Survival strategy

Why data and simulation are motorsport’s best friends

- DANNY NOWLAN

To say motor racing has a Jekyll and Hyde relationship with technology is an understatement. When things get tough, the technology that exists is always the first scapegoat for why things have gone awry. A recent example of this has been the banning of chassis data downloading during the races as V8 Supercars came out of Covid-19 hibernation.

However, this attitude has zero basis in fact and, as we shall see, not only is data acquisition and simulation motorsport’s best friend, it is critical to a level playing field.

First though, we need to call out the elephant in the room that inspired this article in the first place. I recoiled in horror when I learnt that when V8 Supercars resumed at Eastern Creek on June 25-26, chassis downloading for the races would not be permitted. Due to cost-cutting and ‘making the show more interesting’, they said.

Scarier was the gleesome commentators showed at this. One, who shall remain nameless, said the fans don’t care about 500 maths channels. All this does is showcase motor racing’s resident technophobia that, left unchecked, will lead us to our end.

The nail here is that while race fans may not care about 500 maths channels, they do care about their teams competing on a level playing field, and nothing delivers this better than data and simulation.

To illustrate this, let me draw on a correlation example I present at the ChassisSim Bootcamp. This is actual vs simulated data for a Supercar category of vehicle and is presented in Figure 1.