How McLaren uses high-tech to make race-deciding strategy calls

This team is connected directly to the circuit thanks to some incredible technology from McLaren’s partner Cisco. They receive data from the car in as little as 18 milliseconds – that’s literally less than the blink of an eye – then analyse it to feed crucial strategy calls back to the track.

“Mission Control is a bit like Apollo 13, just no waistcoats and cigars,” begins Ed Green, McLaren’s Head of Commercial Technology. “Everyone is looking at race critical data and a lot of the decision making comes from there, sent directly to pit wall.

“If there’s a race with lots of safety cars, for example, that safety car window can be really small. Do you stay out? Do you come in? Which tyres do you go for? What tyre pressures do you have? What temperature? Who comes in first? And you’ve got three seconds to make that decision.

“If we were to lose the link to Mission Control, it’s like walking around the garage by candlelight. You can see where you’re going, but you’ve not got everything you need. With Mission Control, it’s like putting floodlights on at a football pitch. Suddenly you can see everything.”

Communication between car and team has become increasingly complex as technology has developed. From the basic pit board, it progressed to pits-to-car radio then telemetry was introduced to send data back from the car every time it passed the pits.

That then developed into live telemetry, and the connection from car to team expanded to a wider group of engineers in the garage. Now, only recently, technology has achieved such fast and high capacity networking that it enables live data flow and communications all the way back to base.

That has opened the door to something incredible. Mission Control not only adds huge capability for data analysis to improve car set-up and strategy decisions, but it has allowed McLaren to flex the expertise of those working each day, without sending everyone to the track.

“On Friday and Saturday, it’s all about aero, tyres, reliability engineering, making sure we’ve got the cars set up for the best place possible for the race,” explains Green. “Come Sunday, it’s about strategy, execution and insights. So we’ve got flexibility on who we bring in for each aspect.

“All the simulations are taking place in the background and we are constantly serving up information and writing it to many different systems. Cisco sits at the core of enabling everyone to access that information across our…