

Formula 1: The super-fast net driving teams to the podium - jjp
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28416855

======
henningo
Although this article discusses the actual collection and transmission of
data, what I find more interesting is how efficiently the vast amount of data
is being used in the decision making process for vehicle setup and race
strategy. (I strongly believe that data has no value until it is used for
analysis and decision making.)

Data coming from the vehicle sensors and other sources are concurrently being
used for analysis (by both hundreds of engineers and a wide range of
"algorithms") as well as input to simulation models. The results from the
simulations means that even more data is being generated even when the vehicle
isn't running.

Within minutes, using the data, the different engineering groups (typically
responsible for a sub-system, ie. engine, tires, aerodynamics) arrive at
conclusions which then the vehicle's race/performance engineers are using to
enhance the setup of the vehicle. The results of changes are then fed back to
the engineers, and evaluating if the analysis and predictions are correct is a
big part of the post-event work.

I honestly can't think of any other industry that carries out this kind of
analysis of highly non-linear systems at this scale and speed. The only other
industry that I can think of is finance?

Disclosure: I work in motorsports

~~~
Serow225
This is done during flight test of prototype aircraft (and probably spacecraft
as well to some extent, I haven't done that) - the data acquisition system on
a flight test plane is incredibly advanced, and the data gets beamed down in
realtime to a group of (real) engineers on the ground in the flight test
station who analyze the data and communicate back and forth to the pilots
again in real time. All in real time, the test pilots will decide what/how
maneuvers to do based on learnings captured/analyzed, change the configuration
of the aircraft systems/surfaces, intentionally induce failure conditions and
faults, ... It's a real ballet between the engineers on the ground and the
pilots, when the team is working well together. As you said, post-event
debriefing, detailed analysis, recommendations/reports, aircraft changes etc
are started immediately when the aircraft lands, to prepare for the next
flight. It's very intense, but also very rewarding and a lot of fun.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_beamed down in realtime to a group of (real) engineers on the ground_

I assume this is in reference to use of the term "race engineer" in F1.

I can assure you that the sport does use _real_ engineers, and very intensely
so. Folks like Adrian Newey would qualify as engineers by anyone's definition,
and each team has heaps of MechE's, EEs, software engineers, even materials
engineers, back at home base.

~~~
oesmith
.. not to mention that there's a lot of overlap between aerospace and F1
engineering. Plenty of the engineers (even the trackside ones) started out
studying aero engineering.

------
exDM69
It's astonishing how many people are working to keep the cars running on
track. There's perhaps 50 people for each pair of cars, maybe even more, every
time the cars are running on track. There's 5 guys on the pit wall, a dozen
behind the pit garages and twenty or more at the teams' bases.

They make the tactical and strategic decisions on when to pit during the race
as well as guide the car set up and tuning on Friday and Saturday practice.

Here's a few impressive videos from McLaren's mission control, located in
their base in Woking, near London.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYhl7csZJHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYhl7csZJHw)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ple7W6bdxJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ple7W6bdxJc)

~~~
tlrobinson
_" perhaps 50 people for each pair of cars"_

Well, yes. From the article: "the FIA - restricts them to 60 staff members at
the trackside, including engineers"

~~~
exDM69
> Well, yes. From the article: "the FIA - restricts them to 60 staff members
> at the trackside, including engineers"

Does that include the people at the factory in the mission control? I don't
think it does. McLaren's Mission Control (in the videos) already has about 20
people working.

I didn't even count the actual pit crew in my estimate of 50. There's around
20 people in the pit crew.

~~~
tlrobinson
> Does that include the people at the factory in the mission control? I don't
> think it does.

Right, that was the point of the article... they can only have 60 people
trackside, so they need all this bandwidth to send the data back to the
factory where even more people can analyze it.

------
nightcracker
> Both AT&T and Tata insist their networks are secure, but they are tight-
> lipped about precisely how this is done.

This is absolutely terrible. Your network should be secure, even if you tell
everyone how it's done, and reluctance to do so makes it very likely it's not
secure.

~~~
santosha
I see this line of argument very frequently - that if you are really secure,
you should tell everyone how you do it, as some sort of gold standard for
security. Kerchoff's principle suggests nothing of the sort - it is something
of a thought experiment. When you design a system, you should ask yourself if
it would still be secure if you told everyone how it worked. There is no real
need to tell anyone, the obscurity adds an extra layer of defense.

Here's Steve Bellovin's thoughts on this:

'The subject of security through obscurity comes up frequently. I think a lot
of the debate happens because people misunderstand the issue. It helps, I
think, to go back to Kerckhoffs's second principle, translated as "The system
must not require secrecy and can be stolen by the enemy without causing
trouble," Kerckhoff said neither "publish everything" nor "keep everything
secret"; rather, he said that the system should still be secure even if the
enemy has a copy.

In other words – design your system assuming that your opponents know it in
detail. (A former official at NSA's National Computer Security Center told me
that the standard assumption there was that serial number 1 of any new device
was delivered to the Kremlin.) After that, though, there's nothing wrong with
trying to keep it secret – it's another hurdle factor the enemy has to
overcome. (One obstacle the British ran into when attacking the German Enigma
system was simple: they didn't know the unkeyed mapping between keyboard keys
and the input to the rotor array.) But – don't rely on secrecy.'

~~~
gabriel34
You are right in this case. The only one who must be informed about how the
system works is the client. In this case, the F1 team should know how is this
security achieved, not the attackers or the general public.

On the other hand, if it is my information you are securing and if I don't
have good reasons to trust you, I want to know how it is being done, even if
that means attackers also know. If everyone is your client (for example, if
you provide public services), then everyone must know, so they can
independently audit the system.

Obscurity can be a layer of security in one system, made ,managed and audited
by trusted entities, but, generally speaking, it is a weak layer for a
attacker with a great enough motivation.

On the other hand, obscurity is detrimental to a collective of systems made,
managed and audited (or not) by a great variety of entities. Sure, on the real
world we place trust on companies to handle their security well, but that has
ended badly in the past. The knee jerk reaction to security through obscurity
we have is beneficial because it is a symptom of security issues in the
system.

In conclusion, regarding obscurity, the beneficial effect of an extra security
layer is only greater than the potential malefic effect of hiding security
problems if the entities behind it, including the auditor, are competent and
trustworthy. As a rule of thumb it should be avoided or have its bad side
mitigated by independent security audits.

------
billybofh
There was a related 'In Business' BBC Radio 4 programme on this subject last
week - it was an interesting listen. You can download it here (possibly UK
only - not sure) "In Business: Fast and Furious 7 Aug 2014" :

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz](http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz)

~~~
Brakenshire
I'm fairly sure BBC podcasts are available worldwide.

------
triggercut
I used to work for a (traditional) engineering company that partners with an
F1 team.

Once a year they would come around and give a talk about asset reliability and
how they operate.

An interesting story was how the one time they ignored their data (because,
due to the reliability of the part involved, they couldn't believe the
likelihood of such an event occurring) they had a catastrophic engine failure
mid-race.

Thanks to the data collected they were able to run detailed simulations to
"debug" the issue - a small change somewhere else causing a part to vibrate at
it's natural frequency - i.e shaking itself to bits. This then helped them
mitigate the risk of the same thing happening in the future.

From then on they always trust the data.

Test your sensors, trust your sensors, trust your data.

~~~
bruceboughton
Except fuel flow sensors ;)

------
hammock
This 2.5 minute video gives you the scope and breath of how much support goes
behind racing an F1 car.

It’s really the engineers making the pre-race setup for the car and making
real time adjustments during the race that makes a winning F1 team. It has
been argued the F1 drivers merely are “along for the ride” and it’s really
what goes on behind the scenes that wins a race.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j9r7Ue6XnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j9r7Ue6XnA)

~~~
pgcosta
"It’s really the engineers making the pre-race setup for the car and making
real time adjustments during the race"

"8.5.2 Pit to car telemetry is prohibited." source:
[http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/tech...](http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/technical_regulations/8701/fia.html)

"F1 drivers merely are “along for the ride”" This is wrong on so many levels.
F1 is a very physically demanding sport. Their reflexes have to be as good in
lap 40 as they were in lap 4. They need to perform changes to the car in real
time, mostly between turns, as they're told. They need to know how to attack,
defend, overtake, save tyres, save fuel.

The difference is that 10/15/20 years ago they did all this without not much
data, and now they have much more context to each decision.

You clearly do not watch much Formula 1.

------
tedchs
> sometimes amounting to over 100 gigabytes each second.

So that's 800 gigabits per second, nearly a Tbps. Which is a _lot_ of network
throughput. Although this is not impossible, it seems surprisingly high, and I
wonder if the article should have said "100 gigabits each second", which is
still a lot of bandwidth but a little more reasonable.

The article describes the data being transmitted as largely telemetry. Let's
say they are sampling each of their metrics every 10 milliseconds
(100/second), and they need a 32 bit integer to store each value. So, that's
100 * 32 / 8 = 400 bytes per second per metric. Divided into 100 gigabytes,
that would be 250 _million_ metrics. Even if you change these assumptions,
clearly this link is used for more than telemetry.

800 Gbps requires a large number of computers to generate and transmit, then
another large set of machines at HQ to ingest all that data and then run
analytical models against it. Just to handle the network traffic, without any
data analysis, if you assume servers have a pair of 10 Gbps network
interfaces, that's 40 machines.

If you assume hard drives can write at about 100 megabytes per second, that's
1,000 disks just to handle the write IOPS. But, with those 40 machines, that's
an average of 25 disks per machine, so not unreasonable. With SSD's it would
be fewer devices.

I do not know if a way to get this much network throughput over a radio link,
so I can't imagine it's all coming from the car itself.

It would be interested to know what other data is transmitted over this link
during a race other than telemetry.

~~~
mschuster91
> so I can't imagine it's all coming from the car itself.

There's also high-definition imagery from each car, I guess that some of it is
generated in the car and the other imagery is supplied by the TV cameras.

I don't know though if these run on UHD, but given the boatloads of cash
behind F1 I'd assume so.

~~~
gsnedders
To my knowledge, none of the F1 cameras are UHD; FOM (who nowadays produce all
the TV coverage in-house, except for Monaco) only moved to HD in 2010, and
even then only offered the HD feed from 2011 (in 2010 the feed everyone got
was downscaled).

------
ponyous
"And a colossal amount of data is being transmitted over the network -
sometimes amounting to over 100 gigabytes each second."

What am I missing?

~~~
fla
It's BBC'tech reporting. The details are intended to impress the lambda non-
techy readers. 100GB/s seems a bit over-exagerated, but whatever, it's a funny
article to read anyway.

~~~
lucb1e
Someone downvoted this, but I think s/he's right in that it's exaggerated. I
explained why here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177618)

------
kayoone
Interesting article, but the 100GB/s does not make sense, i mean that would
require a 800Gbit/s - 1Tbit/s connection per Team ? Uhm no. Even if its
100Gbit/s, that would still be 12,5GB/s which seems like a lot for telemetry
data and video streams. I wonder how they transfer that anyway as the nearby
city would need to support that kind of throughput for all teams at the same
time.

Pretty sure the actual number is a lot lower than that. I'd say its probably
more like a low latency 1-10Gbit/s connection per team.

------
jgalt212
This is very interesting and intellectually stimulating, but none of this
matters in the current season where Mercedes has a vastly superior engine and
is winning races by 10s of seconds, not milliseconds.

~~~
jeremysmyth
Not in recent races, where there's been real competition.

------
personZ
_" It's a completely bespoke car for each circuit."_

This may give the wrong impression, so just to be clear there are strict
regulations in F1 regarding the reuse of components and static designs.

[http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/spor...](http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/sporting_regulations/8689/)

Mercedes, who sit in #1 and #2 in the driver standings, and of course #1 in
the constructors standings, is presumed to have an advantage because of the
way they laid out their turbochargers.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuBB2F6IutQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuBB2F6IutQ)

By F1 rules, no other team can change their own engine designs until next
season.

~~~
exDM69
While the engine, gearbox and chassis have strict regulations, the cars
undergo major changes from race to race.

Next week at Spa (a very fast track) we will see radically different cars
from, say, Monte Carlo (the slowest track). The cars look visually different
if you look at them in side by side images.

~~~
personZ
The overwhelming bulk of the changes in the car from track to track are setup
changes. These are designs they put an enormous amount of work into over the
off-season, and a significant amount of test time, so it seems circumspect
that they would radically if even marginally change them mid-season, before
even considering the incredible tight restrictions of F1 (which are there for
safety and fairness, but also to try to keep it within "reasonable" fiscal
bounds).

Teams come out with a season design, and from that they adjust wings, tire
pressure, gear ratios or change points, etc, within the tolerances allowed.
I've only marginally been following F1 for the past year, but I'm wholly
unaware of any substantial construction change from track to track.

Edit: To substantiate this a bit, here's the Ferrari car at Hockenheim (a very
high speed track), compared to Monaco (a twisty, "urban" track).

[http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/bGZpJEcephz/F1+Grand+Prix+of+...](http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/bGZpJEcephz/F1+Grand+Prix+of+Germany/Y2745loz6A8/Kimi+Raikkonen)

[http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2014/5/15851.html](http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2014/5/15851.html)
(click on the Ferrari picture)

~~~
sseveran
The competitive teams will field a variety of front and rear wings tailored to
different tracks.

~~~
walshemj
I believe they used to have different wheel base chassis' for some circuits -
not sure if this is now banned.

~~~
tobylane
It's not banned, Raikkonen changed his Lotus wheelbase mid-season.

------
rob-anderson
"When the races are held closer to Red Bull's factory, which is based in
Milton Keynes in the UK, the delay can drop to a staggering seven
milliseconds"

whoopee doo.

~~~
bwilliams18
Important to know–they're almost certainly talking about the race in
Silverstone England. That's about a 30 min
drive.([https://goo.gl/maps/EdR4q](https://goo.gl/maps/EdR4q)) So fast, but
technically not nearly as difficult as connecting to Malaysia.

