Rebuilding with data
For those that are not F1 fans, the name Aston Martin returned to the grid after a 60-year hiatus in 2021. The team that would become Aston Martin F1 experienced a string of different owners, brands and mid-tier performances, meaning that Aston Martin F1 inherited a legacy business with different tools, technologies and levels of data literacy from retained staff. When it rejoined the grid, Aston Martin F1 took on the mantra of being “the first truly modern Formula 1 team” and data was at the heart of this rebirth.
Clare Lansley described what Aston Martin F1 inherited as a collage of different technologies and tools that were far from efficient and capable of delivering what the team aspired to achieve. To remedy this, the whole infrastructure needed to be examined and rebuilt with the future in mind as there are frequent regulation changes from the motor sport governing body, the FIA, and a desire to be as sustainable as possible.
“Everything needed to be designed with sustainability in mind,” said Lansley. “We knew what we wanted to accomplish in the coming years, which would require a huge level of scalability and agility, which is why we partnered with NetApp.” The NetApp solutions allow for the movement of data and workloads with ease, security, agility and compliance – aspects particularly important for a sport that takes place in a different country almost every other week.
The vast amounts of data required to run a Formula 1 team are simply staggering and cover everything from the metrics being gathered by the sensors on the car to the weight of travel containers for moving individual components.
“It is essential to have the decision-makers onboard with data-led choices and that requires an understanding of data and a certain level of data literacy,” said Matt Watts. Once this foundation and the new infrastructure had been put in place, the benefits of data would begin rolling in and turning into trophies.
To make things as simple as possible, a plug and play attitude to developments has been embraced which lowers the barrier for entry and helps improve the data literacy learning curve for non-data professionals. By having a simplified structure, it improves the speed to seeing returns on investments and is possible to implement across international teams of varying sizes and capabilities.
Fast data means fast cars
The difference between first and second in racing can be a thousandth of a second, and being second is “being the best of the losers” as Lansley put it. With success being broken down to such small fractions of time, being able to extract the most from the vehicle and the equipment makes all the difference, and this can only be optimised with data analysis.
One of the prime examples of speed being imperative can be seen at the Australian Grand Prix. This particular race has the shortest time between finishing the practice sessions and declaring the setup to the FIA for the race – just two hours. The other difficulty is that the race takes place in Melbourne, Australia while the Aston Martin F1 factory is in Silverstone, UK, which means all correspondence and data analysis from the team needs to be done remotely. Since utilising NetApps solutions, specifically SnapMirror, the team went from taking more than 20 minutes to send the car data to the factory, to less than 10 minutes. Being able to have more than 50 engineers working on a set of data for an additional 10 minutes when the margins for success are so slim is priceless to this sport. This allows specialists to study and analyse the data for a longer time than competitors which means they have a better chance to solidify their racing setup and extract the most performance from the vehicle.
Furthermore, SnapMirror technology allows the UK-based engineers and simulator racers to use real-time data from the ongoing race to devise strategies, predict environmental changes (which can have drastic effects on the sensitive cars) and predict different scenarios.
“The NetApp solutions allow us to compress huge amounts of data for rapid transferral to our UK team wherever we are racing in the world,” said Lansley. “Which means we can use our simulator to predict the optimal strategy mid-race if there is, for example, a sudden downpour of rain, or if the safety car is released on a specific lap. It is these types of uses for data that win races.”
The implications of the technology being developed by NetApp and used by Aston Martin F1 show how rapidly vast amounts of real-time data can be shared and worked on by international teams to produce immediate results. Data management, storage and compression is key to rapid and effective analysis when working internationally, so much so that the on-the-ground units developed by NetApp are provided with white glove treatment by Aston Martin F1 for every race.
Security is everything
When it comes to having a competitive advantage, secrecy, intellectual property (IP) and compliance are essential in achieving success. This is true across the business landscape, from brick-and-mortar retailers to SaaS, and has caused some controversy in the world of Formula 1. Infamously, there was a 2007 spying scandal that saw teams being disqualified, fined and there were even sentences of jailtime handed down to individuals. More recently, the strictly enforced F1 budget caps were broken, and fines and penalties were issued to deter rule breaking in the future. Additionally, when experts from one team are poached by other teams the garden leave period can be over a year to ensure the knowledge being lost is not going to impact future car developments.
At the time of writing, a change in personnel at one Formula 1 team has seen one highly influential individual have to take the remainder of the year out of the sport and banned from working for their new employer until the next season to protect the knowledge they hold. These examples highlight the need for security and compliance, not just in a hyper-competitive world like Formula 1, but also in commercial businesses.
NetApp is so certain of its security capabilities that it has launched a ransomware recovery guarantee for businesses that meet its criteria. “Cyberattacks are a certainty,” said Watts. “It’s not an ‘if’, it’s a ‘when’ situation. This is true for any business and is the reason why NetApp has been working so hard to develop the most stringent security possible. We know we are the last line of defence as the data storage professionals, and we take that role incredibly seriously.”
A new smart factory has been designed and built by Aston Martin F1 at the Silverstone complex which is due to start being used in the next few months and completed over the course of the next year or so. The details behind this new factory are closely guarded and will be revealed at a later date. The factory has been designed to run as sustainably as possible with a high degree of futureproofing flexibility built in to accommodate regulatory changes and detailed sustainability aspirations for the team.
The Aston Martin F1 team also has a new supercomputer, but the details of it could not be shared due to secrecy and holding on to the competitive advantage against other teams.
What needs to be done
As with all businesses, the data journey is far from over. With technology developing at rates more rapid than ever before and the importance of data being recognised in all aspects of the industry, there needs to be a high degree of training and education for individuals, teams and the wider organisation.
“We are currently laying the foundations which will catapult us when we enter the next phase – the transform phase – of our data journey,” said Lansley. “This includes developing a strong data culture, using storytelling to highlight the wins and possibilities of utilising data and improving data literacy capabilities through education.”
There is hope that the recent explosion in AI technologies will further enhance the efficiency and optimisation of the Aston Martin F1 team and NetApp offerings, but it is still early days. There are a lot of considerations surrounding regulations, compliance, IP, ethics and more when it comes to generative AI.
One area that is of pivotal importance for the Aston Martin F1 team are the finances. Due to strictly regulated cost caps, each penny must be meticulously documented and optimised to ensure compliance, but also being able to provide investment for innovation. “My job involves a balancing act between managing innovation and sustainability,” said Lansley. It is hoped that further savings can be found utilising AI tools, particularly in the movement of equipment between different races.
“The cost of data retrieval is high and complex,” said Gallucci. “This means we are always looking for ways to provide our users with the most comprehensive information about what is being used, where, when, at what frequency and by whom, so any old and unused data can be disposed of, making a saving.”
Despite the cost of data, the return on investment it provides is quite literally game changing – as seen by Aston Martin F1’s rapid rise to second in the standings – and this is true for all businesses. DataIQ members have countless stories of data being the direct cause for business growth, but only when it is properly funded and embraced.
Once decision makers are able to identify the benefits, savings and efficiencies provided by data, the rise to success increases exponentially. With the correct data architecture and a secure and rapid base of data storage in place, the foundations are set for a highly mature data culture and organisational literacy rate to be cultivated. Businesses need to find the correct tools and partnerships for their own objectives and aims as there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but with the right time, staff and investment, this is possible and simple.
