Guennadi MoukineThere is no point collecting data if it can’t be easily accessed or used when needed. The 23Red Racing Supercars team, which recently formed a technology partnership with the global cyber protection firm Acronis, deals with large amounts of telemetry, log files, design, and parts filing data, and it chose Acronis to protect and simplify its data management.
23Red Racing, just like other teams in the competition, stores data from every race and uses it to prepare for each race and also to design next season’s car. This includes live feeds from the car, extensive data logs that are stored by the car’s computer system and downloaded after each race and photo and video footage. After it’s stored, it needs to be accessed by multiple engineers at the same time, who use the file storage in a database type of way, when looking for the required bits of information.
This was demonstrated perfectly at the Barbagallo Raceway, where the team took part in the 2018 Perth SuperSprint. The most important information was the tyre pressure and temperature. “The log files show all the information we need,” Dexter Chiew, the team’s racing engineer said. “We see what adjustments we need to make to set tyre pressure, and how to start the race — what temperature and pressure the tyres have to be at.”
It’s the data from the previous years collected on the same track, as well as fresh data collected during the weekend, that helps them to do that. Because of that, data loss is highly undesirable because it negatively affects the team’s chances on the track.
“Data loss means we don’t have the required data to prepare for the next round. We need last year’s data to prepare for this year’s race and to make changes for the next year. Data is specific to each track. It’s very important. Losing data is not an option,” Chiew concluded.
23Red Racing partnered with Acronis to simplify data management by storing data in a secure cloud-based environment and making it easily accessible at the track and in the factory.
Fraser Masefield
