CIO Interview: Adrian Collinson, Force India Formula One team

Force India CIO Adrian Collinson explains to Computing how the Formula 1 team gets the most bang for its IT buck, both at the circuit and back at the factory

The glamour of Formula 1 might give the impression of unlimited budgets, but it certainly isn't the case, especially for those lower down the grid. Force India currently sits sixth in the Constructor's Championship, with the team's best result so far a fourth place for Paul Di Resta in Bahrain.

It doesn't have the budget of the more established outfits, and therefore needs to stretch resources across all departments - including IT - as head of IT Adrian Collinson explains.

"We're a fairly small IT department, as far as standard businesses go, but certainly in F1, we have seven full-time members of staff - a CAD manager, trackside support and the rest of us cover support for all the factory-related services," he told Computing.

Collinson has been with the Silverstone-based team since 1998, through its previous incarnations of Jordan, Midland and Spyker, before it was bought and renamed Force India in 2008. Despite changes over the years, the team hasn't forgotten its humble origins and employs a waste not, want not strategy with its IT set-up

"We try and use as much as we can off the shelf and stuff that's robust and standard - we're not trying to reinvent the wheel or anything, we try to make it fairly rugged and easily replaceable," Collinson said.

But despite being a mid-tier outfit, the team still has a significant following, especially in India, with web traffic peaking during race weekends. As a result, the website began to struggle and Force India opted to select a new hosting provider, one which could provide a global solution.

"It was about finding someone who could cover our set-up using a lot of ISPs, though they tend to be quite biased towards whichever country they're situated in, so it was finding someone who could give us that global coverage and guarantee that across all the countries we've got races in.

"We're not one of the big teams in terms of funding, so it's finding a company that gives us a very efficient cost set-up for what we're doing," he added.

Force India selected US hosting solution provider Internap after being impressed with what the Atlanta-based firm had to offer.

"Internap's routing optimisation is a good way of delivering content through the fastest local network. They're always monitoring which routes have got the lowest latency and will route traffic intelligently over that, which was a unique selling point for us," he said.

The deal means Force India no longer has to worry about traffic surges causing its website to crash.

"The big benefit for me is it's something I'm not having to look after and manage," said Collinson.

"You can have all these things, but if you have to constantly look at it and make sure it's up and monitoring bandwidth, it's stuff I could do without doing. The biggest benefit is the fact we can run the website without worrying about the hosting."

With simpler issues like web hosting taken care of, Force India is able to focus on the more complicated matter of getting the best result possible on track, where technology plays a key role.

"We start with what can make the car go faster and that's the key point, trying to get first on the grid," said Collinson.

"Then next to that you've got reliability - the car's actually got to finish - so it's all about systems that provide reliable telemetry services, the infrastructure we run, so UPS coverage at the track, making sure the MPLS circuit is reliable, as well as the systems back at the factory."

Collinson adds that it's essential for computer systems at the factory to be as efficient as possible, given the rapid development time of Formula 1 cars.

"A lot of manufacturing environments have very long lead times with projects that go on for years. We produce a brand new car every 12 months, which is far faster than most industries can cope with, so it's all about making sure internally all those systems can cope with that pace of development," he said.

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CIO Interview: Adrian Collinson, Force India Formula One team

Force India CIO Adrian Collinson explains to Computing how the Formula 1 team gets the most bang for its IT buck, both at the circuit and back at the factory

A quick turnaround is also required during race weekends, when the team will only have a few days to set up the networks required to compete, much of which needs to be unpacked straight from planes and trucks prior to connection.

"Our IT guy will arrive at the track for a flyaway venue on the Sunday, for a European event it's the Monday or Tuesday, and we will run some networking within the garage itself," said Collinson.

"We've got side benches in there; we run networking with a networking pod back to the car, so the car is part of that network when it's in the garage," he continued, adding that there's a lot more IT involved than there used to be.

"It's a very intense process getting all that up and running, and over the years it's evolved from very basic systems to complex systems to cope with the amount of computer power we have to carry."

Analysing data to get the most out of the car can make all the difference in Formula 1.

"We receive data over the air from the car when it's out on track and so that comes back and is analysed as bespoke data," Collinson explained.

"We then stream that back over the MPLS circuit to the factory and we have operations from there with engineers primarily based around strategy analysis, analysing that data, looking at timing feeds, data feeds, trying to spot trends, what the other teams are doing and pre-empting pit stops, other teams' strategies and so on."

It's evident that IT plays an important role during race weekends, and Collinson told Computing that efficient systems can't win a race, but IT failures can definitely lose one.

"It's one of those interesting things that it's very hard to say we could win a race because of IT, it's really down to strategy with the car, but we could certainly lose a race because of IT," he said.

"If any of those systems fail that could be a missed pit stop or call, or something failing in the engine: that could all happen if the infrastructure wasn't in place," Collinson continued.

"We have been very fortunate, we have very rugged systems, we have a very good team of people and we've avoided that situation."

Collinson told Computing that much of the team's IT set-up is based around Windows 7, with a little Linux thrown into the mix.

"We're all Windows 7 based, all our clients run a different mixture of versions of the server OS for the systems we're running. But all the desktops and systems are Microsoft OS based except for our big CFD cluster, which is Linux based," he said.

However, despite Formula 1 representing the cutting edge of technology, Collinson believes there isn't a case for Force India to yet adopt Windows 8.

"There's no reason at all for Windows 8 at the moment, no reason at all to move to that; Windows 7 is a very good platform," he said.

Collinson did admit Windows 8 represents an improvement over Windows 7, but said there hasn't been the significant boost in performance required to make it worth rolling out to the entire team.

"It doesn't present enough compelling reasons to move to it. I know it's a fundamentally better OS than 7, but it's not a big enough leap to make the inevitable grief you're going to get with users changing the interface," he said.

Like all F1 teams, Force India is having to grapple with major changes to race regulations, which will dramatically alter car designs from next season. As a result, Force India started work on the new car earlier than usual, which has resulted in extra transfers of data.

"We've advanced the start of next year's car design from when we usually do because there's a lot of changes. There's a lot of work going around that, a lot of information flow and design information," said Collinson.

However, fortunately for the IT team, the transition to 2014 will just be business as usual.

"From the IT side we're looking at possibly having more bandwidth available to comply with telemetry commitments but it's a lot of more of the same for IT," he concluded.