McLaren Racing’s resurgence this season has been nothing short of spectacular. After years of relentless development and strategic focus, the team heads into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the season’s final race, with two drivers occupying the front row of the grid, a testament to their unwavering commitment to innovation and precision engineering. This remarkable achievement caps off a season of consistent performance gains, with McLaren steadily closing the gap to their rivals and emerging as the dominant force in Formula 1.
Sunday’s race in Abu Dhabi offers McLaren a chance to seal the constructors’ championship, a crowning achievement that would mark a fitting conclusion to their extraordinary campaign. It is not just a victory for the drivers and team but a demonstration of how cutting-edge technology and data analytics can redefine the boundaries of motorsport performance.
The race to accelerate has always been a defining mantra for McLaren, and their success this season underlines the importance of strategic partnerships and advanced analytics in their quest for supremacy. With the spotlight firmly on Yas Marina Circuit, McLaren stands poised to make history again, showcasing innovation’s power on and off the track.
Looking to data to get back to winning ways
Fifty years ago, Bruce McLaren hand-picked a small group of engineers to design and build racing cars. Today, McLaren Racing has achieved 20 Formula 1 World Championships and 188 Grand Prix victories and employs over 800 people. McLaren’s successful racing heritage has been driven by a relentless desire to innovate, and they have consistently led the way in the development of groundbreaking technologies by engaging in strategic technology partnerships to improve performance.
With over 20 race weekends in the Formula 1 calendar, each generating 1.5 TB of data, the ability to collect, process, and act on that data is crucial. The team at McLaren Racing uses the Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform to accelerate strategic decision-making both on and off the track.
“IT plays a huge role in how we operate as a standard commercial entity and how we compete,” Dan Keyworth, Director of Business Technology at McLaren Racing, says. “Everything we do across the three key verticals of design, build, and race is completely data-driven. Taking data parameters from something moving at high speed and figuring out how to engineer it to be better or go faster provides a competitive edge. Advanced analytics with Alteryx underpin this.”
Insights that help design, build, and race the car
With 80,000 components on a Formula 1 car and 90 per cent of the car changing throughout the race season, the ability to analyse effectively across the three verticals of design, build, and race is hugely important.
An average of 30 million race simulations are run to test every scenario of how each race will play out. The data to produce these simulations comes from multiple sources, including high-performance compute, the wind tunnel, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and even data on the drivers themselves. As Edward Green, who was Head of Commercial Technology at McLaren Racing Until July this year, explains, “Alteryx allows the fast combination and correlation of those data sets so the teams can focus on what changes they can make that will improve performance iteratively across the course of the season.”
In the production phase, data on each car part is generated from the McLaren factory floor or multiple external suppliers. The data is often in differing formats, making it challenging to understand and track costs. Alteryx automates the collection and processing of these varied data sets to accurately track production inventory and part performance.
Operating under a cost cap does restrict the decision to move forward with the production of a part. To help inform build decisions, the McLaren team simulates the part virtually and uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model the airflow through a virtual part of a car. The Formula 1 governing body regulates CFD run times, so this process must be as efficient as possible. If a part passes these testing processes, McLaren will produce it and put it into the wind tunnel phase for more testing. Yet more data is generated, and if the part performs well in testing, the decision will be made to manufacture.
“On a race weekend, the data collected from that part will be combined with the other sensor parameters to test how it performed at scale,” Green says. “With Alteryx, we can combine the physical, virtual, and race world data to create optimal efficiency and build the most performant race car possible.”
At the start of a race weekend, each race car has 300 telemetry sensors onboard, generating 100,000 information parameters, including engine levels, fuel capacity, temperature, or even the amount of G-force the drivers will feel going into corners. This data is processed trackside using Alteryx and surfaced in real-time to the driver engineers (speaking directly to the driver) and to the pit wall, where the leadership and race strategy teams sit. Allowing this data to flow seamlessly enables near real-time decision-making from a team that continues to challenge for race victories.
The data analysis does not stop at the track. There are 30 people based at the McLaren Racing HQ in Surrey, England, performing more analysis on parts tested in the practice races on the Friday before race day and correlating this with the data collected during digital testing of the car. The McLaren team uses aero model correlation to analyse the delta between how a part performed on the track versus how it was expected to perform. Decisions are then made on the level of trackside tuning to get the best performance from a part.
When operating under a stringent cost cap, every opportunity to control operating costs and streamline efficiencies is crucial. Keyworth is particularly impressed with the predictive analytics capabilities in Alteryx. “We can use the analytics tools to form a predictive picture of how much attrition we are likely to incur under certain conditions or on certain types of tracks. The insight is then used to decide how many spares to manufacture. Rather than go and manufacture ten, we can build what we are likely to use, which is also important from a sustainability perspective.”
Advanced analytics driving a new era of racing
From 2021, all Formula 1 teams will operate under a strict budget cap set at $135M until 2025, enforced by the governing body for world motorsport, the FIA. Such changes tend to either challenge organisations or bring out a competitive edge. For McLaren, the budget cap was an opportunity to assess innovative technologies that would help them control operating costs while driving performance enhancements.
Green saw the potential for the Alteryx Platform to consolidate data from multiple disparate sources and enable data-led decision-making at scale. “My job is to provide IT tools and platforms that make our business more efficient. By implementing a low-code analytics platform, we can free all our business users from the pain of data-wrangling and enable them to focus on outputs that drive our ultimate goal of winning races.”
“What impressed me with Alteryx was the speed of deployment and the ‘bring your own data’ upskilling model,” says Green. “Instead of sitting in hours of workshops working on dummy data, our teams could show up with live scenarios and test the capabilities of the Platform straight away.”
The co-piloting method of upskilling puts the technology into the hands of users early on. With the support of the Alteryx solutions engineers, it was easy to identify use cases across the McLaren Racing business functions. The code-friendly interface allowed deployment into the digital transformation team, marketing, software and IT, and aerodynamics.
“Alteryx is changing mindsets around how people use data to solve problems. With the implications of the cost-cap, this change is super important,” says Green.
Next stop: optimising beyond the grid
The capabilities of Alteryx go beyond the sport of motor racing, and McLaren is also using the Alteryx Platform to enhance efficiencies and strengthen operational insights in the finance and marketing departments.
Formula 1 fans are renowned for being the most loyal and passionate in the sports industry. Alteryx’s geospatial capabilities provide a deeper understanding of fan data. The marketing teams can create new engagement opportunities by correlating fan and lifestyle partner location data.
“If a lifestyle partner has a location in a city which happens to be near where many of our fans are based, we may decide to hold an event at that facility,” explains Keyworth. “It is meaningful to be able to innovate and bring our fans closer to the sport, especially in the wake of a global pandemic.”
For their finance teams, the Alteryx Platform is creating deeper alignments with the business from a regulatory and commercial point of view. “We are a standard commercial entity heavily driven by financial and legal processes, and there is a lot of data involved in all of those things,” says Keyworth. “Alteryx not only has a large customer base in the financial industry but also a raft of strategic partners who can assist with specific financial problems. We are excited to see the Alteryx capabilities continue strengthening alignment and agility across the McLaren Racing organisation.”
