By Cat Yong
In the high stakes sport of Formula One, how does one carve out advantage when the difference between a win or loss, seems to boil down inevitably to the calibre of the sports car and its driver?
In the world of Formula One racing where every millisecond is crucial, a lot goes on behind the scenes before and during Formula One races, to ensure that every speed advantage is leveraged to the full.
Tata Communications’ Managing Director of its F1 Business, Mehul Kapadia said, “This sport is driven by data. The faster you can get telemetry data to the decision makers, the more time they have to work with it.”
That means fast data transfer and fast data analysis.
Mehul explained, “A second’s downtime in a race can be disastrous. This deal enables Mercedes AMG Petronas to react more quickly to developments at the track and helps increase and improve car performance.
“The ability to share richer data and to report issues from trackside to the factory in real-time gives the team a huge boost and the much needed competitive advantage in car performance, not only in speed but also handling and stability.”
According to Mehul, Tata has been successfully providing world-class connectivity to all 19 Formula One race locations around the world, over its global network since the 2012 season.
“The partnership with Mercedes AMG Petronas was a natural progression. We have invested in building the core competence needed for servicing the Formula One and we can now bring that expertise to the Mercedes AMG Petronas team.”
What the deal involves is high speed and secure trackside connectivity to the race team at all race locations. “This will enable the team to transfer vital real-time data from the Silver Arrow cars at any Grand Prix location to its headquarters in the UK, three times faster than before,” claimed Mehul.
He added, “Tata Communications’ global network plays a key role in the team’s performance and their ability to react over race weekends. We also have an on-site team at the race track to meet the demands of the fast-paced race environment. During the race weekend, the on-site team is supported by our crew from across the globe.”
Challenges
Formula One races occur in very diverse environments around the globe. As of today, Tata Communications commands nearly 1 million sq. ft. of data centre co-location space across 42 locations, that certainly helps them to provide seamless connectivity.
“Connectivity plays a major role in a team’s quest to cross the finish line ahead of competition,” explained Mehul.
He further described how data flow from the race track to the factory and back is one of the most critical technology aspects for any team.
“It enables the team to make modifications throughout the race weekend as well as carry out factory-based testing.”
Tata’s global network TGB, includes one of the most advanced and largest submarine cable networks, with connectivity to over 200 countries and territories across 400 points of presence.
“The team now has secure and agile trackside connectivity regardless of race location. This partnership will also enable the team to receive data to feed into technology development without the need to be present at the race location.”
Tata also provides hosting and content delivery services to F1.com website, which is accessed by as many as tens of millions fans. Race days itself, could see demand for website access increase a hundred fold of the usual numbers, so Tata has to be able to scale bandwidth up and down according to demand.
“Our task is one of great scale, which is why we say, ‘if we can do it for Formula One, we can do it for anyone.’”
Special requirements
Mehul summarised, “The services delivered for Formula One are mission-critical and with very tight timelines.
“We need to dismantle and set-up the entire network within three days, a task that other service providers might normally take four months or more to do. We are now taking this process innovation to our mainstream customers.“
He concluded that some analysts have described this as “the Formula One halo effect”.
