Press Release – Didcot, February 2018
Formula 1 – winning ways in IT
Much has been made over the years about how motor racing inventions have been applied to everyday cars and vehicles – aerodynamics, anti-lock brakes, electronic control units, disk brakes, kinetic energy recovery systems, etc. However little has been written about them as advanced IT users until now.
Just think about how the special F1 ecosystem makes the teams stand out as computer users. For instance:
- Agility – IT solutions have to be transported around the world to each race circuit in turn – systems have to be agile, ruggedised and easy to set up and take down. Each circuit has its own –often-different – telecom partners. Each season lasts a year before the rules are reset. As a result the teams are advanced users of ‘Converged Infrastructure’ and ‘Hyper-Converged Infrastructure’ systems and their usage can help those of us who are not learn about the advantages and limitations of such solutions.
- Solid Printing – F1 teams are among the most advanced in terms of understanding 3D printing processes for prototyping new parts for engines and other parts. We can learn from them to prepare for when solid printing becomes a mainstream IT activity for many of us.
- Data Protection – when McLaren was caught with Ferrari data and fined $100m back in 2007, data protection and encryption became absolutely vital subjects for F1’s IT managers. As governments introduce new data protection legislation (such as the EU’s GDPR) many of us need to improve our procedures to improve data governance and avoid getting fined for non-compliance ourselves.
- Digital Transformation – the shift from real wind tunnels to CFD techniques parallels the digitization of many analogue processes in business. F1 teams are very advanced users of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) techniques. This means that most F1 teams are already ‘digitally transformed’; learning from them ought to be able the rest of us who haven’t really even started.
- Operational Efficiency – restrictions imposed by F1’s governing body on the number of hours High Performance Computing (HPC) systems can run simulations focuses attention on efficiency, as opposed to the raw megaflops. In general purpose computing we can learn from them to build systems that are ‘fit for purpose’ as opposed to those that are under- or over-specified for our applications.
- IoT and Big Data Analytics – F1 teams process billions of data points as multiple sensors for telemetry calculations; they can help us decide how to filter the useful information from gigantic sources of unstructured data from social media apps and the digital monitoring of new devices.
- Cloud Computing – most IT teams make excellent use of cloud computing and understand the complex issues of data sovereignty and jurisdiction. Using cloud services saves them money by reducing the number and size of systems they have to transport to each race circuit, but has to be done in a secure and trusted way; balancing the cost, security and trust of cloud verses on premise computing is becoming a vital process for almost all enterprises.
- Green/Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) – perhaps because their sport involves burning huge amounts of fuel for sport and entertainment, F1 teams focus strongly on reducing their carbon footprints. Many other business sectors also have to adjust their effect on the environment due to legislation – doing more than the legal requirements can be the beginnings of a CSR strategy.
These are just a few of the areas where drawing the analogy between F1 and general purpose enterprise computing can help C level execs like us come to terms with sometimes highly-technical and otherwise difficult IT concepts and solutions.
It’s not that F1 teams always get it right, or have enough IT budget to do whatever they want; but learning about their challenges, decision-making processes, solutions and associated benefits will prove extremely useful and fun for the rest of us.
As a team Keith and Martin are working from their extensive knowledge of F1 and ITC market research to write white papers for computer companies – many of them sponsors of F1 motor racing – to draw these analogies and help improve business results.
Your F1 IT project sponsorship opportunity
As a sponsor of our research we’ll give you a new marketing tool to stimulate debate around these vital IT and communications subjects. Your brand will be associated with the first major research project outlining the lessons F1 IT can teach corporate IT.
More specifically we’ll write a 6-8 page white-paper for you to use on one or more of these major IT topics, customising it to include an appraisal of your brands, offerings and strategies.
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euroLAN is an Industry Analyst firm focussed on routes to market in EMEA.
ITCandor Is a market research company following the IT and Communications market and providing forecasts for industry business planners.
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