user story
At the highest level of professional motor racing, CAD and high-performance workstations play a role far greater than we may imagine. John McIver went trackside at the recent Australian Grand Prix to observe the close association between the Jordan Formula 1 team and Hewlett-Packard.
Hewlett-Packard has a
sponsorship involvement with a number of Formula 1 motor-racing
teams, with the Jordan and Jaguar teams being the main
beneficiaries. Unlike the other teams, however, HP's involvement
with Jordan is more a formal business association than a
sponsorship arrangement. Jordan uses a substantial quantity of HP
equipment in its engineering operations and HP in turn provides
substantial resources to maintain that equipment.
In fact, Jordan is the only team which has a full-time employee,
provided by HP, dedicated to working with the team and travelling
with them to every race. HP believes it gains from this
arrangement by being able to test its equipment in a very
stressful and demanding 'real-world' environment. It believes the
benefit to the end user is hopefully a better product.
A Formula 1 racing team can be considered to exist in two
specific physical locations. There is the factory, where the team
is based in between racing seasons, and where all the design work
on the car takes place. There is also the team as it exists
'on-the-road' during the racing season. With a race typically
every two weeks during the season, the team as a mobile entity
needs to act as a functional unit while far removed from the
factory.
In the case of the Jordan team, its main factory is located near
the Silverstone race track in England. During our visit, the team
itself was located in Melbourne, Australia. It would be hard to
envision a more distant location from the factory than that.
Despite this substantial distance, the factory and team expect to
work closely together during the entire period of the race. This
typically occupies a few days for setting up, then two days of
formal testing and qualifying, followed by a day for the race
itself. The factory is also the location where most of the design
work is performed on the car. Car design for a new season is
expected to take around six months, usually beginning during the
latter part of the previous season.
Jordan uses Hewlett-Packard Visualize (J Class) Unix workstations
for the design task, running SDRC I-DEAS CAD/CAM software. Since
the team was formed in 1991, it has never had, or used, a
conventional drawing board. All design work for the car is done
electronically using 3D solid modelling, and this has always been
the case. Almost four dozen CAD stations are now used in the
factory for design. The team makes the maximum use of the
advantages 3D CAD can offer, having recently commissioned a large
stereolithography system for rapid creation of prototype 3D
parts. This is primarily used for building components for
aerodynamic testing, where the ability of stereolithography to
incorporate design details which would be difficult to fabricate
in other ways is seen as a major advantage. 3D models from the
CAD system are also used as the basis for FEA (Finite Element
Analysis), for component stressing and CFD (Computational Fluid
Dynamics), and for theoretical aerodynamics computer analyses. As
would be expected from its highly computer-intensive nature, the
CFD application runs as a single application on a cluster of
these workstations. The factory also acts as a data warehouse,
and has a 'Seven Post Dynamic Test Rig', of which more shortly.
At the race track, the
team will be housed in a dedicated garage area. There are usually
three cars at a meeting, one for each of the two team drivers,
plus a backup car. Computer support for the engineering side of
the Jordan team comprises six PCs. Two computers are dedicated to
each car, plus a third for the car's engine. The engines are
provided by Honda, with several Honda technicians on hand to
maintain the powerplant side of things.
The PCs are all nearly identical, each being housed in a six-foot
high, standard 19-inch equipment rack. Typically, the rack will
house a standard Hewlett-Packard PC, in a conventional desktop
case, a large colour LCD display and a colour inkjet printer. A
seventh equipment rack exists to house any ancillary equipment,
such as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and other power
conditioning hardware.
As much of the team's time is spent travelling, the use of
equipment racks helps protect the equipment in transit. LCD
displays are now used extensively as they are more robust than a
conventional monitor, and a lot smaller physically. When it comes
to sending equipment by air freight, any size and weight
advantage equates to substantial cost savings. Although the team
carries a backup car, there is no backup computer. If a system
goes down, tasks are then shared between the other five systems.
As the computers are standard desktop Hewlett-Packard PCs, the
local HP Dealer should also be able to help with support in an
emergency.
Unlike the computers back at the factory, the team computers run
Windows NT. This has been found to be more flexible and easier to
support when operating at some distance from the factory.
Applications software is generally sourced from third-parties. In
the case of data acquisition and analysis, the primary
requirement of the computers during a race weekend, Jordan uses
TAG software, developed by the supplier of its car's engine
management system. Only a small amount of custom programming is
undertaken in-house.
The cars themselves each have two computers on-board, primarily
to perform engine management and data acquisition tasks. When
undergoing maintenance in the pits, the cars are connected to a
local computer network in the team garage, with each of the two
on-board computers provided with its own IP address on the
network. The car's data acquisition system is able to record
about 130 separate data channels.
When the car is running on the track, a telemetry system
continually returns live data to the pits. This system only
returns a subset of the available data - just the most important
information. The full data set is accessed when the car returns
to the pits, where the data is downloaded in bulk to the network.
This can result in a data block of anything up to 64 megabytes.
During a race weekend, a dedicated ISDN line is permanently in
place between the factory and the team. This permits the full
facilities of the factory to be accessed at any time if required.
The team also employs a laser link at the track, between the pit
wall and the garage. During the race, the team manager will be
located on the pit wall, some 20 or 30 feet away from the garage
area where the main computer systems are. He will have a computer
at his disposal, but regulations dictate that no cable is allowed
to cross the pit road, which lies between him and the garage. In
order to meet this requirement, but still maintain a link to the
main computer network, optical (infra-red or laser) links are now
employed by many teams.
Having described what hardware is available to the team,
we can now look at the very interesting area of how it can be
used to the team's best advantage. Typically, whenever the car is
running on the circuit, the data acquisition system is operating.
After a race testing or qualifying session has been run, the team
will analyse the recorded data and usually select the best few
laps the driver was able to achieve. This information is then
immediately sent back to the factory via the ISDN link. These can
then be used as the input data to the 'Seven Post Dynamic Test
Rig', mentioned earlier.
The Seven Post Dynamic Test Rig is a testing unit, typically
comprising seven high-performance hydraulic actuators (and hence
its name). A full-size race car is attached to the rig, with one
actuator dedicated to each of its wheels and the remaining three
representing the effects of the negative lift forces generated by
the car's wings. The actuators can be computer controlled to
represent the dynamic motion, as far as the car's suspension is
concerned, of the car as it moves along a roadway.
It's perhaps important to be aware at this point of another
regulation pertaining to Grand Prix racing. Testing time during a
race is limited, and only 12 qualifying laps are permitted for
each car. It takes time to optimise a car's suspension settings
to achieve the best possible performance for a given track, and
the time available at a race is very limited. Although the Seven
Post Dynamic Test Rig is primarily a design and research tool, it
also has a considerable capability to substantially extend the
time available for suspension optimisation. The data recorded
from the car's best laps is used as input for the test rig,
representing the dynamics of a lap of the actual race track. The
test rig can then be run continually, for many hours if
necessary, driven by this data, in search of some optimum
suspension settings. It effectively gives the functional
equivalent of many test miles around a real race track. The
optimised settings can then sent from the factory back to the
track, ready for the next day's testing, or the race itself.
As a digression, it is interesting to note that the full
suspension travel of the Jordan Formula 1 car is of the order of
5 millimetres, and that the tyre deflection on the car can be
greater than this.
Finally, one of the key issues of running a successful racing
team is experience. With this in mind, all the data acquired
during a race weekend is returned to the Jordan factory and
stored on-line in a data warehouse. Historical performance data
can therefore be made immediately available to the race engineers
from the factory for any previous race, at any track, for any
previous year, should it ever be required.
