How Formula One takes tech to the extremes

Following Jenson Button's maiden F1 win in Hungary last year, he talked about the vital role his Honda team played in getting him to the top step of the podium. But an increasingly important force behind any successful Formula One team is technology.

The intensive development work and data telemetry and analysis needed to stay at the sharp end of the grid during the season creates unique demands and relies on having the best IT infrastructure possible.

Working on the technology behind an F1 car means living with the high pressure combination of the race calendar and the demands of the people involved, Honda's director of IT, David France, explained.

He said: "We know that if we don't have the have the car ready to go onto the grid at a certain point in time, then we miss the opportunity to qualify or we miss the opportunity to race and that's our sole focus in life. So everything is channelled towards making that happen.

"It's actually quite hard for the IT people to keep up with it at times."

And while there are similarities with working on IT in other industries - as most expect systems to be robust and resilient - France added: "I traded life with motor insurance for motor racing, and I can tell you that one is a lot more interesting than the other."

France said the F1 team works with tech companies that "buy into what we're doing, the way we operate". And in return the team provides an environment that showcases the products and services of its partners.

Communication is critical, with the team testing or racing 40 weeks per year - in as many as 18 different countries - which means data has to flow constantly between track and factory. Ahead of each race a member of the IT team is sent forward to set up the working environment for the engineers and drivers, including a link back to the factory and the temporary phone lines.

France explained: "We have to have as good an operation in the garage and on the pit wall as you would expect in a much more static and stable infrastructure." After all, if a critical issue occurs and the response is slow, "quite frankly, we will have missed the race", he said.

Another key challenge for the team's IT department is handling the huge amounts of data generated by aerodynamic simulation and the recently installed wind tunnel.

The new wind tunnel added "another source of high volume, high quality data which has to be managed", said France.

He added: "We were actually running into a spot of bother with our data storage and [data storage company] NCE came to our rescue."

NCE recommended and installed a data virtualisation system, turning what France describes as "islands" of information into "continents".

Following this, France said the team tends to over-spec the capacity of the services and infrastructure to avoid running out of storage space.

Beyond the day-to-day operations of the team, technology is used to further the brand - for example following Jenson Button's first win in Hungary last year, Pipex, which hosts the team's website, had to respond quickly to cope with extra traffic by increasing bandwidth.

Plans for 2007 include the installation of larger capacity servers and an improved WAN at the factory. Race trailers are due to be refitted with network cabling, telemetry racks and servers, and team laptops will all be replaced as well.

France said this is part of a strategy to replace hardware every two years due to the extreme conditions it is subjected to.

In the dry conditions of Bahrain and the humidity of Malaysia, cooling becomes a major issue. Winter testing at Silverstone has also created problems. He said: "We probably take [technology] to extremes."