The Spy in the Car

Mika Hakkinen's Mclaren started showing signs of trouble around lap 47, after he had his second pit-stop for the Hungarian Grand Prix. Reports said it might have been a damaged front shock absorber. Others spectulated it may be a gear missing. Which ever way, Hakkinen's car was malfunctioning, and McLaren could not tell why. How come? One of Formula One’s greatest mysteries is telemetry. This is the system used to measure various parameters within the car, whether it’s the chassis’ reactions, the engine’s performance or various other ancillaries. This information is downloaded each time the car completes a lap, the data then being shown on screens which are constantly monitored by data analysis engineers. It allows the team’s race engineers to see what is going on within the car, how the car reacts to changes that they might make to the engine or the chassis. They can tell if there is a problem with the engine, or the chassis. And many times, they know these problems before the driver does. They can compare their two drivers around the same lap, where one driver might be making up time on the other, whether one driver puts more load on the suspension than the other at various points during the lap, and which system is the quicker. In short, telemetry allows the team to spy on the driver, to back up his comments about the car with hard and fast information, and to make the car as quick as it can possibly be. The information is collected by some 30 or 40 sensors placed around the car although there are many other mini-computers which also measure parameters on the car and send back their own information. These, for instance, can measure fuel consumption, they can adjust the fuel management, even measure fuel consumption between two points on the track. In short, while there may be 30 or 40 sensors, up to 100 different parameters may be measured. There are three basic stages in telemetry. The first is the collection of data; it can come from the chassis, for instance. Here, suspension travel and load may be measured, aerodynamic load can also be measured, the temperature of the shock absorbers recorded and weight distribution can also be monitored. The engine is seething with sensors: pressures, temperatures, loads again, all faithfully recorded and downloaded to the pits. And finally the electronic side is also downloaded. Information from all sources is collected in the data acquisition box, ready to be downloaded. The second stage is for that information to be transferred to the pits, either by cable when the car is in the pits, or by high frequency radio link. Two megabytes of information can be downloaded in a couple of seconds on each lap, and the FIA closely controls the amount of information that is downloaded - teams are only allowed to download once a lap. Even this poses its own problems: certain systems might be directional, so that they can only download at one point, while multi-directional systems are somewhat slower in downloading their information. There is then a third stage: the actual interpretation or decoding of the groups of numbers which are downloaded into readable information - in most cases, graphs on monitors. It has to be transferred into information that can be monitored, and this is by no means a simple task, depending on format. And it has to involve many different colours and even systems for activating alarms to alert the engineers should something fail on the car. The information is then transferred to different computers placed in the rear of the garages where they are constantly monitored by the team’s data analysis engineers. There are monitors for electronics, for the chassis, and a further for the engine. Each screen in scrutinised by data analysis engineers whenever the car is running, and later in the day, those same engineers will seek further methods to improve the car from the information provided by their basic parameters. They work closely together, and can simulate and compare, so that theoretical settings can be utilised and their advantages analysed. Obviously not all the information can be monitored, so the telemetry immediately monitored has to be selective, choosing the most important information at that time. And the engineers monitoring the information have to know what to look out for, remembering the basic remit of their job: to make the car go faster. They therefore seek to report on any information they can find that will improve the car’s performance. This information is also available to the drivers, during practice or qualifying sessions, if they need it. Sitting in their cars, they can ask to see graphs on their own monitors, and their data analysis engineers can then download those graphs so that they can make comparisons, for example, between the engine revs on certain laps, or the suspension movement comparing one setting with another. So, with so much data pouring to the pits, how come McLaren could not find the problem in Hakkinen's car during last Sunday's Hungarian Gran Prix? Well, telemetry has advanced enormously in recent years, and teams admit that it would take an age to monitor all the information that is available. Much of it is simply ignored, and though it is always there should it be needed, it is not always a very easy - or quick - task to pinpoint the cause of trouble in the car. So either McLaren were lost in numbers, or they just don't want to tell us what it is; whatever they will find in those megabytes of graphs and charts, we, the public, will never have the chance to see. Because, after all, telemetry - like any typical spy - is still a team's biggest secret.

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