Driving decision intelligence at 330kmph with BWT Alpine F1^® Team

Just like BWT Alpine F1^® Team, KX focuses on speed and data, hence the foundation for a great partnership. KX has enabled some of the world’s largest companies to achieve a competitive edge by uniquely combining real-time streaming data with historical context to power faster and better in-the-moment decision-making. In Formula One™, sub-second decisions can literally be the difference between winning or losing.

BWT Alpine F1 Team competes in the FIA Formula One World Championship™, the world’s most prestigious motorsport competition. The Alpine Business Unit is part of Groupe Renault, and BWT Alpine F1 Team headquarters are co-located in Enstone, England, for chassis and Viry-Châtillon, France, for power unit development. In 2021, the team finished a credible 5th place in the Constructor’s Championship, with a victory for French driver Esteban Ocon at the Hungarian Grand Prix and a podium finish for Fernando Alonso in Qatar.

In an industry and competition that’s all about speed, real-time data is invaluable to Formula One teams as they seek to discover even the slightest performance differentiators for an edge over their competitors – and milliseconds matter.

Every F1 team aims to develop the best car, optimize the performance on race weekend, and evolve faster than their competitors.

BWT Alpine F1 and KX: A partnership for speed and precision

BWT Alpine F1 Team had identified several ways to extract more value from their data.

Leveraging huge data resources

BWT Alpine F1 Team creates a vast amount of data from R&D simulation and race-day telemetry. Recognizing an opportunity to find new optimizations from this resource, they sought a solution to analyze and visualize all their data in real time. Ian Goddard, Head of Technical and Innovation Partnerships, shared:

“We run a billion simulations a year, that’s something like 40,000 simulations for every lap of every race through the season. You can’t just create more data; we’ve got to be able to understand it and do more with it.”

Data volumes amplify on race weekends. “We burst a lot of data – billions of data points. We have hundreds of sensors in the cars and two cars active at the same time. That’s a real challenge to manage all that data. To capture it, to store it, and give access, immediate access to the engineers,” explained Sergio Rodriguez, BWT Alpine F1 Team Data Science & Engineering Manager.

Managing different data types and locations

With hundreds of multi-channel sensors on each car, a vast amount of data is burst during a race weekend. Conversely, development activity from crucial tools such as the wind tunnel, engine dynos, and simulators drive a lot of constant, steady data—all coming in at different sampling rates, frequencies, and time series. BWT Alpine F1 Team wanted to ingest all their data into a single data store, instantly accessible by engineers irrespective of their physical location.

Optimizing on-track performance

BWT Alpine F1 Team wanted to use data from previous races to develop data models to run in real time during race weekends as the cars test, qualify, and compete around the track. Engineers could then compare the models against real-time telemetry data and have more confidence in their dataset when making in-the-moment optimization or strategy decisions.

Choosing KX for agile, real-time data solutions

BWT Alpine F1 Team evaluated available solutions, benchmarked various companies, and selected KX as their Official Supplier for Data Analytics Solutions due to its performance, efficiency, agility, and proven track record in demanding data environments.

Bob Bell, Strategic Advisor to BWT Alpine F1 Team, stated:
“KX did a demonstration for us—prototyping—within half a day. It met all our objectives, and it was quite clear from the start that when we were looking for someone to really partner with, they were the choice.”

KX seamlessly complements the existing technology stack and partner community, running on Microsoft Azure and supported by other hardware and infrastructure partners to deliver real-time data, on-demand, for processing, simulation, race strategies, and live telemetry.

The use of KX technology in R&D projects enables engineers to capture data from the wind tunnel, simulators, dynos, and testing rigs dispersed in the UK or France, enabling design engineers to leverage diverse data sets effectively.

The KX Platform also provides invaluable real-time access to all car sensors during racing. Nathan Sykes, IT Business Systems Data Science Director at Enstone, highlighted:

“A great example of this was at Austin in 2021. While pushing the performance of the car and fighting to the end, we were managing the brake temperatures and wear in real time to ensure we were within acceptable tolerance to get the brakes to the end of the race.”

Empowering engineers with contextual, instant data access

Sergio Rodriguez explained:
“KX enables us to capture the data in a very fast way and show it to the users in the way they want. This can be web dashboards or through their favorite data analysis tools. One of the main benefits of KX is that it’s not only a time-series database. We can add relational information so that it gives context to the engineers, enabling them to make much better decisions. Historically, our engineers took hours to collect all the data they needed to make a decision. Thanks to our partnership with KX, these engineers can now make decisions in the moment.”

Bob Bell summarized:
“After three great years of partnership with KX, we’re looking for new opportunities with them. We’ve been wowed by the capability of the software and toolset, and now we’re almost in the phase where we’re looking for new things to apply it to. We’re excited about the capability it offers and the advantages it will give us in new areas.”

Discover how KX delivers real-time analytics and valuable insights that drive superior automotive performance and efficiency.