SAKHIR, 6 April 2004 — At the 2004 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix it was impossible to miss the fact that information technology plays a huge role in Formula One racing. LCD displays of one sort or another were everywhere and engineers huddled around laptops throughout the practice and qualifying days. Another way of course that IT plays a role in Formula One is through corporate sponsorships. While many international IT brands now grace F-1 cars, HP is still the most prominent. In the 2004 season, HP enters its fifth year as principal sponsor to the BMW WilliamsF1 Team.

HP’s sponsorship enables the BMW WilliamsF1 Team to focus on the core business of racing. HP provides products, technologies, solutions and services that support the team in car design, performance management, manufacturing and testing telemetry. HP technology is used at both the team’s headquarters in Grove, Oxfordshire, UK and trackside at locations around the world.

At the Bahrain International Circuit, Arab News dropped by to see the BMW WilliamsF1 IT infrastructure firsthand. It was amazing. Hidden behind temporary partitioning in the team’s garage, approximately 15 meters from the main racetrack, Mark Arnott, WilliamsF1 IT support specialist, had set up a mobile data center featuring HP ProLiant servers and a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) connecting the servers with state-of-the-art notebooks.

“I’m responsible for looking after all the data we collect from the cars and also anything IT related that we bring with us to the race,” Arnott said. “That covers everything from the main servers right down to the engineers’ laptops and printers. It’s an amazing job, but quite pressurized as well because I’m the only IT person here with a team made up of about 100 people. When we’re at a race I have to unpack and set up the whole IT infrastructure myself. I came to Williams three years ago and started on the test team. After just under a year with the test team, I was shifted to support the race team.”

Arnott is usually one of the first Williams team members to arrive at the race location because the team is so dependent on the network infrastructure.

“When we set up on these faraways, I generally start to set up on a Monday or Tuesday and I expect to have the whole infrastructure running by Wednesday morning and any problems sorted out,” explained Arnott. “Anything that has broken in transit or whatever, is normally spotted early on. The primary thing is to get the infrastructure up as soon as possible and establish the link back to Grove. Once it’s all up and running, I can more or less just sit back and keep an eye on it and keep it ticking over.”

What exactly is he setting up?

“The most important thing are the four big racks in the garage,” said Arnott. “We have one for each car and then there’s the main data server that has a lot of storage capacity something like 250GB. When the computer racks download the data from the car it’s stored all on the one main server rack. We are going to upgrade the servers we are using now to G3 ProLiants before the next race.

“As for the individual team members, this year we started running HP’s Compaq NC 8000 business notebooks, which all the engineers and data people use to communicate with our network. That’s our standard laptop throughout the team. These notebooks aren’t designed to be used in this sort of outdoor, garage environment and they aren’t ruggedized but they have been coping quite well with the requirements. Perhaps the harshest environment the notebooks are ever in is when they’re on the grid in a rainstorm, and then somebody will hold an umbrella over the machine.”

Arnott stated that Williams takes both physical and virtual security very seriously. In addition to the security guards on site and physical monitoring of the IT equipment from the moment it leaves the UK till it returns, all the laptops are password protected and the network and communication infrastructure utilizes advanced encryption. The team uses secure ISDN or satellite connections to send the data back to Grove from the race circuit. Even when taking photographs of the mobile data center for this article, we were queried about our actions as such photographs usually aren’t allowed.

Arnott pointed out that there is so much care taken of the mobile data center and other equipment because IT has brought great changes to Formula One.

“IT has changed racing hugely,” he said. “Just consider the amount of data generated by the car when you know that now we can have 250 to 300 sensors on the car during practice and testing, all of them sending data back. Each year the amount of data increases. We rely on the data so much for analyzing the performance of the vehicles and developing the car.

“When you look back even 10 years ago, there might have been only two or three laptops per team. Now there’s this whole IT infrastructure and LAN in the garage. We have network connections actually on the toolboxes behind the cars because we have laptops there for the fuel men to use so they can type in the fuel figures. Our network extends over the pit lane via a laser link and we have a full network on the pit wall so you can plug ten laptops in on the pit wall and have a 150MB connection back over to the garage.”

Most of the data being generated isn’t essential during the race. According to Arnott, the only data analysis that’s done by engineers when the cars are running is simple, such as keeping an eye out for unusual temperatures and pressures that may predict a failure.

“All the data we download from the cars has to go back to Grove for analysis,” said Arnott. “When we are on these faraway races we normally have three ISDN lines. One is dedicated to e-mail. The other two give us a pipeline just for car data. So those are running all the time when we are in the garage. In one day we generate about 1GB of data and that has to be sent back to Grove immediately so that the engineers who don’t come racing can look at the car data. When we are at European races we use a satellite connection for a very fast link back to the factory at Grove. No matter where we are, the data is always being sent back to Grove for backup purposes and secondary analyses.”

How does the team download the data from the cars?

“There’s live data that’s constantly streamed back over microwave and then there’s a big memory module that saves everything in the car, which we download by wire,” Arnott said. “There’s also another memory set that gets sent back to the garage in a burst every time the car comes down the pit straight. So we have various methods of getting the data back from the car. If the microwave signal is lost due to topography for example, the data is buffered in the car and sent back when the signal is regained.”

With the data so important to future development of the team and its vehicles, nothing is left to chance when it comes to data management and storage.

“Redundancy is on the main data server in the garage,” remarked Arnott. “We send the data back to Grove where it is safe, but we also use a RAID 5 storage system, which is an HP cluster server, and that gives us a lot of redundancy. Basically we have two nodes running the cluster. If one fails the other one automatically switches over and becomes the master. It’s a very resilient system that HP developed with us over the winter and at Bahrain this is the first time we are running it this year.”

While the system is designed to be a hardy and mobile, the fact can’t be denied that most of this equipment would usually be set up in a company’s climate controlled server room. Sometimes things do go wrong and that’s the true test of the HP and Williams partnership.

“When something goes wrong it’s important to keep a cool head,” Arnott said. “I let people know how long it’s going to take to fix and how serious it is. I do have support from people back at the main factory who can give me assistance over the telephone. Generally I need to speak to them only if there’s a communication problem.

“Some failures are to be expected,” Arnott added. “We have a fairly complicated infrastructure and it has to be portable and move with us every two weeks. When it gets stripped down and put back up again there is always the chance of a failure. This equipment is meant to be stuck in a server room somewhere and left alone. When you bring it to environments like this where it is really dusty and hot it’s not ideal for the equipment, but I have to admit it does really well. We do have worldwide support from HP and in fact in Australia we had a network switch failure. It wasn’t a common switch. We called HP and they had one to us the next morning. Luckily it wasn’t a race day but a set up day. We get good support from them.”

At the end of the race the equipment is packed up and flies back to the UK as cargo, separately from the team. The servers always remain in special boxes on rubber suspension mounts. All that’s required to pack the equipment is to flip down the screens, snap on the box lids and remove the wheels so the entire unit can be moved onto pallets for the trip home.

“The boxes are well built for traveling,” said Arnott. “Three years ago the worst happened and one of the boxes did drop off the cargo ramp of a 747. The screen was smashed but the server was OK. That’s pretty impressive. All we had to do was put a new screen on and we were up and running again.”

The Bahrain Grand Prix didn’t go well for the BMW Williams F1 Team.

“After we had a good qualifying, we have seen today that Ferrari are again in a class of their own in the race,” said Mario Theissen, BMW Motorsport Director. “Juan Pablo was losing about 0.5 second a lap from Michael Schumacher before he had a gearbox problem which pushed him down. After his problems, Ralf still made his way up from the back of the field to finish in seventh position. Of course, we were expecting to come out of the first three flyaway races more successfully. Now it’s all about improving our package.”

It’s certain that HP technology will be an essential part of the championship quest for the BMW Williams F-1 Team.