In a sport like Formula One racing, where every millisecond matters, the ability to access real-time data for instantaneous analysis is critical.
Zadara, headquartered in Irvine with R&D offices in Yokneam and Tel Aviv, has recently started making inroads into the sports world and this season became the Official Cloud Supplier of Sauber Motorsport, which manages and operates the Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN entry in the Formula One world championship.
With hundreds of sensors continuously collecting telemetry data on the cars, the track and the drivers during every session, Zadara’s edge cloud technology-enabled Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN to maximize its race weekend performance with best-in-class cloud services delivered at the edge.
“Formula One begins long before you get to the track with the engineering and design of the car,” said Zadara CEO Nelson Nahum. “Engineering relies on massive amounts of data, collected in locations around the world. This data is also needed for split-second decisions made during the race. We are proud to be Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN’s Cloud supplier.”
Team engineers from Track Engineering, Systems Engineering, and Vehicle Performance departments rely on hundreds of gigabytes of data produced by each car during race weekend, for trackside decisions and use back at headquarters. These volumes of data inform research and development, engineering modifications, and race strategy.
“In Formula 1 racing, it takes the complete package. A good driver in a bad car or vice versa does not bring good results,” Yan Lefort, Commercial Director Sauber Motorsport AG explained in a recent interview with IoT Evolution. “The combination is crucial.”
Nahum echoed Lefort’s sentiment, telling IoT Evolution: “These machines generate so much data. It was just a few years ago the first camera was put on a car, today there are 20.”
Zadara’s cloud services dramatically streamline Sauber Motorsport’s cloud infrastructure, while enhancing performance and improving latency, making race data readily available.
“The choice of Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN in Zadara as the official cloud provider of the Formula 1 team is a significant milestone for us,” said Yair Hershko, Co-Founder & CTO of Zadara. “The enormous amounts of information and the need to process it quickly and with maximum precision are factors of paramount importance for every Formula Group, and the choice of us by Alfa Romeo over huge companies in the field of computing and cloud storage – think Microsoft and Amazon also putting in bids – puts us in line with the best companies in the world.”
Sauber Motorsport and the Zadara team made F1 history as the first partnership of its kind forged 100% virtually during the 2020 pandemic. Never before had a technology partnership been developed entirely over digital channels; including the technical architecture assessment and design. A partnership truly engineered in the cloud.
“Data plays an ever-important role in what we do at Sauber Motorsport,” said Frédéric Vasseur, Team Principal Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN and CEO Sauber Motorsport AG. “Being able to make data-driven decisions in near real-time, and having a cloud technology partner like Zadara to ensure data from our cars and drivers is captured, secured, and transported to the right place at the right time, means this is a partnership we not only value but depend on to deliver performance on and off the track.”
In Sunday’s final race of the Formula One season, Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN suffered heartbreak as both Antonio Giovinazzi and Kimi Räikkönen were forced to retire from the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. In the last race for both drivers, technical failures caused their races to meet an early end when running just outside the points.
For the season, Räikkönen finished 16th overall with 10 points, while Giovinazzi came in 18th with three points.
While 13 points overall and a 9th-place finish in World Constructors’ Championship standings may be a little short of expectations for Team ORLEN, with the partnership with Zadara just hitting stride, a stronger 2022 season definitely seems to be in the cards.
Available on-prem or in the cloud, Zadara Edge Cloud Services support both traditional enterprise and modern apps and provide a complete set of highly secure software-defined solutions for compute, storage, network, security, Kubernetes, and cloud management. For more information on Zadara’s cutting-edge cloud platform, please visit the company website at www.zadara.com