Hardest drive of all

Electronics Times, May 8, 2000

Luke Collins goes behind the scenes at McLaren

There's only one thing you need to know about McLaren's Formula 1 team: the people who work there polish under things as a matter of course.

A visit to the headquarters of McLaren International, the Formula 1 (F1) racing arm of the TAG McLaren Group, is like a day out at an Extreme Engineering Theme Park, full of unlikely feats of engineering prowess. But despite the pressure of F1 racing, which sees the team take three drivers, four cars, 29 tonnes of equipment and 80 people to 17 races on five continents in nine months, the people who make it happen are pretty calm. Perhaps it's the polishing that does it.

McLaren fields the West McLaren Mercedes team, which had a spectacular one-two win in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone a couple of weeks ago. Since the company was founded as Bruce McLaren Motor Racing in 1963 it has contested 497 Grand Prix, won 125 (as of 26/4), taken eight Constructors World Championships and 11 Drivers World Championships. And though McLaren needs drivers like David Coulthard and Mika Hakkinen to get the cars round the tracks, as a racing team "we're more interested in the car than the driver."

Producing the cars is where the extreme engineering comes in. These cars will accelerate from 0 to 62mph in 2.3s, and from 0 to 124mph in 5s. The cars weigh 600kg at the end of a race including the driver, and 100kg of that is the engine. The engines are $500,000 a piece and run for around 500km - which is why they take ten to a race.

Design of the cars starts in August each year. In December the cars are being tested and in February they are `finalised'. By March, they're racing. In the few months between concept and reality, the team will design, draw, make and fit 5000 components. The carry-over of parts from year to year is estimated to be about 5 to 8% of the total. And during a racing season the car will change a further 75%, with perhaps eight or nine chassis variants. Last season 32 different nose sections were used.

Some of the parts such as the `tub', or main structure of the car, can take up to 800 man-hours to lay up in the in-house composites shop. The undertray, crucial to the car's aerodynamics and its ability to meet race rules, takes 100 man-hours to produce. Last year McLaren made 85 of them.

With this sort of lead time in the schedule and races just two weeks apart, speed of implementation from design revision to finished car becomes as critical as the car's speed off the grid. McLaren uses a big network of Sun workstations and servers to support its fast-turn engineering efforts.

Paddy Lowe, head of vehicle technology at McLaren, said: "We are looking for more [computing] power, we are looking to save people time so they can be doing something else."

McLaren uses Sun workstations for everything from basic design to trackside monitoring and analysis. Adrian Newey, who designs the McLaren cars, stills schemes his ideas on paper at a drawing board. But when he is happy with those paper drawings they are transferred in to a cadcam system for analysis and development.

The company uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to test the aerodynamics of the car, to ensure its design remains within the ruling body's specs and so that they can simulate the car's action before the full-scale car is built. The team has done a CFD analysis of the whole car - which yielded a set of around one and a half million cells which had to be mapped before the analysis could start. The data set for that CFD run reached 1Gbyte.

At trackside, the use of two-way telemetry has been banned since 1993, so the team is relegated to looking at the data which comes back from the car and talking to the driver about it over the headset radio. In the early nineties, the team could pretty much drive the car from the garage, adjusting its ride height, programming gear changes and managing traction control and launch devices remotely.

With that gone, trackside analysis becomes more important and McLaren now takes eight workstations to a race, to monitor 80 sensors in the car and break down the 1 to 2Mbyte of data the car spews out each lap into information which will help the engineers and drivers make the cars go faster. Over a season the team collects 25Gbyte of data.

The team even tried monitoring the stress of its drivers, wiring them up to read their alpha brain waves. The idea was to use a technique called autogenics, a form of self-hypnosis, to teach the drivers to calm themselves before the start of a race. According to Lowe, though, the idea failed.

"We measured both David and Mika [at rest] and they were very calm," he said. "But when they were put in a car they went off the scale of highs and lows." At the flag drop in a F1 race, Lowe says the drivers' heart rates can be up to 180 beats per minute. There's not much you can do to ameliorate that level of alertness.

Sun is one of McLaren's longest standing partners, second only to aftershave maker Hugo Boss. Lowe rates Sun for its consistency and for giving McLaren early access to upcoming technologies which may give it a racing edge. He gives the example of having taken on an early processor prototype for which Sun claimed a 25% improvement in performance: "We tried it, it worked and that cut a CFD run from four days to three."