With 1.5GB of data transmitted from each Formula 1 car back to its garage during a Grand Prix race – enabling the constant monitoring of fuel consumption, tyre wear and engine status – “an F1 car is probably the best example of a connected car”, says Steve Wainwright, General Manager EMEA, VP Sales and Marketing, Freescale Semiconductor.
Freescale has a long-standing partnership with McLaren Electronic Systems, which began in 1999 and was formalised in 2008, when the two companies entered into a technology partnership. Freescale itself was established as a company in 2004, when it was spun out of Motorola. The automotive industry is Freescale’s largest single business segment: in 2010, 50 million cars globally had a Freescale component in them. 300 million automotive microcontrollers (MCUs) were provided by Freescale in 2010 alone, and the company has shipped four billion since 1996. According to Wainwright, “That translates to 160,000 cars a day rolling off a line somewhere in the world with Freescale in them.”
The technology partnership came about as a result of the FIA’s decision to standardise powertrain management in Formula 1. “Suddenly Freescale became a supplier to all of the teams on the grid in Formula 1,” says Wainwright. “That was followed up by the extension into NASCAR. By that time, Freescale and McLaren Electronic Systems were working much more closely, and at that point we formalised our partnership.”
“There is a standard ECU which all of the teams use; all of those control units come from McLaren Electronic Systems in Woking, UK, and are underpinned by microprocessors which come from Freescale,” explains Dr Peter van Manen, Managing Director of McLaren Electronics. “The electronics and software which are created by McLaren Electronics Systems are used by all of the teams on all of the cars, with a single version of hardware, and a single version of software. The only difference between the cars is the tuning and the data that’s used to tune them.”
Although teams could gain a competitive advantage in the area of electronics, the FIA introduced a standard ECU in 2008, to remove driver aids like traction control and automatic gearboxes. The electronics platform that was being developed by a number of sources was adding little to the racing, says van Manen. “The tuning of the systems was providing the differentiation. Electronics was a performance differentiator in the early 1990s, but there was an opportunity to reduce costs by having a single platform.”
Motorsport: the industry test-bed
Freescale’s interest in motorsport lies in the test-bed opportunities that it offers. “You don’t make a lot of money supporting F1,” says Wainwright. “There are 22 cars on the grid this year, so the volumes are low. What you do get is this opportunity of a lab environment, and learning cycles.” Product development cycles in F1 are much shorter than in road cars. Whilst a product may take five to seven years from development to fitment in a road car programme,“it is very different in F1,” says Wainwright. “There’s always a change in regulations, and every year there is a new engineering challenge, so there is constant innovation.”
The extreme conditions of motorsport, and of Formula 1 in particular, are ideal for testing those components which, in road cars, would be exposed to much less extreme conditions. “This is an extremely tough environment in terms of heat and vibration. In an F1 engine, you have a machine running at 18,000 RPM. That’s about three times what you get in a road car. That puts tremendous demand on the processors we use, but the processors we use for race cars are the same as those we use in most road cars.”
High speed data, high speed cars
Success in Formula 1 hinges on high speed data transfer…
This is an excerpt from an article first published in the Q3 issue of Megatrends magazine, to continue reading, simply download your free copy and turn to page 50.
Megatrends Q4 will be published in mid-December at awmegatrends.com/emagazines.
