A modern Formula One race car is an example of the internet of things in action. From a distance, the cars lapping the track still embody the sleek elegance that has marked the sport since day one. But behind the scenes, technology has quietly taken charge.

Championship-winning team Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport races cars equipped with hundreds of sensors. These feed real-time information on anything and everything that could increase performance, giving the team that millisecond of advantage against the competition. All this information makes Grand Prix cars the ultimate edge devices. And like all edge devices, real-time data access is critical.

“In qualifying for instance, those 300 sensors, that information that we’ve got from the car, we’ve got minutes to make a decision based on data,” said Matt Harris (pictured), head of information technology at Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd. “We have to make sure data ingests from the car, and then multi-access from everybody in the factory or the track side is performant enough to make a decision before the car goes back out again. Otherwise we’re wasting track time.”

Harris spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure//Accelerate event in Austin, Texas. They discussed how Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix uses data to gain the competitive edge in Formula One and how the company’s information-technology department uses Pure Storage Inc. products to manage performance data (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

When an IoT company meets an analytics company

In today’s Formula One racing, data analytics and artificial intelligence are tools as important as the pit mechanic’s wrenches and sockets. “Everything we do as a business revolves around data,” Harris said. “We never make a change to the car without being able to back it up with empirical knowledge.”

How much data does an F1 car produce? “From a car perspective, it’s just under half a terabyte [per race],” Harris said. “But we produce up to another half a terabyte of other supporting data. Whether that’s GPS data, weather data, video, audio, whatever it would be. Other information to help with the strategy side of things.”

The results from this data mean that every car, in every race, has had some tweaks and adjustments from the last. “What you see on the track looks the same, but realistically every time it goes out the garage, it’ll be different,” Harris said.

Different cars are even optimized for each race track. “So, we have two different worlds that are basically iterated minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day at the track,” he said.

Unlike most IT departments, Harris and his team don’t have the luxury of a stable environment for their equipment. Instead, they operate in a mobile shop trackside that has to be set up and broken down for each race.

“We have all the same systems as any normal business would have,” Harris stated. “The track-side environment is very different though. We don’t have air conditioning, so all the IT equipment has to work at the natural ambient air temperature of the country we’re in.”

This presents huge challenges when temperature and humidity hit summer highs.

Mercedes uses Pure Storage arrays, which have the dual benefit of not generating heat and being heat tolerant. “All of our production data is on Pure,” Harris stated. “Whether you’re talking about finite element analysis for high perform or the [computational fluid dynamics] using high-performance compute systems, everything’s on Pure.”

Praising Pure’s Evergreen storage service for being high performance and always available, Harris added an extra benefit that the company provides: “All that innovation that Pure is putting into their products, we’re getting it,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Pure//Accelerate event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Pure//Accelerate event. Neither Pure Storage Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE