mula By Cat Yong
This weekend’s Formula One racing event at Sepang, sees the McLaren Honda racing team, utilising SAP technologies, a phased implementation at the moment, which involves mostly collection of data and analysis for McLaren racing.
The full implementation of SAP HANA is expected to be live, in the very near future, however.
There are about 200 sensors in one car, all to monitor the health and performance of the vehicle and which detects its speed, gear as well as temperature of oil, tyre and track, among others.
SAP Malaysia MD, Bernard Chiang said, “Data from the car is vital, therefore data and analytics are key to helping teams prepare.One whole race weekend can generate over 3TB of data.”
This data gets sent back in real-time to McLaren Racing’s headquarters in the UK.
A team of engineers in Mission Control, at this HQ, will monitor the data and performance of the McLaren Honda cars. The team will then devise and create strategies for the race based on the acquisition and evaluation of the data received.
A McLaren Racing spokesperson said, “About 90-percent of decision in strategy is made in Mission Control.”
With SAP’s technologies, McLaren Racing claims that there is now quicker and more accurate aggregation of data, in a matter of hours, when it used to take a week.
The race team also now has capability to analyse as much as 10 years’ worth of data that takes into account more internal and external factors like heat, humidity, track conditions and more. This in turn enables more realistic racing simulations and preparation for more racing scenarios.
The Sepang leg of the Formula One, is known to be one of the race venues with the hottest weather.
The McLaren’s spokesperson said, “Our main focus here is cooling. We rely on our engineers to predict the right weather forecast, which can influence decisions like how often to change the race car’s tyres and more.”
In 2012, SAP became official tech partner for McLaren Group, which comprises four divisions – automotive, applied tech, racing and marketing.
