jaguar type I electric race car

Jaguar TCS Racing’s Formula E Race Team

Revs up analytics performance with Vertica, optimising race strategy and car performance to drive better results on the track.

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Success Highlights

Sub-second analytics query response times fuel rapid insights for elevated track performance

100 billion data points/season – every sensor, car, event – drives informed decisions on and off track

Race engineers and strategists get access to billions of event data points in minutes not hours

Eliminating sacrifices to speed and accuracy caused by exporting and down sampling data sets using the 650+ in built functions

Who is Jaguar TCS Racing?

Jaguar TCS Racing is a Formula E racing team based in the UK. Jaguar TCS Racing joined the all-electric ABB FIA Formula E World Championship series in 2016, making Jaguar the first premium car manufacturer to compete. The racing team plays a key role in designing, building and testing new technologies that support electric vehicle (EV) development across Jaguar Land Rover.

At a Glance

Industry
Automotive

Location
HQ: Grove, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and seen racing in cities around the world.

Challenge
Eliminating limitations on data uploading and analysis is critical to Jaguar TCS Racing’s success in Formula E.

Products and Services
Vertica Analytics Platform

View PDF

Gaining an edge on the competition

As an official Formula E manufacturer team, Jaguar TCS Racing designs its own electric powertrain, which includes the motor, transmission, inverter, and rear suspension. Because all teams in the Championship are required to use the same car chassis and battery, the focus is on developing the most efficient powertrain—crucial to gaining an edge on fierce competition.

Successful electric powertrain development demands much more than simply specifying and manufacturing hardware. The systems and software used to control the powertrain, along with the algorithms that optimise its energy usage throughout each race weekend, are also key to beating the competition.

These powertrain solutions generate huge volumes of data, which the team must analyse effectively to understand and improve performance. However, the FIA—Formula E’s governing body—applies tight controls to the number of engineers allowed to access and interrogate that data, both on the track and back at team headquarters.

Phil Charles, Technical Manager at Jaguar TCS Racing, elaborates: “The restrictions mean that we must make the most of limited resources in very short and high-pressure time windows. To do so, we need to use the best techniques available in terms of data processing and analytics.”

However, this was where Jaguar TCS Racing had run up against a major stumbling block. The team’s existing analytics platform was struggling to keep pace with ever-growing data demands. As Phil Charles explains: “The system took ages to load and query data, restricted us to a set volume of data we could handle, and forced us to work with aggregate and down-sampled data. It was holding us back from analysing data as quickly and deeply as we wanted. Ultimately, this was holding back our performance on the track.”

Success Highlights

Sub-second analytics query response times fuel rapid insights for elevated track performance

100 billion data points/season – every sensor, car, event – drives informed decisions on and off track

Race engineers and strategists get access to billions of event data points in minutes not hours

Eliminating sacrifices to speed and accuracy caused by exporting and down sampling data sets using the 650+ in built functions

Who is Jaguar TCS Racing?

Jaguar TCS Racing is a Formula E racing team based in the UK. Jaguar TCS Racing joined the all-electric ABB FIA Formula E World Championship series in 2016, making Jaguar the first premium car manufacturer to compete. The racing team plays a key role in designing, building and testing new technologies that support electric vehicle (EV) development across Jaguar Land Rover.

At a Glance

Industry
Automotive

Location
HQ: Grove, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and seen racing in cities around the world.

Challenge
Eliminating limitations on data uploading and analysis is critical to Jaguar TCS Racing’s success in Formula E.

Products and Services
Vertica Analytics Platform

View PDF

Gaining an edge on the competition

As an official Formula E manufacturer team, Jaguar TCS Racing designs its own electric powertrain, which includes the motor, transmission, inverter, and rear suspension. Because all teams in the Championship are required to use the same car chassis and battery, the focus is on developing the most efficient powertrain—crucial to gaining an edge on fierce competition.

Successful electric powertrain development demands much more than simply specifying and manufacturing hardware. The systems and software used to control the powertrain, along with the algorithms that optimise its energy usage throughout each race weekend, are also key to beating the competition.

These powertrain solutions generate huge volumes of data, which the team must analyse effectively to understand and improve performance. However, the FIA—Formula E’s governing body—applies tight controls to the number of engineers allowed to access and interrogate that data, both on the track and back at team headquarters.

Phil Charles, Technical Manager at Jaguar TCS Racing, elaborates: “The restrictions mean that we must make the most of limited resources in very short and high-pressure time windows. To do so, we need to use the best techniques available in terms of data processing and analytics.”

However, this was where Jaguar TCS Racing had run up against a major stumbling block. The team’s existing analytics platform was struggling to keep pace with ever-growing data demands. As Phil Charles explains: “The system took ages to load and query data, restricted us to a set volume of data we could handle, and forced us to work with aggregate and down-sampled data. It was holding us back from analysing data as quickly and deeply as we wanted. Ultimately, this was holding back our performance on the track.”

Vertica + Jaguar TCS Racing

With Vertica analytics embedded into their race toolset, race engineers and strategists will have near-instant access to data, which will fuel even faster decisions.

A winning partnership

Prior to Season 7 of Formula E, Jaguar TCS Racing set out to rebuild its data processing and analytics environment from the ground up. As part of this move, the team welcomed Micro Focus as its official digital transformation, business resiliency, and analytics partner. In a very short window, Jaguar TCS Racing worked with Micro Focus to migrate from its legacy NoSQL system to an advanced analytics and machine learning platform powered by Vertica.

Phil Charles comments: “Vertica’s real-time analytics and machine learning capabilities are a great fit for our environment, helping us improve data-driven performance on and off the track. Vertica opens a new door for us: It allows us to collect as much data as we can in a well-defined, centralised analytical database and make it available to the relevant people incredibly quickly.”

With Vertica, there are no longer limits on how much data Jaguar TCS Racing can analyse. The team now has full access to all the raw data from every practice, qualifying, and race session (after the race cars return to the garage they are plugged in, and the data is downloaded).

Phil Charles gives an example: “Consider the raw data logged on each race car – from speed and lateral acceleration to steering angles and suspension geometry. Once that data is downloaded, Vertica gives us access to more than half a billion data points. We then run analytics on this directly in Vertica, which enables us to glean impactful results.”

Thanks to Vertica’s scalable massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, Jaguar TCS Racing enjoys fast, efficient analysis of even the largest datasets. The team also has access to Vertica’s more than 650 in-database functions for querying data. On top of this, Jaguar TCS Racing used Vertica’s User-Defined Extension component to build a bespoke lowpass filter to run against its data. This ensures top analytical performance without having to move the data to other systems or tools first.

Steering record results

With Vertica, Jaguar TCS Racing has transformed the way it processes and analyses data—and the difference is clear to see from start to finish. Whereas previously, it could take hours to load data from each race car into the team’s legacy system, Vertica facilitates priority access to load key data sources within seconds. And the complete dataset can now be loaded within minutes of the cars entering the garage.

Query performance has also been turbocharged. For instance, using Live Aggregate Projections in Vertica, Jaguar TCS Racing has accelerated a single query from 60 seconds to 15 milliseconds. Thanks to this performance boost, engineers and race strategists are now able to analyse a greater volume of data in much more detail. This has revealed all-new insights that the team can use to make critical performance adjustments to each car’s powertrain, suspension, steering, braking, power management, and more.

Vertica helps us to make time critical decisions to ultimately deliver an edge that leads to more points, podiums, and wins for Jaguar TCS Racing.
PHIL CHARLES
Technical Manager, Jaguar TCS Racing
Read the eBook

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