Can IT be glamorous? I guess it can when it’s travelling the globe and helping to make F1 racing one of the most exciting sports on the planet. Look “under the hood” of any F1 racing team and you’ll see high-performance IT processing mountains of data in an effort to make the cars go faster. You’ll see teamwork at its best, with success bred through partnership – as with Caterham F1 and Dell.
In F1 racing, you never stop learning. Teams are always striving to improve. And the amounts of data feeding into this learning process are mindboggling. Imagine: 20 gigabytes in a single race weekend from more than 150 sensors distributed across the car’s body. Then there’s the high-performance computing (HPC) environment back at the manufacturing plant performing hundreds of thousands of calculations per second as engineers simulate air flows around the vehicles.
Yet the relationship between Caterham F1 and Dell goes far beyond simply providing the kit to do all this work. It’s a partnership in the true sense of the word, where Dell is a key part of the team – coming up with innovative solutions in support of success on the track.
Be it getting a HPC environment up-and-running in less than 22 weeks. Or constructing a track-side infrastructure to withstand 40-degree heat in Abu Dhabi. Or making sure support arrives within two hours at any F1 track worldwide, Caterham F1 is finding solutions with Dell. Bill Peters, Head of IT at Caterham F1 puts it nicely: “I consider the Dell team to be part of my team.”
To hear from Bill Peters and other members of the Caterham F1 team, check out this video:
For more details on what kind of IT goes into an F1 racing team, check out the infographic below. Click on the image below to see a larger version. Otherwise, visit the Team Dell Racing website to learn more about Dell and Formula 1 racing.