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The 2023 Formula 1 season is starting soon! Alteryx’s excitement for the new season and our growing relationship with the McLaren Formula 1 team can’t be contained!
McLaren is seeing the value of Alteryx from the factory to social media and in the IT team. McLaren’s IT team is a lean team who really appreciated the ease of getting users up and running with Alteryx. I’m sure, like many of you, at first, the McLaren Data Science team had previous ways of doing things, but with the ease of use, the speed, and the automation capabilities, they soon embraced Alteryx.
As Alteryx continues to partner with McLaren to help them win a Formula 1 World Championship, we want to share these stories with you. As part of the continuing story, Alteryx created a wonderful new video featuring Jess Tomkins (who I interviewed on the Alter-Everything Podcast) on how Alteryx provides value for the McLaren Formula 1 team across the organization.
Continue on to read about two specific use cases on how McLaren uses Alteryx:
Formula 1 is unlike any other sport when it comes to technology, speed, organization, research, development, and of course, money. Teams like McLaren have to find the best ways to analyze data quickly to design parts, build simulations, testing, and even understand their fans at breakneck speeds.
I’ll give you two examples of how McLaren uses Alteryx that blow my mind, and I hope it blows your mind as well.
How McLaren uses Alteryx for race weekend
Imagine you have to find .234 seconds of increased speed in your car in order to go from 10th place to 1st place. You can’t put it on your driver since they are already pushing the car to the limit and are begging for more, so you have to rely on your engineers to make adjustments to the car to find the speed. How will you find the speed? This is the situation teams like McLaren face all season. In order for McLaren to solve this minute (but massive) problem, they must use data.
Thursday and Friday of race week are packed with understanding the track and performance of the car. Through these two days, the team is analyzing thousands of data points, running 300 million race simulations, and looking at historical data of the track and past car performance to make the necessary adjustments to get the peak performance out of the car.
The car is set up with 300 sensors looking at 100,000 parameters that include everything from car ride height to gear changes. This data is looked at through McLaren’s decision making support tools. Alteryx is a part of these support tools and is used to bring data together to analyze track historical data as well as race simulation data to empower race Engineers to see how track corners have performed in the past. The team can then work with car setups in the turn, find the best one, and communicate with the drivers (yes, drivers have to set up the car for each turn).
Along with the race engineers at the track, McLaren engineers pour through the data on Thursday and Friday back at McLaren’s mission control in Woking, England. The team works together to analyze the 300 million simulations to choose the right way to set up the car and create the race strategies to give them the best chance to win.
Testing and Understanding Car Parts
The race weekend use cases can show off what these teams have to do in such a short amount of time to come up with a winning strategy. However, I think the more amazing piece of McLaren is how quickly they have to design, test, and build parts. Alteryx allows McLaren to move through these processes to get the part onto the car much more efficiently than if they didn’t have Alteryx.
Let’s take an aerodynamic part as an example. The part begins at the design phase, where engineers design these parts and move them to a CFD cluster. Once the part is tested in the virtual environment, the part is created in 3D at 60% scale and tested in the wind tunnel. The CFD cluster and wind tunnel time are restricted for each team by the FIA. This means they need to get these tests completed quickly and efficiently. Alteryx gives McLaren the power to correlate all this testing data and helps cut down on testing time and move parts through to production much more quickly.
Just like many of you may have to do in your companies, McLaren must understand how long a part is going to take to manufacture before they move it to production. Alteryx brings all the essential elements of the parts data together to help McLaren understand the effort. McLaren can look at the number of people it takes to build the part, the time it takes to build the part, the material costs to build the part, etc. By bringing all the data together and giving McLaren a full picture of the part, they can manage and prioritize the part in their production and cost schedules. Oh, and did I mention that they will change over 80% of parts a year on the car? That is a tremendous amount of time and decisions that have to be packed into not a year but in a 10-month season!
The new car and season for 2023 will bring the McLaren Formula 1 team many challenges, and we hope that Alteryx can assist the team with making great decisions both on and off the track and continue the push to win a Formula 1 World Championship.
