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The Technology Behind Formula One
axlrosen writes "An article in the NY Times about the technology behind Formula One. The wealthiest teams arm themselves with powerful advantages, almost entirely centering on computing controls in the cars and computer simulation in design. Car data is sent in multi-megabyte wireless bursts each time the team's cars flash past the pits, often in excess of 200 miles an hour. It is simultaneously sent over the Internet to a larger data center in Maranello, Italy, where more complex analysis is done. AMD is expected to supply a supercomputer roughly as fast as the world's 10th most powerful machine to the Swiss-based Sauber Petronas racing team... I love the crazy steering wheel - anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?"
Having bought one of the top flight cycling computers, which came with software far more sophisticated than I need. I could go totally overboard on my power to mass, VO2 Max, heartrate training, etc. For what? To beat guys on my weekend rides? If I were a Pro I would need to have not just a coach, now, but a team behind me to monitor my fitness, nutrition, energy levels, and a slew of other data, where once I'd pretty much only need a coach. The bar is being raised and without money or sponsorship where does this leave the talented natural who can't meet the bar?
There's considerable complaining about how uneven F1 is, with Ferrari's huge budget. It's hitting all sports. Spend to win and use money and technology to remove so much doubt the mystery of the game is ultimately solved.
It was good to watch the Pistons dismantle the Lakers, but how less often are we to see upsets anymore?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...to help a team beat Michael Schumacher. The guy is ridiculously good, and he's paired with a great car. F1 basically is a contest to see who will finish 2nd.
Tiger Woods in golf, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, Michael Jordan in basketball -- all three of these guys dominated their respective sports at one time or another. But I don't think anyone has ever dominated a sport as much as Schumacher has in the past few years. Its getting so bad that F1 is actively NOT promoting Schumacher, as people are losing interest...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
If you've watched the IMAX film "Super Speedway", you'll see how they build a CART racer from scratch. It doesn't focus a lot on applied computer technology in this field, but it's still informative.
Such as this tidbit: modern brakes on CART (and F1) racers can bring the vehicle to a total stop from 200mph in 1.6 seconds. Imagine the g-forces.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Wonder how long it takes before they start either jamming each other's transmissions or playing man-in-the-middle and injecting false data...?
New regulations are being ushered through to eliminate a lot of the computerized systems in F1 cars. No more fancy traction control, the engines are going to be smaller, and there might even be an honest manual gearbox in future seasons. I doubt this will effect the telemetry advances, you still need all that data. What it will do is eliminate the edge Ferrari and BMW Williams have over everyone...
Go out and look for articles on the changes. I read a great piece in Autoweek a month or two ago.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
Years ago, when a driver crashed, you would see him get out and throw his steering wheel against something. That doesn't happen any more because those steering wheels cost $50,000.
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
That movie's the next best thing to experiencing the joys of 250mph+ car racing, and an absolute must if you're into car racing games (TD, NFS, etc). I also learnt a couple of neat facts like driving in quick succession (about 5ft apart) helps the successive cars to avoid drag, and the air flow from the following car helps push the leading car along.
Anyway, enough ranting...here's hoping for a 3-D car racing game for the PC.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
the price of all this equipment is always coming down. I remember when my mates and I were all using toeclips and we had to look on jealously at the pros using Look pedals, nowadays everybody has the Looks. It wasn't so long ago that a wrist/handlebar mounted heart monitor with a radio telemetry strap was out of range of mere mortals, now you can pick them up for less than $70 and with a boatload of functions.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This is a great site for a lot of the technical aspects of F1.
:)
http://www.f1technical.net/
I found it funny that the NYT waited until the Ferrari was in Canada so they could shoot pictures of it without the Marlboro ads the car typically has painted on while racing outside North America.
The buttons control all sorts of aspects of the car. Brake bias, sway bar settings, fuel mixture and horsepower, pit speed rev limiter, etc.
Now the really AMAZING part is that if you watch the races, you can usually see Schumacher fiddling with these settings during a race and often in a turn or at well over 100 MPH.
I race myself in an open wheel car, and I do OK, but my concentration is usually at close to 100% all of the time, so seeing Schumi adjusting things in a turn just blows me away every time.
Eschew Obfuscation
You mean like the US Grand Prix ? (I know you were joking)
I have been to the Indy 500, and the US Grand Prix. I can tell you that to me, F1 is much more impressive than Indy cars. Thankfully, I have never been to a NAASCOOORRR race, but there were plenty of ignorant rednecks at the Indy 500 for my tastes. What is most impressive to me about F1 is their handling. Holy Crap! When I went, it was raining part of the time, and they were still going insanely fast through the corners. When it dried out, they were even faster. Unbelievable. The downforce on those cars, and the suspension/tires is amazing. Not to mention the braking ability. The sheer speed is nothing sto sneeze at either. Hell, their *average* speeds are impressive.
I have heard NAASCOOOORRR fans say that F1 is too much technology and not enough driving, but F1 has the best of the best when it comes to sheer driving ability. Then there are those absolute FREAKS who do rally. Those guys are nuts.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Actually f1 racing requires far more skilled pilots than nascar, on nascar you get to see rookies, on f1 piltos have a BIG resume. I hate nascar becasue cable tv s plagued with it and I (and most people outside us) find it terribly boring, but since "gringos" like the sport its on tv
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Participants have too much vested interest in the race to ruin it playing with things like this.
Spectators, on the other hand, may have bets on the outcome - in which caes foul play is much more profitable per the risk.
I was just about to post that...
What makes champ car really cool is the in-car camera with all the useful info (like accel/brake pressure, rpms, speed, etc) when they show champ car racing on HDNet. It looks like the replay mode in GranTurismo 3, but in HDTV.
gpl_dan@yahoo.com. I will be in section C, way up high in row HH. Drop me a line if you will be there. Halfway between S/F line and T1. I'm hoping for Renault to do one of those crazy "we don't have launch control - wink wink" starts from row 3. :-)
A few years ago, F1 used to have two-way telemetry to the car. Computers were adjusting brake-bias settings on the fly on a TURN by TURN basis. Cars were dynamically adjusting settings to optimize for all kinds of things. Really, it was getting silly.
Eccelstone, the guru who presides over Formula 1 and looks like a cross between an evil elf from LOTR and Andy Warhol, had to make changes. He banned that. before last year's season, he reduced qualifying to a one lap shot instead of your best lap over time, and he created the parke-ferme, a parking garage that cars had to roll into after they pulled off the qualifying lap. Teams were (are) not allowed to touch the cars between the end of qualifying and the race start. At all.
this created goofy things, such as last week's Canadian race where Schumi qualified back because his brother Ralf (we call him Little Ralfy) and the BMW-Williams just decided to go totally lite on fuel for the purpose of getting the pole. He had to pit 12 laps into the race, but it was part of the strategy. michael went for a 2-lap strategy and won.
So, now - the rule changes have created a more boring sport. Unless you are some hard charger with brass ones (hello Montoya and Sato) you rarely risk passing for position, except at the start. It's just not worth the risk, wait for the pit strategy to kick in. It also promotes blocking. Rubens blocks for Michael and executes Team ferrari strategy, that's his role in life.
The technology is shattering the smaller clubs. Arrows is gone, Minardi will probably be gone, Eddie Jordan is constantly broke and needs Ford engines to run. Now the dollars are cutting into teams that are bigger. Jaguar may pull out of F1 if they lose Webber, a promising driver. Honda was thinking of dropping BAR, after they dropped Jordan and leaving altogether, knowing they could not match the spending that Toyota was going to do. Toyota is something like 5x the size and wealth of Honda, something I didn't know until I started wacthing F1.
Drivers are no longer valued for just driving prowess, but the engineers they can bring WITH them, and their leadership abilities within the organization. Michael Schumacher is part CEO, part engineer, part driver and basically gets what he gets because he is a large reason that Ferrari executed the plan it had. He brought Ross Brawn with him from Bennetton Ford.
There are the big six in F1 right now - Honda, Toyota, Renault, Mercedes, BMW and Ferrari. Everyone else is an also-ran. Sauber uses 2 year old Ferrari engines, I think this year they upgraded to 1-year old engines. And to emphasize how big of a disadvantage that is - this year at Canada, the times were approaching 3 SECONDS faster than last year. The difference between a 1:12 and a 1:15 per lap is so large, old tech will leave you in the dust.
In contrast, if you attend Champ Car (formerly CART) it's like going to a damn vintage race. Spec chassis with spec Ford engines, standard turbo, no traction control, no ABS, manual gearboxes. It's like watching F1 in 1989. And IRL is KILLING it, this is almost certainly the last year. Nobody wants to see those tanks doing makeshift street courses. Americans like ovals, and speed speed speed.
F1 is brilliant, but they know they can't keep going as is. You hear crazy rumors all the time. One is that the V12s will get chucked, and everyone has to go to V8s. The spectacle and sound of a V12 revving at 19k RPM is amazing. THe cars will deafen you from 100 yards away. the carbon fiber chassis and cutting edge brake tech is stunning to see in person. Seeing a car brake from 200mph to 40mph in 200 feet really can't be described until you see it happen.
If you want to see some truely amazing driving check out WRC. 120mph on a frozen mountain road with a driver who doesn't know the course (the passenger says things like "turn right next" in order to navigate.
On the best of days, for the best of teams, the pit-stop is still a hazardous affair. Coming in at high speed, braking at the last second to stop on a dime, pumping huge volumes of fuel, leaving again with maximum acceleration the instant work has finished - it's pretty dangerous. That's why all the mechanics have fire-proof gear, tough boots and so on.
Every team and driver have had their problems in the pits, I think it's unfair to single out M. Schumacher. Besides, I wouldn't say Benneton were unsafe in the pit-stops - they probably were the best trained.
If I were the front jack man, and I had to pick a driver to stand in front of, it'd be M. Schumacher. Not because I reckon he'd be the most concerned for my safety though; he'd want to hit his markings just right to minimise the stop time.
He is of undoubted skill, but his arrogance makes it easy to take shots at him. My main problem is that right now nobody else is as good as him. I wouldn't mind if he won every single race, just as long as he had to fight hard for each victory.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
naeem
One of the neat tricks teams can use to spy on other cars is monitoring their in car camera feed and sending the audio through a dsp to find out stuff like what valve timings they're using. It works with a mic on the side of the road too, but then you've got to correct for the doppler effect.
Thing is, F1 is about putting cars out with the absolute hottest technology possible on board. The current regulations ban so many cool things that would give the less spendy teams a bit more of a chance.
To be fair, they usually significantly dumb down the track or drive simpler road tracks.
At Watkins Glen, for example, (my favorite track to drive), they skip the toe of the boot, which is the most complicated part of the track to drive well.
Not slamming NASCAR, but there's a world of difference in the type of driving they do.
They're all (F1, NASCAR, etc) pansies compared to the drivers in SCCA ProRally, CARS and WRC, though. I mean, really. They don't even have trees to hit!
The 2J was as radical as the 2E and 2H had been. Maybe more so. The car looked like a white brick. A very fast white brick. The car carried two motors. A 465 cubic inch Chevy V8 powered the rear wheels and a 274 cc Rockwell snowmobile engine powered a pair of "sucker" fans in the rear bodywork. The fans sucked air out from under the car, creating a vacuum that held the 2J on the track. Sliding Lexan skirts were placed around the bottom edge of the body to seal the "plenum" area under the car. Enough suction could be generated to hold the car upside down on the ceiling of a room! Where a wing generates downforce (good) it also generates drag (bad). The suction device generated downforce with no drag loss.
Reigning F1 World Driving Champion Jackie Stewart qualified the 2J third at Watkins Glen and drove the race's fastest lap, but his race was cut short by brake problems. The Chaparral team missed the next three races but returned to competition in September at Road Atlanta. They also brought a new driver with them, Vic Elford. Elford drove the 2J in three of the remaining four races. (The team would miss one more race.)
Elford was fastest qualifier in all three of those races but he only finished one (sixth at Road Atlanta). Something always broke. But the competition felt that, with a year of experience under their belt, the Chaparral team would bury them in 1971. Competitors were always lobbying the SCCA to ban the 2J. At the end of the season it was. The sliding Lexan skirts were said to have violated the "moveable aerodynamic device" ban. With that, Jim Hall closed up shop. An era in international autoracing had come to a close.
Also, there is another type of racing that approaches the excitement and sheer driving skill of F1, and that would be Rally. The control those guys evince under such conditions is truly mind-boggling. Beyond that, for pure joy of automotive race, it's hard to beat the beauty of GT. The cars, the tracks. Not the same rush as F1, but for a car lover it's heaven.
I hate NASCAR. Nothing puts me to sleep faster (except motocross racing). If you want to see some *real* racing watch FIA World Rally. Some of the in car footage is insane.
I used to work for the Benetton F1 team when Schumacher was around. I joined in 94 as their sole software engineer tasked with writing data analysis, strategy and telemetry sw. 94 & 95 were great years - we won around 60% of that year's GP's and the bonus was $$$$ :-)
In those days the on-board data loggers contained 4mb(now 128Mb) and the real-time telemetry was a pitiful 9600 baud, which didn't work 100% on every track (e.g. Hockenheim and Monaco).
I found Schumacher to be a good egg, fairly quiet, polite and interested in your work.
Happy days.
wrt the super computer etc, I'd take that with a slight pinch of salt. F1 teams are prone to exagerate slightly. PC's are adequate for most of their tasks excepting cfd and design work which is usually done on unix boxes.
Actually that not a fair assessment. CART was first with HANS (head and neck restraints), pit lane speed limits, wheel tethers, monocock crash test requirements. Before the money disappeared, CART had a huge budget for safety R&D. They were the model in the racing industry for proactive safety programs.
F1 still doesn't have a traveling trauma team or safety team. They rely on local authorities for medical response. If CART had run that way, Alex Zanardi would be dead today.
F1's biggest advantage in safety is improved track design to prevent the deadly crashes to start with - run off areas, etc. That's great, and Champ cars are catching up by wisely abandoning oval tracks.
You might not want to hear this, but when they gotta go - they gotta go.
An average formula-1 race lasts about 90 minutes (there is a 2 hour maximum for any race). Somewhere hot, say, malaysia, the air temperature is 40 degrees C (104F). Or more.
Now, imagine you're dressed up in a fire proof coat sat right next to a powerful engine. You're going to get very hot, right?
They drink lots of water before and throughout the race to prevent dehydration. They can lose 3-4kg throughout the race.
So it's not unusual for them to have to "go" during a race.
Watch out for the dark spots when they get out of the cars... used to show up quite a bit on the silver McLaren suits.
Not quite so glamarous thinking about pissing yourself, is it? You would think with a $400m budget they could sort that out!
The Champ car machines are all standardised. They use the same Lola/Reynard chassis and Ford V8 engine. They're more like Formula 3000.
Until three years ago there was alot of interesting comptetion in CART - engines from Toyota, Honda, Ford, and Mercedes - chassis from Reynard, Lola, and Swift - tires from Firestone and Goodyear - big budgets.
It was a poor mans Formula 1, with great drivers, some great tracks, and the frightening spectacle of the super speedways. I mean a world record 246MPH qualifying lap! And the horsepower they used to run!
Unfortunately, the money is gone now, and Champ car is surviving with as a spec type series. It still has some great drivers, great tracks, and a good fan base -- especially in Mexico and Canada. It's still serves as a feeder series to F1 along with F3000. Let's hope Honda and Toyota come to their senses and bring their money back to Champ cars.
Let's also hope the same thing doesn't happen to F1.
A couple of years ago, Wired had an amazing article about F1 racing, particularly in terms of how it evolved yearly from the technological arms race. A team would develop something astounding, and others might copy it, and by the next year it would be outlawed. Innovation after innovation came and went like this, with few of them being allowed to remain. What I most liked about the article was the picture of a Mercedes-Benz F1 motor mounted to the dyno, looking utterly gorgeous (spotlessly clean, I should add) with its huge shiny exhaust pipes glowing cherry red. :)
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Looking at the sports Americans like, it's quite localised - American Football, Baseball, Ice Hockey. Basically, hardly anyone else plays them.
They've picked up Football (the proper one) only as a ladies game (where there's little competition). I wonder how long interest will be held if someone gets a better ladies team out there.
They sorta do this in F1, but really only the RPM. I don't believe the F1 teams are willing to share telemetry data like that, so they actually base the RPM on the in-car shot on the tone of the engine being picked up by the ambient microphones on the cars. It's reportedly "very accurate", but it's not a true reading of the car's actual RPM.
This is, all based on things heard from the commentary on Speed Channel here in the states, but I have no reason to doubt it.
Renault figures out, based on track conditions, fuel load, air temp, etc. what the ideal clutch pressure/engagement speed is for a wheelspin-free launch and set that into the computer. Red lights go off, Alonso pulls the upshift paddle (or releases the brake - not sure which) and the computer grabs first with a hopefully-optimal clutch drop.
If the number-crunching goes wrong the start is less-than-perfect. But in any event, they aren't using proper TC, just a really slick first-gear engagement!
GTRacer
- Enjoying the 2004 Schumacher Victory Tour (Monaco cancelled due to inclement conditions)
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Not really. The last driver to die was Ayrton Senna, 10 years ago, in a freak accident. A suspension rod went straight through his helmet faceplate. How unlucky can you get? Formula 1 cars only crash after going through a gravel pit, and then they hit tyre barriers. In CART, IRL, or NASCAR they hit the wall without any speed reduction. It's only because the angle is usually shallow that drivers survive crashes in those races.
My God, man. You're watching history being made. Enjoy it.
If incredibly dominant teams damaged the sport, it would have already been terminally ill after the McLaren/Proust/Senna years when other teams were lucky to finish on the same lap with the leaders.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
Renault had it on their site live at Monaco. I wacthed it during the race, but it got Slashdotted and haven't seen it on their site since.
http://blog.karit.geek.nz/