200mph insights power innovation everywhere with Dell Technologies and Intel

The McLaren Group encompasses a sports car business, a Formula One racing team and a technology and innovation business, called McLaren Applied Technologies (MAT), that extends innovations across its business lines. With a focus on continuous improvement, innovation at McLaren is anything but top-down.

The company’s sports car business and Formula One racing team use high performance computing (HPC) systems, powered by Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel® processors, to design and engineer faster cars. They also use HPC systems to collect and process streaming telemetry data during the races. According to Paul Brimacombe, Head of Enterprise Architecture at the McLaren Technology Group, “There are around 300 sensors on a Formula One car, and we collect around 100 gigabytes of data on each car during a race weekend. That data needs to be accessed in real time by the engineers, both trackside and in mission control, in order to make crucial decisions about the cars, such as when to make a tire change.”

After the race, Brimacombe says, “We use machine learning and analytics to dig into that data and optimize the performance of every component in the car to get the best racing results possible. This data is also a valuable tool in designing future cars.”

But the innovation doesn’t stop there. McLaren uses the same technology that follows cars on the track at 200mph to make breakthroughs in other industries. From sensors to software to electrical engineering and testing 5G technology, MAT extends those racetrack-inspired innovations into unexpected directions.

For example, MAT has used HPC-driven insights from the racetrack to help a British pharmaceutical company use smart sensors and data analytics to monitor patient recovery during drug trials. Compared to the previously manual approach of tracking recovery intermittently, at in-person visits, biotelemetry provides more accurate results, increases confidence in the studies and can help bring new drugs to market sooner, at a lower cost.

According to Duncan Bradley, Health & Human Performance Business Unit Director at MAT, “It started off with us saying, ‘Well, if you can continuously develop a Formula One car by using real-time data insight and being predictive about the outcome of the race, why wouldn’t you do that for a human, swapping the race outcome for a health outcome?’ In the F1 world, it’s all about maximizing race performance, but in healthcare it could be recovering from a surgical procedure, managing a disease or weight loss.”

Whatever the use case, Brimacombe says that “Dell Technologies gives us a one-stop shop across the entire IT infrastructure landscape. Whether it is real-time data capture of sensors on a car, edge computing, the core computing that sits in the garage or the distribution of that data securely, Dell Technologies is involved. We are never more than a meter away from a piece of Dell Technologies hardware.”

Read the case study: Innovation doesn’t stop at the finish line