In the hyper-competitive world of Formula One™ racing, information is now every bit as critical to a team’s success as the condition of their vehicles or the skill of their drivers.
Consider this: Williams Martini builds as many as 300 sensors into its cars, which collect 1,000 channels of information every second the vehicles are on the track. That adds up to about 80 gigabytes per race that get fed into a constantly updated computer model.
So when the Williams team arrives at a new Formula One circuit, their engineers haul with them a two-rack data center that they erect for the duration of the race.
These "pop-up" data centers are perhaps the team's most important piece of equipment. They host the engineering systems and analytics that process real-time data streams from the cars' onboard sensors to deliver the final fraction of horsepower, tire life, and speed.
They also transmit vast amounts of information generated by Williams’ race cars’ sensors. Beamed back to the company’s Grove headquarters in Oxfordshire, UK, this telemetry data is fed into a computer model that is updated in real time and allows strategists to model the data and make mid-race decisions based on their analysis of this rich trove of information. For example, race tire engineers can deploy tablet computers to record wheel pressure and temperature readings at the track using a tablet and send that message back to Williams’ HQ for closer analysis.
"Speed and performance during a Grand Prix weekend is critical, no matter what you're doing, whether you're preparing the tyres - and it used to be done on a piece of paper, and it's now done on a tablet - whether you're sitting on the pit wall making strategy calls, making decisions about when to bring a driver in or what configuration to send the car out for qualifying," said Chief Information Officer Graeme Hackland.
All of those decisions need to be made in near real-time with the right data.
"And so that local processing power that we put on the laptops and devices that people use and the virtual service is absolutely critical to what they do so that they can get the answer back as quickly as possible," Hackland added.
But these systems must function securely and flawlessly in crunch situations. Like other businesses operating in the digital age, however, Williams officials also contend with myriad security risks.
Digital’s Double-Edged Sword
In a sport where a split-second difference determines a team’s finish in a race, closely-held information offers an inviting target for rival teams, track insiders, or any of 250,000 fans who crowd the stands during a major race.
Williams’ challenge is to maintain the availability of a full complement of data center services in real-time conditions where 100 percent uptime is an absolute necessity. As Williams has gone more digital and mobile, more endpoints mean more potential points of entry to defend. Unpatched vulnerabilities can expose applications and data to unauthorized access and theft. DDoS attacks can overwhelm key systems, rendering them unresponsive. Botnet infestations can siphon off compute cycles and degrade service quality.
As all industries are increasing their cyber security awareness, the pinnacle of motor sport is no different. With that in mind, Symantec last year carried out a penetration test following the British Grand Prix. Symantec demonstrated how an attacker could easily breach the wireless networks used by a pit crew to hack into an unprotected system and steal data.
This is the double-edged nature of digitization. For Hackland and his team, the challenge was to reduce security risks to that computing environment while making sure that the company’s data remained safe and was available on demand.
"You've got a racing car that's generating 1,000 channels of data as it drives around every second. All of that data needs to be sent back to the UK in real time, used by engineers on their laptops in between races so that they can prepare. So there's a very obvious intellectual property challenge in F1, which Symantec are helping us with - protecting our endpoints, protecting the data center that travels around the world," Hackland said.
"And what Symantec have allowed us to do is to make sure that we have in place all of the tools and technology that we can say to our customers: Your data is safe with us."
Nowadays when Williams engineers turn up at a racetrack and erect a data network within the pit lane, they are protected from malware infection or interception when they connect to the Wi-Fi network from their laptops with the help of technologies such as Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Endpoint Encryption.
"Through our partnership with Symantec, we’ve been able to embrace a new portfolio of technologies that encompasses all of these," according to Hackland, whose Williams Martini teams have traveled with their pop-up data centers to competitions in 21 countries on six continents in the last year.
Learn more about how Symantec protects Williams
