The other day I was in a Manhattan library wearing the t-shirt of my undergrad school. As luck would have it someone noticed it. She was from the same school - her Ph.D. was in mechanical engineering - and a most interesting conversation followed. It turns out she happens to work on suspensions for one of the more famous Formula One teams.
Formula One may be the most form of auto racing. Four wheels hanging out in the breeze and an open cockpit, its roots go back to Grand Prix racing about ninety years ago. After WWII it was associated with some of the most famous car makers and drivers. It has enormous popularly worldwide with something like a half billion people following any given race and over 300 million fans who follow most of the season. Good drivers make in the eight figures and some have career earning exceeding a billion dollars. A massively important form of sports entertainment larger than the NBA and NFL combined.
F-1 technology side has made huge advances over the years. Thanks to tire, suspension and aerodynamic advances the cars can corner with lateral accelerations over six times that of gravity. That's more than an astronaut experiences during re-entry and on par with the limits of a jet fighter. Top speeds are on the order of 240 miles per hour on relatively twisty tracks. Teams spend a lot of money - she said an average team might have 100 engineers, technicians, physicists and mathematicians - over a third with Ph.Ds. - working on every little bit of vehicle performance. Cars get much better during the racing season not making improvements every race means almost certain failure. She said a few American universities major talent suppliers - notably Caltech and MIT - but England is the real ground zero for car design and tuning talent from a half dozen schools.
So there's this question. How much success is the driver and how much is the car? The feeling is the driver, even though operating a car under such conditions probably is an athletic performance, is less important than the car. Put a great driver in a lesser car and they might improve the performance of the car a bit, but they'll never win. A lesser driver in a great car probably won't win, but will place much higher one might expect. But there's a human story and sport is all about human performance. You probably won't see much interest in autonomous cars zipping around a circuit even though they might outperform humans.
But there's another story. The master designers and aerodynamics people are very important, but there are enough very good ones and enough viable approaches that the top half dozen teams are on fairly equal footing. the most important person on the team, and sometimes it is two people, is the strategist - usually a mathematician or physicist.
The cars are rich data sources sending hundreds of channels of telemetry for analysis giving the state of almost anything you can image about the car. Additionally tracks, weather, cars, tires, competition and tactics and strategy are all modeled ahead of time. Variables are thrown into the mix that makes the strategist even more important. Tires are a good example. There are three levels of grip... the grippiest tires wear very quickly, the least grippy more slowly. You have to use at least two during a race meaning a pit stop with a tire change is necessary. Additionally there are two types of rain tires. It's an exercise in modeling and game theory sorting out how this will play out. The most consistent factor in winning races appears to be the strategist. Three of the top ten are women.
As the sport changes to stay relevant hardcore fans are being challenged to examine some of the race data during the race .. there's thought about making it part of the race itself, but keeping the competition level high and the fans engaged is the key point. One thing she mentioned is heart rate and blood pressure telemetry from the pit chief as a car comes into the pits at 70mph stopping a few inches away as he has a few seconds to make the swap.
There are a lot of interesting things you can say about this type of data and its analysis. The fact that some believe understanding it is more important than the driver speaks volumes. Some of the teams monetize this by letting their largest sponsors in on their technics of dealing with rapid change and strategy and tactics. A few of the analysts have been loaned to these sponsors for non-trivial sums to look into their businesses.
It makes you wonder about other sports. It would be interesting to create a plot with understanding of athletic performance (including psychological elements) along one axis and understanding of strategy along the other. Understanding hydrodynamics created a revolution in swimming along the first. A deep data and model driven understanding of strategy has driven Formula One performance along the second. How much potential does a given sport have?
Steve, very interesting post. I found this video interview of a F1 strategy engineer that illuminates many of the points you make. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7EEBE-2Wf4
My local baseball team SF Giants has been terrible the last two years and now has a new GM who's largely data-driven. He's just hired a new "Coordinator of Pitching Analysis" from baseball consulting firm Driveline who's pitch is, "Hacking the Kinetic Chain". The Giants had been run by an "old boys network" for years, and were known to be among the least analytical of teams. Now that's changing. Analytics wins games.
Posted by: Brian | 01/15/2019 at 02:51 PM