Compaq servers and other equipment help give the BMW WilliamsF1 team an advantage.

Every time the FW24 hits the track, it's different. Different aerodynamic package, different gear points, different ride height, new bits all over. Not to mention that today is sunny and dry, while yesterday was foggy and wet.

There's unlimited variables that can determine the setup and performance of the car - today, this second, on this circuit. The drivers can explain a lot of the feel behind the wheel, telling the team there's too much understeer on turn one, etc. in an effort to match the car to the conditions.

But to refine the characteristics of the car on the microscopic level that F1 demands, the car is completely wired, constantly transmitting and recording it's vital statistics. This data is key to understanding what's running smooth, and what needs a swift kick to bring it into line.

Now in his mid-30s, you could say Chris Dietrich is the grand old man of the WilliamsF1 watchmen. He has that focused intensity it takes to keep on top of the tsunami of tech data the WilliamsF1 team generates at a test session. But there's also an undercurrent of gentle humor that came out when we talked to him in the control tower at the Nogaro test circuit.

"I've been with Williams 12 years - the highs and lows. Compared to the last two, this season hasn't been too bad. We expected it to be a lot worse and everybody knew it was going to be a learning year."

Evolution
"The biggest area of advance has been information technology and computers without a doubt. The cars don't look a lot different than they did ten years ago, basically four wheels, two wings. A lot of the mechanicals are basically the same, they have been finely developed and honed and we use different materials here and there, but it is basically the same layout for the car.

"But the advances in computers have been enormous. Ten years ago we used to plug in a wire to download data and we had maybe 20 channels and we got a quarter of a meg of data and it took maybe 12 to 15 minutes just to download it. The engineers would be standing around saying when is this car going to be able to go out? And we would still be waiting for the data. So it was all a bit slow. You had stand-alone computers there was nothing networked, one on one side of the garage, one on the other for each car and they couldn't talk to each other. If you needed more advice you had to get on a phone to the factory. You couldn't sit there on your mobile right next to your computer and talk to someone at the factory you had to go off into the back of the truck. So it's enormous. Now we can download thirty times the data in five or ten seconds, and within another 30 seconds it's available back at the factory from wherever we are in the world."

"And they always want more. The factory server 10 years ago had a one-gigabyte hard disk and now we've got four machines in the garage each with 40 gigabytes, so the amount of data we can bring to the circuit as well as access back at the factory is enormous. We used to worry about saving data all the time, deleting old files and being very conservative about how you stored it and made sure you kept some space, but now you just don't have to worry."

Getting under way
"I set up the computers, power up the servers and check out everything is working. Next, install the link back to the factory down the ISDN line and make sure that it's all working. Then we set the cars up, load the software in the cars from the servers. We either pick up some software that may have arrived before we got here from down the ISDN and load that; load the set up - there's lots of numbers to enter to calibrate parts of the car. Set all that up and then, when the cars start running, it's basically monitoring that everything's working OK: the power steering, the gear box, and all the test sensors we have. And then we look at bits of the engine, although mainly that's BMW's responsibility on separate computers."

Watching, Waiting, Analyzing
"If we see something on the engine that looks a bit suspect we will nip around the corner (to the engine engineers) and say have you seen this? And usually they have, but they'll do the same for us. There's a lot to look at because there's nearly 100 channels to monitor so it's quite easy to miss the odd one. Quite often they are not obvious. It is just trends, there is nothing dramatic. Unless something dramatic happens like something stops working and completely breaks, you often won't see it and you might just miss a trend, or something's just dying away or not responding, something working loose. So you have to be pretty on the ball and keep checking. It gets a little bit boring because you keep looking at the same things. You can't afford not to concentrate though, as soon as you drop off something will go wrong - guaranteed.

On the Williams side we normally have a hydraulics specialist who sits at the other computer and looks at the other car if we're running two cars, so it splits the work a bit, two sets of eyes. Then normally there is a race engineer, each race engineer for each driver normally has a junior race engineer who is looking at data. He'll either be sitting on the pit wall - we have an infrared network link to the pit wall so you can have a monitor there - or you can or sit in the back of the truck with a laptop and look at the data there if you want.

It is all the same data, as it comes in from the telemetry or we download it from the car as it comes in and that file goes onto a common disk on the server and they can look at it straightaway.

"You have to have a routine to check the priority of things first. There are certain sensors that have to work for the car to work properly. Like speed sensors, there's six on the car, one on each wheel and two inner ones. Then you check your hydraulic pressure is working, the battery is OK and that there is enough fluid in the hydraulic system. Then start looking at gearbox sensors which tell you which gear you're in and the clutch movement sensor - things like that, the very basics. Then once you establish that everything there is working correctly also there is an error log that is kept as the car is going around the circuit. It will immediately flag any errors that have occurred and tell you if any of those has been logged so that you can go straight to the error."

The errors in the data itself are errors relating to the car and are what we call run-time status errors. That can be anything from a speed sensor which has stopped working momentarily, usually when the driver has locked a wheel when braking, you see that in races - they lock on the inside as they go into a corner, it's because the car is very stiff across the front. So you have to be experienced to realise that's what's happened; it's not the speed sensor that has stopped working it's the driver who has just locked the wheel up. So there's a bit of interpretation on what some of the errors are. So you check all that critical stuff and then move onto the non-critical stuff which is really just there for data logging, to help the data analysts work out how the car is handling and set up. Things like, we log damp travels, the load in the suspension that relates to the downforce on the car and hence the balance, front to rear. So we have sensors to measure that, and obviously they are less critical to the running of the car, they are sort of would-be-nice sensors but don't stop it running, so you check those things secondarily, and if you can fix them without delaying the car then you do.

We get a dump of one lap's data as the car passes the pit. BMW have it in real time as the car is actually circulating, although they can't see every channel because the band isn't wide enough to see absolutely every channel, so they just monitor some critical ones. We get a dump every lap so you're only about a minute behind until you can check what's happened on that last lap, and as the car comes into the garage you go in with a land-line and you get everything then and you can check back in more detail. So as that is downloaded onto the server, everybody at the circuit who is on the local network can see it.

Then it goes out; we've got a program running called Send-Data, which, when it sees a new file, automatically sends that back down the ISDN to the factory, so there will be a few seconds delay while that gets there. Then there's 350 people back at the factory who will look at it, if they've got a computer on their desk, and they are pretty quick to tell you if you have done something wrong. They are your back-up basically..."

Sometimes it's a bit like big brother is watching you. You know if you've missed something, someone is going to haul you up, but it is helpful because you've got all those extra eyes. Then a systems specialist, like Mark, who is very methodical on the hydraulics side, will normally spot any tiny thing that we've missed and will be on the phone or e-mail us. It's not email via the Internet, it's the factory's system of e-mails, which we just become an extension of, so it's completely secure on a local system.

Races these days are very routine. It is a very organized weekend you don't test any bits or anything like that. You go there, try to get the best set up on the Friday, qualify on the Saturday and obviously race on the Sunday.

When you get back from a test or a race , you sit down with your opposite number and discuss any problems. Normally there is a big transfer of parts so you are in almost constant communication, saying I need these spares back and please can you send those, and by the way we had this problem. This normally takes place by e-mail, so it's almost in real time. And if you had something of particular interest that hadn't happened before you would sit down back at the factory and say, look this happened, if you see that this is how I solved it. There is a lot of transfer of information.

(My favorite part of the job is) probably just the traveling and being involved in the high-level motor sport, being close to the drivers and the cars, all that sort of thing. The glamour wears off and you get very blase about it. But it is still the pinnacle of motor sport and it's still the thing to be involved in. I don't travel so much any more. For me, it got a bit of, keep going back to the same places every year, doing the airport circuit. But when new places come up and new tests you try to go along if you can. It helps to keep your hand in.

There is always something going on in F1, whether it's some controversy over regulations or drivers being banned from a race. Something is always there keeping your interest going. Even when the racing stops over the winter, there's always something - is Schumacher going to be given his world championship - it just keeps going, doesn't it?"