down to
one of my favourite aspects of any data logging or data analysis package I should say is using
a reference lap, potentially from a faster driver and being able to see a variance or where another
driver's faster or slower so can you tell us how you can actually do that live?
- Yeah correct so within i2 you can have a log file uploaded and you can do it
with a telemetry file as well but as the vehicle goes around a lap, it can overlay
directly over the top of that and you can see live whether they're slow into a
corner, out of a corner, braking markers and you can give that feedback over the radio.
- Look I think this technology obviously is still relatively expensive, it's definitely not
something that every club level racer should have or is going to have but as we progress
through and become more professional and get into the more professional sort of
races as well, it is that technology that can make a real big difference to both the reliability
of the car as well as the performance of the car.
So thanks for giving us some insight into what goes into that Ty.
Cheers for your time.
- Cheers, thank you.
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