Buckle your seatbelts for high-octane Formula 1 racing success
It’s no understatement to say that McLaren Automotive’s Formula 1 team runs on data—and that for them, performance is everything.
Each of McLaren’s Formula 1 race cars carries more than 300 sensors and generates over 13,000 data points for fuel levels, tire pressure, speed, battery health and more. One car generates 1.5 terabytes of data over a race weekend, with the whole fleet generating 12 billion telemetry points during a single race season. But as McLaren’s Head of IT Infrastructure for McLaren Technology Group points out, “data is useless unless you apply some insight to it.” That’s why McLaren teams up with Splunk and Dell Technologies.
The Splunk Data-to-Everything Platform will allow McLaren to capture unstructured data from across their infrastructure, in addition to data from the Formula 1 cars. Then, Splunk’s powerful insights and machine learning capabilities will enable McLaren to turn data into action, helping them make better decisions, anticipate and address problems faster, and — ultimately — accelerate performance.
Of course, applying machine learning to massive amounts of raw data requires a huge amount of computational power and storage. But instead of just throwing more hardware at the problem, McLaren decided to take a strategic approach, making use of Dell Technologies solutions for high performance computing to provide the huge computational performance and storage capacity they needed. Even better, they were able to do it within the same footprint and with a public cloud experience delivered from their own on-premises data center.
McLaren decided to take a strategic approach, making use of Dell Technologies solutions for high performance computing to provide the huge computational performance and storage capacity they needed.
With the partnerships with Splunk and Dell, McLaren can use every piece of data to deliver insights to the driver and racing support team, enabling split-second decisions to improve performance and edge out the competition. But McLaren doesn’t stop there. They take the same technology that powers their vehicles and use it to power innovation in other industries via McLaren Applied.
According to Duncan Bradley, Health & Human Performance Business Unit Director at McLaren Applied, “In the F1 world, it’s all about maximizing race performance, but in healthcare it could be recovering from a surgical procedure, managing a disease or weight loss.”
McLaren Applied is using technology that was created and tested on the racetrack to drive better patient outcomes in stroke recovery. They actually monitor patient progress using the same smart sensors developed for their Formula 1 race cars, then apply predictive analytics to the biometric data to provide a host of winning innovations for healthcare—all deployed, secured, managed and supported by Dell Technologies.
Splunk is now teaming up with McLaren as an official McLaren Technology Partner, starting with the 2020 season. With this new partnership, McLaren is excited to continue its legacy of performance, using Dell Technologies and Splunk to bring data to every question, decision and action across its business.
- Come racing with us at conf20
- Read the McLaren case study
- Find out how Dell works with Splunk
