Force India announces tech upgrade
November 9, 2009 by SJ Skid
Filed under Prime & Option, SJ Skid
Force India today announced an upgrade to its CFD programming today “that provide the company’s drivers with the best chance of a podium finish.”
Before you go getting too excited — like I did, wondering just how much merchandise I should buy online — I notice in the announcement that about half the Formula 1 teams are using this new-to-Force India technology, which as best as I can tell is a super-quick storage system that keeps pace with the wind-tunnel simulations.
Still, it’s good to see a “back marker” team stepping up with improved technology. [I hope they aren't spending their lawsuit money prematurely.]
Rather than muck-up the technical details, here is some of the language from the press release:
Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage solutions for the world’s most performance-intensive applications, announced today that Force India Formula One Team has increased the performance and capacity of its engineering simulation solution through the deployment of Panasas ActiveStor storage. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a critical part of Force India’s car
design process to continually improve the team’s on-track, aerodynamic performance.In conjunction with physical wind-tunnel testing, Force India relies on virtual prototypes and CFD methods to improve racing car aerodynamics. Maximizing the impact of its CFD process leads to engineering advancements that provide the company’s drivers with the best chance of a podium finish. The challenge Force India faced from an IT perspective was providing a data storage solution that could keep pace in this rigorous environment.
Where’s Todd’s abacus when I need it?
One item I do find funny, which I quoted in the lead to this post: “the best chance of a podium finish.” Force India, to their credit, aren’t getting too big for their britches. They aren’t expecting to develop the “best chance of a victory,” just finding one of those coveted winner’s steps.
Hey, it’s more substantial than anything we’ve seen from USF1GPEXYZ, right?
Are there any experts out there among our readers who can put this more into context? Is it a big deal — or even just “a deal” — at all? I figure my notice that half the teams already are using it suggests it is not necessarily something that will fly Force India to the front, but if they were improving before having this extra “oomph,” it can’t hurt. Let’s hope it helps them figure out downforce on the car.
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i do cfd for a living and i can say that quick storage is important for getting simulations done in a reasonable time. but i wouldn’t think this would have that big of an impact unless there former system was really crappy. but maybe it was.
but thinking about it a little more. they probably just now got enough drive space to run simulations that are actually large enough to do them some good. it’s actually a little surprising that an operation like that wouldn’t just contract out their cfd to people who know what they’re doing and can get them results quickly. seems like the upfront costs / technical skill would be pretty high for a small team to bother with on their own.
“Hey, it’s more substantial than anything we’ve seen from USF1GPEXYZ, right?”
Peter Windsor said in Mark H’s interview that they were subcontracting out their CFD to a local Charlotte firm, which as John B says might just be the smarter way of doing it as a smaller team.
It really does just seem like this is a case of Force India having gone and bought a new hard drive though, since there doesn’t seem to be any sort of sponsorship involved. It wasn’t even provided direct from Panaceia Inc either, it was sold to them by an HPC design firm.
What a non-story, next they will be telling us they went to IKEA and bought a bigger, more modular bookshelf!
well usgpxyz is a little different case. their head engineer (ken anderson) works at said charlotte-based cfd firm (corvid). so i’m guessing they’re getting a bit of a deal (and they’re probably only really paying for computer time, probably not for man-hours so much). my friend works in the same office as ken at corvid.
what software do they use? I see BMW were using Fluent wheras I expected teams would develop in-house codes.
corvid has their own code i believe and they do a fair amount of work for IRL, etc. i’m only making the assumption that that is the code they’ll be using for the usf1.
Are those codes benchmarked against some F1-similar problems with known solutions?
Are the wheel spin and ground moving taken into account?
Are the simulations running using stationary conditions for car/wind speed?
tell us
yes.
yes, definitely for the ground moving, sometimes for wheel spin depending on fidelity of the model.
and i don’t really know what you mean by the last question.
I wish they would do Q&As and stories with these kind of technical people instead of just team owners, managers & drivers all the time. Maybe Todd can do a F1B downshift with someone technical in the future.
I know there are mags like Racecar etc which have more technical stuff, does anyone know of any others?
Hi Royce.
Tech people are on our list for Downshift. We’ve made some inquiries. I suspect some of the hesitation by teams is these are not the people that get media training. But we’ll keep at it!
That’s what I was thinking too, you would have to choose carefully.
I found this http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/who-is-designing-the-new-toro-rosso/ which says Nick Wirth from Manor F1 is going to design the car completely using CFD, no wind tunnel. Imagine that dude’s hard drive!