An unsung hero of Caterham F1 team

The Caterham F1 team’s performance analysts look at the data coming from the car at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Credit: Dell If you had to make a list of all the environments where you’d rather not use your laptop, it’s a fair bet it would look something like this: • Really hot places • Really cold places • Very dusty or sandy locations • Anywhere near excessive vibration The problem if you do any sort of engineering job for the Caterham F1 team at a grand prix is that this list pretty much covers every single location of the 19 races that the Formula 1TM calendar visits throughout the year. Walk through Caterham’s Leafield factory in the United Kingdom or round the team’s garage at a Grand Prix, and you will see a familiar piece of equipment. Mostly black, fairly sturdy in size and usually being inspected by a very clever engineer, it is the Dell Precision mobile workstation. It is not an exaggeration to say that this piece of equipment is one of the unsung heroes of this particular Formula 1TM team. Graphics and design The Precision’s ability to be able to deal with large CAD files while offering state-of-the-art graphical performance makes it an ideal candidate to be used in the design stages of the car. “Normally I’ll use mine for looking at lightweight CAD files of the whole car,” says Lewis Butler, the team’s chief engineer. “It’s handy because if there are any issues with how parts fit together on any new updates we’ve sent to the track, for example, I can be at the factory and speaking to someone at the circuit, quickly bring up the part in question on the Precision and look at it in quite a bit of detail in order to help them out.” Performance At the factory, the Precision enables other critical work to be performed once the car has been designed – notably in aerodynamics, the most important area of Formula 1 for teams to understand. “I’m looking at all sorts of things each day from CAD geometry to CFD post-processing, as well as track data and lots of wind tunnel results,” senior aerodynamicist Dominic Turner explains. “The Precision can do lots of different tasks at the same time, from the very heavy CAD graphics to all the data analysis.” For aerodynamicists like Turner, who spend time at the wind tunnel 20 miles away from the factory, having a computer with such power that’s portable is invaluable to their roles. The Caterham F1 Team’s performance analysts, who look at the data coming off the car at the track, also need to be able to deal with huge files. “We’re processing lots of data that gets sent to the factory from the track during a race weekend, as well as doing quite a lot of code development work,” explains junior performance analyst Alex Holyoake. “I’ve usually got between ten and 20 applications running at any one time, and a lot of those are pretty data-intensive, so the Precision is amazing for what we have to do.” Durability For all its handiness at the factory, it’s trackside where the Precision really comes into its own. Formula 1TM circuits are harsh environments with extreme temperatures and conditions. Anyone who’s ever been near an F1 car when it’s fired up will attest to the ferocity of the shuddering and decibels coming from it. The Precision’s hard drives contain no moving parts and vibrations coming from a Formula 1TM car are not a problem to deal with. Speak to anyone who works with a Precision on the Caterham F1 team and he or she will marvel at the speed with which it operates. Antony Smith, the team’s senior IT engineer, reveals, “The thing for the engineers is that they’ve got to be able to manipulate data and jump around on lots of files at once, and the Precision is perfect for that. They’ve got lots of memory and bandwidth and they’ve got good graphical performance. That’s what you need to operate the amount of software we’ve got at Caterham.”