{"id":129814,"date":"2022-11-16T19:58:52","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T19:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.microsoft.com\/?p=447737"},"modified":"2022-11-16T19:58:52","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T19:58:52","slug":"faster-data-faster-car-how-bwt-alpine-f1-team-aims-to-lead-the-formula-1-tech-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2022\/11\/16\/faster-data-faster-car-how-bwt-alpine-f1-team-aims-to-lead-the-formula-1-tech-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Faster data, faster car: How BWT Alpine F1 Team aims to lead the Formula 1 tech race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Midway through the Dutch Grand Prix, radio traffic between 20 Formula 1 drivers and their busy crews buzzed with the usual chatter about lap times, tire conditions and pleas to \u201cpush now\u201d \u2013 a frantic wall of sound rivaling the powerful engines roaring around the track.<\/p>\n

But precisely 59 minutes and 27 seconds into that Sept. 4 race, one sentence from the comms chorus grabbed the attention of Matthieu Dubois, chief strategist for BWT Alpine F1 Team, based in Enstone, England and Viry-Ch\u00e2tillon in France. What Dubois detected was a simple instruction to Lando Norris, a driver with McLaren, Alpine\u2019s top rival.<\/p>\n

\u201cLando, both safety car windows are open, please confirm,\u201d the McLaren race engineer told Norris, who was leading both Alpine drivers at the time.<\/p>\n

A large data display on BWT Alpine F1 Team\u2019s pit wall instantly transcribed the McLaren engineer\u2019s spoken words. Leveraging Microsoft Azure<\/a>, Dubois had plucked that snippet from the radio din by simply typing the keyword \u201cwindow.\u201d  It would change the race for Alpine.<\/p>\n

\"Members
In the pit area, Alpine team members monitor race-generated data, including transcripts of radio traffic from other teams.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThat was crucial information,\u201d Dubois recalls. \u201cMcLaren was telling their driver that a safety car was on track (due to another car stopping). So, they were telling Norris to pit.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that intel, Dubois instructed BWT Alpine F1 Team driver Fernando Alonso to also pit for fresh tires. His quick decision allowed Alpine to exploit a brief stretch when every car slowed for the caution period \u2013 and when Alpine\u2019s top competitor was momentarily off the track.<\/p>\n

Driving on the new tires, Alonso soon posted one of the day\u2019s fastest laps (averaging 128 mph). Then, Alonso passed Norris, finishing sixth overall, and nosing out the McLaren driver by a mere half second. That result earned BWT Alpine F1 Team eight points in the Formula 1 standings, pushing Alpine further ahead in their season-long fight with McLaren.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe gained position with the help of this information,\u201d Dubois says. \u201cData is probably most of our world now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Alpine
The Alpine pit crew changes the tires on Fernando Alonso\u2019s car during a race.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Formula 1, every race week is jampacked with live data. Each team fields two cars that are essentially mobile IoT devices. The cars are equipped with a few hundred sensors that send a constant flow of telemetry back to the teams, revealing everything from engine temperature to brake wear, while collectively generating more than 600,000 numbers per second.<\/p>\n

Still more data is produced at the teams\u2019 technical centers as new car parts are manufactured and tested during the days leading up to the races. In total, Formula 1 teams gather as many as 50 billion data points each week.<\/p>\n

In data processing terms, that\u2019s a mighty big heap of bits and bytes. The trick is to unify those raging data streams into a single source of real-time insights that\u2019s accessible across an entire organization.<\/p>\n

\"Alpine
At the Alpine technical center in Enstone, team members track multiple data streams during a race, from brake wear to engine temperatures.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the 2022 season, BWT Alpine F1 Team built a cloud-hosted, data science platform that relies on Azure infrastructure to deliver decisive insights from the team\u2019s manufacturing and testing work and from its practice laps and race-day sprints.<\/p>\n

The platform helps Alpine shape design decisions and make real-time race adjustments, team members say.<\/p>\n

According to one more slice of data \u2013 Formula 1\u2019s team standings \u2013 the technologies have helped boost BWT Alpine F1 Team during 2022. With one grand prix race remaining in the 2022 season \u2013 Nov. 20 in Abu Dhabi \u2013 Alpine has amassed enough points to reach fourth place<\/a>, on pace for its highest finish since 2018. McLaren sits in fifth place.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe entire organization is here solely to make the car go faster,\u201d says Pierre d\u2019Imbleval, BWT Alpine F1 Team\u2019s vice president of information systems and IT. \u201cIn our business what matters is always to get the information sooner and to shrink the time we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The
Alpine driver Esteban Ocon banks left during a race.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But the team\u2019s cloud-based infrastructure also helps fuel smart and safe race strategies \u2013 tactics that require less velocity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are so dependent on data,\u201d d\u2019Imbleval says. \u201cAlmost every race, there is a moment of truth where you get a combination of data that tells you to slow down a bit to save the lifetime of your brakes or your engine.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring races, we are so close to the failure point on certain parts that it\u2019s super important to monitor all data at every moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s equally vital to monitor competitors\u2019 radio traffic. But the BWT Alpine F1 Team crew no longer must physically listen to all that cross-communication \u2013 a public broadcast that\u2019s piped into the paddock. Instead, they now merely glance at a large screen on their pit wall to read selected phrases uttered by the other teams.<\/p>\n

To accomplish that, the Alpine staff fed audio files from past races into Azure to train a computer model that now delivers nearly real-time transcripts from every driver and race engineer.<\/p>\n

This enables the Alpine crew to search for keywords, such as \u201ctires overheating,\u201d allowing the team to quickly adjust their race strategy.<\/p>\n

\"Sergio
Sergio Rodriguez.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe need to make decisions in fractions of seconds,\u201d says Sergio Rodriguez, BWT Alpine F1 Team\u2019s data science and engineering manager.<\/p>\n

Indeed, modern success in Formula 1 is not so much about big data as it is about fast data. And the need for speed is just as pressing at Alpine\u2019s two manufacturing hubs as it is on the track.<\/p>\n

The team designs and assembles its chassis at a facility in Enstone and builds its hybrid V6 engines at a technical center in Viry-Ch\u00e2tillon, a Paris suburb. Hundreds of engineers and mechanics work at each site, developing, testing and assembling new parts, many aimed at improving the cars\u2019 aerodynamics or power.<\/p>\n

The process is painstaking yet often performed at pace. The team creates computer-simulated models of new parts then calculates how those virtual prototypes would react to, say, drag or downforce, ultimately predicting how they would perform in a real-world race car.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat involves big data clusters,\u201d Rodriguez says. \u201cOnce we say, \u2018This looks good,\u2019 we manufacture a small version of the part and put it in our wind tunnel. We pass wind through it. We check pressures. All this data we gather as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two
The team creates computer-simulated models of new parts then calculates how those virtual prototypes will perform in a real-world race car.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BWT Alpine F1 Team is relying on its cloud-hosted, data science platform to \u201cunlock the information we have in the data,\u201d which saves precious time when pushing new parts from the factories to the cars, Rodriguez says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work that we are doing in the factories this year is almost more important than the work we are doing (at the track) on the weekends,\u201d Rodriguez adds.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery Formula 1 team is building new parts and improved versions of their cars every weekend. But if you are able to bring out a new part one race before your competitor, that\u2019s one race that you are going to be in front of him,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

\"As
At Alpine\u2019s technical center in Enstone, engineers and mechanics work in the days before a race to design and build new car parts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This season, BWT Alpine F1 Team accomplished that feat for the British Grand Prix on July 3. In Enstone, team engineers and mechanics worked nearly non-stop in the hours before the race to design and build a new floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had people in the factory over the weekend finishing the floor,\u201d Rodriguez says. \u201cWe were improving it overnight, then taking it back for Saturday testing, and then we brought it back to the track on Sunday. We managed to overtake McLaren thanks to this push from the factory.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the British Grand Prix, Alonso finished fifth, 2.37 seconds ahead of McLaren\u2019s Norris, who finished sixth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe data is fundamental in all of this \u2013 in our efforts to improve efficiency, in our efforts to bring new developments to the car faster,\u201d Rodriguez says.<\/p>\n

The floor upgrade increased downforce, enabling the car to \u201cstick to the track in the corners,\u201d Rodriguez says. \u201cThe faster you can go in the corners, the faster you can go during the race.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in the world of Formula 1, fast is everything.<\/p>\n

Top photo: Fernando Alonso races during the Mexican Grand Prix in October 2022. All images courtesy of BWT Alpine F1 Team.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Midway through the Dutch Grand Prix, radio traffic between 20 Formula 1 drivers and their busy crews buzzed with the usual chatter about lap times, tire conditions and pleas to \u201cpush now\u201d \u2013 a frantic wall of sound rivaling the powerful engines roaring around the track. But precisely 59 minutes and 27 seconds into that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-129814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-recent-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}