Autonomous Car Racing—A paradox, a sharp turn or the final lap of racing?

As bizarre and as bold it may sound, the idea of a racecar without a driver is a cockpit full of mystery, incremental innovations, hurdles and dilemma-packed scenarios. How does this even work? Let’s warm up this engine a bit

- Pratima H

What’s the most fascinating part about F1 racing cars? That they can—in theory, so far—drive upside down for a few seconds? That the driver wears two suits and still loses a couple of kgs due to the extreme heat inside? That back then, in 1950s, safety was all about wearing a cloth-helmet and crossing your fingers that you would come out of the race without a scratch? That the most important part of a driver’s training— which, by the way, is years and years—is not the driving but the braking?

How about this? The longest pit-stop time recorded has been a good 43 hours—yeah, it took that many hours to dislodge the right wheel from a big team’s car. Sounds weird in an age where we talk of 1.82 seconds when we think of the best pit-stop time. But it is also a reminder that even the most record-breaking human feats start from a humble lane before they go on to smash scoreboards.

Something that’s now happening with autonomous car racing. We seem to have crossed the Woodcote (the first corner that drivers tackled in the very first F1 race many many decades back). Let’s see how far we are from the ensuing turns. It’s a good time to check how tricky the Copse, the Maggots, and the Club are going to be on this strange, but mind-bending, racecourse. More so, as this race is not about a driver’s dexterity to brake when required, but of data to accelerate—and in all directions.

Software in the Driving Seat

An autonomous race car is like any other racecar—except the human factor is not sitting inside the cockpit, but outside. Here, the driver is not a human head but a nerve-centre of sensors, wires, algorithms and Machine Learning marvels.