The worst job I ever had was working as a petrol station assistant.
At least it paid for my first motorcycle.
The worst job I ever had was
cleaning the fridge out at a butchers.
The worst job I ever did was a paperboy for
my local paper back in Canada. Lots of early mornings
and very, very cold winters in Canada, of course.
So, no fun, I much prefer what we do now.
For decades, Formula One is not only the Champions League in motorsport, Formula One
is also known as the fastest R&D lab on earth.
The notion was that motor racing technology would sooner or later trickle down to road
car technology. Since the introduction of hybrid powertrains,
F1 cemented itself at the forefront of technology, from consumer electronics to medical technology
and smart cities.
When we see the engine first fire-up, that’s the point that we say that the
Power Unit has come alive.
I think some of the
dramatic steps that we are taking in the naturally aspirated era,
we are hitting 20,000rpm. I think in the hybrid era,
starting in Melbourne 2014 at 44% thermal efficiency,
that was an amazing achievement. And now, having Power Units
that achieve 50% thermal efficiency, those sort of milestones
are points in your career as an engineer that you will always remember.
2014 regulations aligned the mission of the road car
world with that of Formula One. And so, everything we work on now does have relevance in not
just the road car world but many energy conversions.
So, over the course of a weekend we might run anywhere
from 200 to 400 sensors, it really depends on the day.
So, on a Friday, for instance, when we are getting the
car developed and we are really trying to gather
as much information as possible, we might have
up to 400 individual sensors on the car. Over the course of the weekend, we take
sensors off the car and try and get it down to its sort of fighting weight,
the racing weight.
One of the things you may have spotted on television
before is this little pod, and this contains a
series of temperature sensors that are actually looking towards the front tyre and giving
us a profile of temperature all across the front of the
tyre. And the driver then has access to that information
on his dash, so he is really getting direct feedback about
what the tyre is doing and how it is reacting to
everything that he does in the corner.
Not many years ago we had a telemetry link to the
car that was bi-directional, so we could send settings
back to the car. And that’s no longer allowed, because I think people began to feel the engineers
were driving the car. So, instead what we have
now is a really nice situation where we close the loop around the driver and all that
information exists to amplify what the driver can do and make the car do exactly what he
wants it to do. That sort of synthesis between the
driver and the car is stronger than ever because of
the amount of data. It would be fun if we were
allowed to drive it, but I am glad they do it.
When the car comes back into the pits, as it is approaching the garage, we get this
high bandwidth link going and we start to pull
that information off the car. So, by the time the
driver gets back in the garage, our tyre engineers are looking at those thermal camera images
and they know exactly what his tyres have been
doing throughout that lap.
The umbilical gives us like a more conventional network link to the car, connecting the car
as if we were connecting a laptop and it also powers
the car and allows us to do some other settings.
A lot of these high bandwidth systems they both come from and make their way back
into things like high bandwidth smartphones. Some of that technology comes to us from that
world, and some of the development they do with us
makes its way back into those devices.
We have been looking at 5G wireless technologies to download a huge amount of data in a matter
of a few seconds rather than many minutes.
Now, the challenges for the road car will be the collection of huge amounts of data,
so again wireless data technology is going to be
really important, finding ways to send more data, faster.
You have started to see for instance on road cars
tyre pressure sensors that are within the wheels
and will give you an indicator if you are starting to lose
pressure in a wheel, and those things work their way
into brake-by-wire systems or anti-lock braking
systems for instance that are on road cars.
What we find is that both in the road car and
in the Formula One world, we’ve become very dependent on simulation technology. In fact,
the whole design and development are very much
now in the digital domain.
We have to make sure
that the simulation matches the real world, so
we need real world data to keep checking that our
simulation is correct. We couldn’t have arrived at
this level of sophistication in wind tunnel testing without
additive layer manufacture. I think it’s early days
for machine learning, we have got some tools that have solved a
difficult problem that we couldn’t of solved a few years ago.
We have seen both develop at the same time.
It’s a really tough environment, so if you can make technology work on a Formula
One car, you can definitely make it on a road car.
We are setting up what might be the equivalent of a data centre for a small company, but
we’re setting it up in a different garage, every week in
21 countries a year.
High noise, high vibration, lots of carbon
dust coming off the brakes, it’s a pretty terrible place
to try and set up a data centre.
It’s a challenge, but good fun
The thing that keeps me driving in Formula One
over all these years is because you have always got a
new problem, and you have got a lot of people to help
tackle that problem that have just got an attitude of
‘yes, we are going to do it’.
Right, you can make me sound clever out of that, I am sure.