Jaguar TCS Racing
Jaguar TCS Racing performs data analysis at top speed with OpenText™ Vertica™, gaining real-time insights for ABB FIA Formula E World Championship success
About Jaguar TCS Racing
-
Fans:328M+ global fans
-
Parameters:700+ parameters to optimize
Summary
Challenges
- Limitations on data uploading and analysis.
- Limited engineers allowed to access data.
- Huge amounts of data generated by powertrain solutions.
Solution
- Enabled analysis of vast Formula E data.
- Migrated to advanced analytics.
- Optimized race insights with Vertica’s speed and functions.
Results
Sub-second analytics query response times
100 billion data points per season
Billions of event data points accessible in minutes
Challenges
- Limitations on data uploading and analysis
- Limited engineers allowed to access data
- Huge amounts of data generated by powertrain solutions
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 optimize 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 analyze effectively to understand and improve performance. However, to prevent better-funded teams from having an unfair advantage, 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.
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.
Solution
With Vertica, there are no longer limits on how much data Jaguar TCS Racing can analyze. The team now has full access to all the raw data from every practice, qualifying, and race session. This adds up to a huge amount of information available for analysis.
Products deployed
-
OpenText™ Vertica Analytics Platform
Unify analytics by offering an open, scalable, and elastic database with many powerful features and deployment options
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 OpenText as its official digital transformation, business resiliency, and analytics partner. In a very short window, Jaguar TCS Racing worked with OpenText to migrate from its legacy NoSQL system to an advanced analytics and machine-learning platform powered by Vertica.
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.
Appreciating that races can be won or lost by margins measured in fractions of a second, every millisecond that can be shaved off an analytics query means that valuable insights can be in the hands of race engineers and strategists in time to make impactful adjustments to the cars before the next race. Working closely with the Vertica team, Jaguar TCS Racing highlighted a query for performance improvement. It previously used one of Vertica’s in-database functions and took over four seconds to complete.
We are doing things with Vertica that were just not possible with our previous system. By getting data into the platform incredibly quickly and with sub-second query response times, our race engineers have been able to unlock new value from our data between practice, qualifying, and race sessions.
Results
Vertica made a clear impact on the track—Season 9 of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship was Jaguar TCS Racing’s most successful yet.
Steering record results
With Vertica, Jaguar TCS Racing has transformed the way it processes and analyzes 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, meaning 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 analyze 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.
Ready for the road ahead
For Season 10 of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, Jaguar TCS Racing is pushing for even better results. The team is currently working to integrate Vertica into its existing web-based app for visualizing key analytics. With Vertica analytics embedded into their race toolset, race engineers and strategists will have near-instant access to data, which will generate even faster decisions.
As Jaguar TCS Racing gears up for Season 10, Vertica will be right alongside them, delivering the speed, scale, and reliability of analytics to help the team claim more points, podiums, and wins on the racetrack.
