Formula One cars cannot run without data analytics: Alonso

There were plenty of prolonged cheers on Monday when Fernando Alonso, the two-time Formula One champion, addressed the packed audience in Cognizant’s massive hall in Chennai. But the loudest were on the two occasions when Alonso mentioned Adrian Newey, the greatest designer in F1 history, who will move from Red Bull to Alonso’s current team, Aston Martin, next year. Cognizant is Aston Martin’s technology partner, and the IT company’s employees clearly sense an opportunity to be – vicariously at least – part of podium finishes in coming times.
Newey may be a genius, and Alonso may be one of the world’s best drivers, but today, even they need all of the data analytics and technology that Cognizant brings to Aston Martin.
“Without the data, without the analysis, I think current Formula One cars cannot run,” Alonso said in an interaction with us.
In the success of a F1 car, what matters most is the aerodynamics – that’s about the way the car’s surfaces interact with the air flowing over it as it speeds around a grand prix track, braking, sliding, turning, and accelerating. Alonso says modestly that the driver probably matters no more than 10% in the success. Engine matters 30% – mostly on the straights, but aerodynamics, he says, matters 60%. Good aerodynamics helps cars go faster in the corners, and that’s what’s critical.

That is also Newey’s strength. But even Newey needs data to do what he does best. Alonso says there are 16,000 sensors in the car that collect tonnes of data during every race, which then helps fur ther improve aerodynamics. “We have data dynamics working very specifically in different parts of the corner. Normally, dictated by the ride heights of the car. We have a ground effect – where all the grip is coming from underneath. And this suction is very dependent on the ride height of the car, how the car is approaching the ground. All these things can be controlled only by data, by looking at all the sensors,” he says.
From every race to the next, F1 teams change an average of six components in the car. “So over a year, it’s more than hundred components in the car that make the car faster. There is always an improvement, an improvement driven by data analysis, data that we have also in the factory, from previous experiments and previous tests that we did,” Alonso says.
Data is also needed to make sure that a car is ready to run at full thrust as soon as the race starts – teams don’t have the luxury of warming up the engine slowly. That requires engineers to circulate hot water inside the whole system during the night. And this needs to be monitored continuously to ensure optimal temperature.
During the race, monitoring tyre temperatures has assumed huge importance ever since sensors made that possible. Alonso says there’s an optimal window of temperature, below or above which the tyre grip weakens. “Until data about tyre temperatures started coming in, we didn’t know there’s this window of operation. Once you understand that, you want to be always in that window,” he says.
Before every race, Alonso says, he has to communicate with engineers down to the last detail. “We have our performance engineer. He takes care of all the things that we can change on the steering wheel, brake balance, differential, all the sensors that we have in the car that we can control as well. And then I go to my race engineer. We talk about the setup, we talk about the tyre pressure, we talk about how to race the car in the most efficient way. I then go to the strategy engineer. He tells me at which lap we need to stop, given the life of the tyres. The relationship between the driver and the engineer is crucial. Without them, we will never be able to extract the maximum from the car,” he says.
Yet, he says, the driver is the brain of all the sensors. Drivers are sometimes able to sense things that even engineers are unable to. “The engineers then dig deeper into the data, and often eventually find that there’s been a miscalibration or something,” he says.