LG Mobile Phones and the Data Processing of F1™

By Tom Clarkson

Data is the dictionary of Formula One™ and collecting that data requires sophisticated technology. As the sport has become more high tech, we’ve become increasingly reliant on data to enlighten us and clarify aspects of the sport that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

It’s no longer enough to show television viewers a picture of the race leader and give them a bit of commentary; they want to know everything that’s going on behind the scenes. G-forces, engine revs, KERS deployments, split times and speeds have become de rigueur in recent years, and there is constant pressure on Formula One Management Limited (FOM) to find fresh, innovative data with which to dazzle the watching world. As the Official Data Processor of Formula 1™ LG is identified and credited on the official live timing service at Formula One™ events and in the associated timing and data TV graphics.

The same is true of the world of consumer electronics, and especially mobile phones. No longer is it enough for a consumer to have a mobile phone that just lets them make calls. Today’s tech savvy consumers want to be able to download all kinds of data while on the move such as e-mail, text messages, and even live F1™ timing data.

There are two main sources of data in F1™ - the teams and Formula One Management.

For the teams, each car carries more than 100 telemetry sensors which relay technical information back to the pits in real time for engineers to analyse. This data is relayed through an antennae system much like that in a LG phone. The second source of data obtained from an F1™ car is the identification transponder provided by FOM that is positioned between the car’s front wheels.

One of the first places of technological connection I discovered between FOM’s timing data system and LG mobile phones involves GPS. F1™, for example, uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) to provide it with an accurate time of day at every racetrack around the world. Similarly, a GPS system now comes as standard on almost all LG mobile phones.

The timing loops are at the heart of the FOM data collection because, among other things, they generate split times and an overall lap time for each car. As the cars travel around the track at speeds in excess of 200 km/h these transponders trigger the 12 timing loops around the track. The information is then sent back to the FOM Technical Centre via 35 kilometres of fibre optic cable that is laid prior to each race. The data is processed to become what has become to be known as ‘dictionary data’.

In F1™ cars, the transponder is a communications device communicating with loops that are like cell sites connected to FOM’s network in the same way your LG mobile phone communicates with cell sites that are connected to mobile phone networks.

And like LG’s mobile phones, the F1™ car team data must be accurately transferred and done so at extremely high rates. It must also be transferred securely as this data is highly sensitive and could provide top secret information if it got into another team’s hands.

In addition to using the timing sensors to measure split times and lap times, they also serve other purposes. Each time a car crosses the start/finish line the sensors trigger the lap counter. The Technical Centre also uses the timing information to ascertain speed trap figures because the frontal area of the cars is too small for a radar gun to be reliable. Speeds are worked out by measuring the time taken for a car to travel from one sensor to the next sensor and then doing a simple conversion into kilometres per hour.

Like the F1™ timing system data can be utilised for various purposes, LG mobile phones are also multi-functional. For example, they can also be used for identifying a person’s location as the cellular network tracks the phone’s movement from zone to zone. This location data can be used with software on the phone to ‘geo-tag’ various locations that you wish to remember for future visits.

During a race there are more than 10,000 loop passings which account for much of the 2.5G of data that is collected, processed and stored at a grand prix. With so much information being generated in a short space of time, the need for robust and reliable equipment is paramount. FOM uses highly ruggedised machines to minimise the chances of failure, and all new systems have to have been tested for six months prior to inclusion in a race broadcast.

This is another parallel that can be drawn with LG, which ruggedizes all of its products before releasing them for sale. Notebook computers, which are now becoming wirelessly enabled much like the F1 cars, are dropped onto the floor from 2.5 feet at LG’s test facility, and the keys on the keyboard are pressed 8 million times to ensure that they still function. They’d be fit for purpose in F1™, we’re sure you’d agree!

The timing system around the track is not the only area of technological sophistication. Once the data gets back to the Technical Centre it must be processed. Some very extensive computer systems, and advanced software algorithms are in place to transpose this raw data into the timing data. FOM does not only have systems to process the data, they also work to make sure that the graphical representation of that data is very user viewer friendly. Again we see several parallels with LG mobile phones which use very sophisticated software to take all the data that an LG phone captures and turn that into a useable form on the phone screen.

As you’d expect of a sport that’s so reliant on time, there is a back-up system should one of the timing loops fail – as was the case during qualifying for the FORMULA 1 ING MAGYAR NAGYDIJ 2009 (Budapest) earlier this year. A mechanical problem with a connector on the Hungaroring’s start-finish straight resulted in the timing system going down with five minutes of Q3 remaining, yet everyone remained calm in the Technical Centre, where the manual back-up system was seamlessly deployed.

In this instance lap times were recorded using a light beam on the start-finish straight. Whenever a car broke the beam, it was identified by a technician in the Technical Centre and a back-up camera shooting at 10,000th of a second was used for verification purposes. Within a couple of minutes of the session ending, the grid order was announced and FOM’s back-up timing system was widely applauded.

“The failure couldn’t have happened at a worse time for us,” says Andrew James, the technical division head of the FOM Technical Centre. “Five minutes earlier and we would seamlessly have switched to the back-up system; as it was, the system failed just as everyone wanted the results and it took us a couple of minutes to verify the results before publication. It was a good test of the back-up system and it passed with flying colours.”

LG phones use cameras for many applications including taking pictures, shooting videos and for phone to phone video calling. Although LG phones have some sophisticated camera technology they still have a way to go to reach the speeds of the camera’s catching the on-track action at grand prix races that shoot 10,000 pictures a second.

With so much hardware to install prior to each race, the build process for FOM communications begins on the Thursday of the week preceding race week. A giant tent structure is erected on a concrete pad. This pad is freshly painted to make sure that the environment inside is as clean as a hospital floor before the equipment arrives. Next the FOM technicians start to lay the fibre optic cable around the outside of the racetrack – over 35 kilometres of cable is laid around a 5 - 6 kilometre long race track. Those jobs are completed by the Monday of race week. Next in arrives the technical equipment – the guts of the operation that travels to every race. This equipment arrives in a number of specially designed flight cases that come right out of the aircraft that fly them to races around the world. There is less than 48 hours to make the 1920 connections from the timing equipment to the fibre optic network and commission the entire system in time for racing to commence. By Wednesday evening before the race everything is ready to go, ahead of a full test run on Thursday afternoon. At the test run FOM does a simulated race using the safety cars to make sure everything is working perfectly before Friday practice sessions begin.

When Friday’s on-track action begins the track surface is alive with timing loops and light beams, all waiting to be tripped by the cars. Seventy two computers in the Technical Centre wait to process the data, along with 150 interconnected software programmes that comprise the main and backup timing systems.

The magnitude and technical complexity of processing data in F1™ makes LG a perfect partner because the company prides itself on innovation. “The parallels between LG and Formula One™ are many,” says Chang Ma, Vice President of LG’s Mobile Communications division. “We have similar values as a company because we strive to be the best in everything that we do. I’d like to see greater interaction between ourselves and F1™ in the years ahead.”

‘Given LG’s status as the Official Data Processor of F1™, our company is at the forefront of the sport’s ever changing technology’, says Andrew Barrett VP global Sponsorship. ‘We are constantly looking for ways in which it can work with FOM to improve the show and transfer that expertise and technology onto its consumer products’.

“There’s a lot more analysis of the data that we’re already collecting to be done,” concludes Andrew James. “We’re already working on innovations for 2011, when I expect us to do a lot more predictive analysis of the action. For example, we’ll look at a driver’s lap times and predict at half distance where we expect him to finish the race. It’s all about making the sport more accessible to the television viewer.”

And with greater access to what’s going on under the skin of F1™, we’ll gain a greater understanding. That’s what makes data the dictionary of F1™ a constantly evolving thing, and it is this constant technology evolution that makes it so similar to the world of LG’s mobile phone development.