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F1 Racing: Driven by Technology

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Voice&Data Bureau
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Rubens Barrichello, the ace Formula One driver, is preparing for yet another grueling Formula One race at the British Grand Prix finals on July 10 at the Silverstone race track in central England. A 45-member technical team of Barrichello's AT&T Williams F1 team is straining every nerve to give their legendary driver a flawless car for the day's race.

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An engineer has some doubt about a particular step. He doesn't waste much time and darts to 1 of the 3 mobile homes of the team parked close to the pit lane. Within seconds he is chatting with a technical wizard who is back at the team's factory in Grove, Oxford, about 50 km from the race track. After an animated discussion, the engineer gets the solution he was looking for and rushes to the star car that will compete in the day's race.

The troubled engineer made the contact with his technical wizard on a live video connection and could discuss the minutest details just as they would have done if both were at the factory. For the AT&T Telepresence video and audio teleconferencing facility used by Willams F1 team, courtesy its main sponsor, the telecom giant AT&T had made things easy.

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This time the distance was only 50 km between the race track and the team headquarters in Grove. The doubting AT&T Williams F1 engineer would have done the same thing if he was, for example, at the Hungarian Grand Prix, a few weeks later, 1,450 km away in Hungaroring, Hungary. For since late 2010, the AT&T Williams F1 team has been moving around European tracks with a mobile AT&T Telepresence Solutions unit to provide instant connectivity between the team and its headquarters.

The AT&T Williams F1 team has its own networking infrastructure. The AT&T Telepresence Solution was seamlessly plugged into this network to provide high quality video connectivity. “The main benefit is that we can connect with people who we would otherwise be communicating with via phone and email,” said AT&T Williams F1 CEO Alex Burns.

Burns added: “As well as enabling us to fundamentally change the way we operate, the AT&T Telepresence Solution makes you feel like you're really having a face-to-face meeting-this improves the relationships and gives a greater sense of collaboration.”

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For AT&T Williams F1, the solution has come at the right time. In 2010, all the 12 Formula One teams that are competing in the year-long racing circuit decided to limit the number of technical people present at each race track to 45. This was done to keep the costs down and also provide a level playing field in terms of technical support for all the teams.

Each team is allowed to keep 3 mobile homes at the track close to the pit. One of these homes was remodeled to install the Telepresence screen and the related equipment and this room has the pride of place in the scheme of things at AT&T Willams F1 team. “It was easy to install with little reconfiguration. The system continues to be intelligent, secure and the highly-scalable multi-point solution is built on an always-available IP network, using the existing LAN (local area network) infrastructure in Williams F1 headquarters,” said the team's IT manager, Chris Taylor.

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For AT&T, the Williams F1 team is an ideal showcase to demonstrate its cutting edge technological solutions. And the company uses its association with this high profile Fromula One team to the hilt. Williams F1 team believes that this high tech solution could provide it competitive advantage in the near future when the 12 teams try to save every microsecond in the race.

Since its installation, Williams F1 team has been moving around the European circuit with the mobile Telepresence platform. As the race moves to locations outside Europe, the platform too could move with the team in the near future for the other races.

Eight of the 12 Formula One teams are located in the Oxfordshire region. Last year, Williams F1 set up a technology center in Doha, Qatar as part of its diversification process. The team hopes to use some of the cutting edge technologies used in the Formula One race for other purposes and this development work will be done in Doha. AT&T has seamlessly connected the 2 centers of Williams F1 using a variety of advanced communication tools.

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“The Doha center will be technology focused with the aim of driving development and innovation of our flywheel and simulator technologies that have their origins in Formula One.Its success will partly depend on seamless and reliable collaboration between our in-house experts in Qatar and our headquarters in UK,” Burns said. “And AT&T was our natural choice as the company has already shown it is highly capable of delivering against our communication requirements on a global basis for the AT&T Williams team in Formula One.”

The Formula One is a year round activity, with the season starting in Melbourne every March. The season continues till November with the race in Brazil. There is a brief break during August. In 2011, there are 19 races in 18 countries and so there is a Formula One race every alternate week.

When the race gets off for the first time in India at NOIDA, UP on October 30, it will be the 20th Formula One race location this year.

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So the 12 teams travel with the full entourage to all these locations and compete fiercely against each other under widely varied conditions.

Last year, after the Shanghai Grand Prix, some of AT&T Williams F1 team members were stranded due to disruption to international travel caused by the volcanic ash spewed from Icelandic volcano. Then these members used AT&T's Telepresence facility available at its regional headquarters to keep in touch with the headquarters.

In recent years, AT&T has been increasing its Telepresence suites around the world with more touch points to enable organizations such as Williams F1 to be in constant touch with its people and customers wherever they are located in the world. “Across the AT&T Business Exchange, AT&T's unique, network-based inter- and intra-company collaboration feature, in a highly-flexible manner,” said Jon Summers, AT&T's senior VP for applications and service infrastructure, based in Dallas, Texas.

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Data Communications

The modern Formula One race is a high tech marvel. The racing car carries so much software that it is as complex as any computer. More than 100 sensors are placed in the car and the technical team receives continuous stream of date about various vital parameters of the car instantly. Course corrections are also made quickly after analyzing the data even as the race is going on.

AT&T Williams F1 team uses AT&T 's WAN Acceleration Service which makes its broadband network run 25 times faster. “In 2010, we increased the quantity and type of data we transferred across the network by around 50 percent to 27 GB(gigabytes). Using a VPN and AT&T WAN Acceleration Service today we generate 30 GB of data per event, which come from 140 sensors on the car monitoring temperatures, pressures, speed, wheel position and loading,” informed Taylor.

The voluminous data allows the team's engineers back home to analyze performances of key components, redesign and optimize them quickly for the subsequent races. Travel time and cost are reduced and more resources are available than the race spot to draw the right conclusions about the car.

No wonder Formula One is called the world's most technologically intensive sport. So when the 24 elite drivers like Barrichello compete with each other every other week around the world, they are not pitting themselves against each other's driving skills. The technology that goes into the Formula One car and the surrounding telecom infrastructure has as much to do with the champion in each race as driving itself.

Narayanan Suresh
The author was hosted in UK
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

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