Auto Racing by Numbers

"Mechanized racing events, racecars, motorcycles, speed boats, and so on are driven by technology to a stunning level," explains Dominic Dobson, former racecar driver and now CEO of Motion Research. "In these mechanized sports, the major costs are in capital equipment and easily into the tens of millions. This is what's driving the extreme use of technologyto decrease the time to analyze data, to therefore increase the competitive advantage, as well as to increase the fan's and sponsor's experience."

In the early 1990s fans could rent "pager" devices at Indy 500 events and receive continuous lap-time updates. Today, you can rent small video devices similar to a Game Boy and pick up the real-time camera feeds from any of the live cameras positioned around the track and in the pit areas. The popular racers will have cameras mounted in the vehicle's interior and even have cameras mounted on helmets. The fans at the event are now "in the driver's seat" (visually, at least) and can control which car and which video stream they want to observe.

The amount of technology and data traffic now in use by racing teams is astounding. A cadre of vehicle-mounted sensors stream channels of data back to pit crews in real time. Crew members are in constant touch with a car's engine temperature, RPM, brake pressure, ride height, steering, and tire pressures to name just a few. The instant the car rolls into the pit, the crew knows exactly the status of the vehicle and what changes are needed.

With the exception of NASCAR events (which have historically precluded the use of remote, real-time vehicle monitoring), all of a vehicle's data is collected and analyzed in the pit area. Questions such as the following can be answered as the race is in progress:

• Did the new synthetic oil have the desired reduction in engine temperature?

• How many rotations has the left-front tire gone through and is it time to resurface or replace it?

• Is there a relationship between time of day and this racer's success rate with the higher-octane fuel?

Data-Laden Cars

Much of the same data is actually being collected today by commercially available automobiles. As a vehicle owner, when you take your car in for service, special computers and interfaces absorb that data to help diagnose problems. It's not that the auto industry is trying to hide this data from you, the owner of the vehicle. Rather, it just has not been historically practical to expose the data to end users. As a driver, trying to monitor a lot of data as you are driving can be distracting as well.

There are some end-user devices available for a few hundred dollars, such as the EZ-Scan 6000 from AutoXray, that allow at-home vehicle diagnosis. These PDA-like devices plug into the same under-the-hood connector that the repair shop uses to access all of your car's runtime metrics and history.

Looking ahead in time, your vehicle may be wirelessly enabled (using Bluetooth, 802.11b, or both) and its runtime data will be made available to you via a Web browser interface, accessed by a nearby PDA or laptop. Some of the information may be useful to you (various fuel-efficiency metrics, for example). However, data locked up in the vehicles onboard computing system could be far more valuable to the manufacturer.

The manufacturer, for example, could frequently get real data regarding the type of driving conditions (as evidenced by various speeds and brakings), typical amount of idling time, typical warm-up time, frequency of trips during rain, hours driven when the temperature is below freezing, and so on. Such data could have monumental value to the manufacturer who is desperate to know details of product use for future competitive improvement opportunities. As we move toward greater product customization enabled by Inescapable Data, the vehicles we buy will fit us better because they and their developers will know us better.

Incidentally, who owns data collected by your car? Is how you drive and take care of your car your dirty little secret? Or, does the next buyer have some entitlement to that data? Currently, your car has an odometer. Both the manufacturer and federal regulators have gone through some trouble to ensure that it is accurate and tamperproof. Is that data as valuable to the prospective used-car buyers as excessive braking habits, excessive vehicle loading, or unsafe turning speeds? If you bought a car from a supposed little old lady with mild driving habits, would you not want proof and assurance of the actual driving patterns? When you buy a mutual fund, do you not look closely at the fund's history and various managers' performance? Inescapable Data allows our more sophisticated devices to carry with them rich histories of their travels and usage patterns...and that data is available to be exploited.

"The car racing business is truly a business, and everything about the operations side is easily as sophisticated as any other business back end," explains Dobson. "Building and maintaining race cars is exceedingly expensive. We RFID tag our costly pieces and track inventory with meticulous scrutiny and we have direct real-time connections to the engineering teams of our sponsors. We may not appear like Wal-Mart from the spectator view, but behind the scenes we have the same real issues and we're just as driven by efficiency as any other business." Dobson knows of no other sport where the collection and redistribution of data is so complete. The racing industry was born as a result of technology and will drive technology to advance. "At the heart of racing is data, and exploitation of the this data builds the winners."