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How analytics is driving innovation at the DS Virgin Racing Formula E team

Alex Tai, team principal of Virgin Racing, explains how HPE technology is helping bring success to the electric car racing team

Formula E team DS Virgin Racing has transformed its IT infrastructure in a technology partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that has helped the team win races in the electric car racing series.

That's according to Alex Tai, team principal of Virgin Racing, who detailed how the outfit has benefited from HPE services including analytics as it attempts to win the FIA Formula E World Championship.

"The automotive industry is in transformation; not only the racing section, but through the introduction of electric vehicles, and we want to be part of that transformation and help inform it and be part of the technical story," he said during a Q&A with Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman during the firm's HPE Discover conference in London.

The conference represented the first major UK event for HPE following the formal split from HP.

Virgin Racing wants to be at "the forefront of electric vehicle technology", Tai explained, despite being, essentially, a small business.

"As much as Sir Richard [Branson] has some very large companies, the current project we're working on here at Virgin Racing is a start-up," he said, adding that as chief of the team "I have a budget for intellectual technology and I need to make sure that's spent as wisely as possible".

Partnering with the right technology provider was therefore an important decision, especially given the proportion of the budget spent on IT, Tai told the audience gathered at the London ExCeL, who had previously heard from BlueShore Financial CIO Fred Cook, another HPE customer.

"What I was looking for wasn't only the leading firms in the world to partner with, but also the most capable. I spend between 15 and 20 per cent of my entire annual budget on IT, so I really need to get the biggest bang for my buck," he said, before going on to detail how this led to selecting HPE.

"Having worked through all the different options, the ability of Hewlett Packard Enterprise to innovate with us and transform our entire technical capabilities and server support network was really important to me and at the end of the day Hewlett Packard Enterprise came out on top," Tai explained.

Ultimately, Virgin Racing partnered with HPE in order to have the best chance of winning in the 10-race championship series - now in its second season - which visits locations across the globe, from China to London to Argentina.

"The preparation, the practice sessions, the qualifying happens in just one day. This means between our two morning practice sessions and our qualifying, we need to take this data-rich environment and take all that analysis we can from it as quickly as we possibly can," said Tai, who explained how quick analysis of big data and analytics is key to the success of a Formula E team.

"We're working with your analytical teams and the software they produce, plus looking at our server infrastructure and how we implement work in the cloud to inform the decisions that our race engineers make and how they communicate with our drivers so that we make them quicker."

As part of the relationship with DS Virgin Racing, HPE provides the team with analytical tools and the networking equipment required to transfer the data to where it's needed as quickly as possible.

"They're connected through a network infrastructure put together by Hewlett Packard Enterprises with the main brain a Moonshot server," said Tai.

"That's powered by the analytics provided by the Autonomy software and this gives us access to data streams that none of the other teams is using."

Tai explained that the technology allows Virgin Racing to make decisions based on video and audio data.

"What HPE can do is take the video analytics, the audio analytics and we can crunch that not just for our cars and our teams, but at a speed where they can give all the information to our race engineers so they can provide the driver with more information more quickly," he said.

The technology ultimately allows Virgin Racing to analyse data that other Formula E teams can't currently access and this has helped them win races.

"We didn't think we'd be able to do that, but the system your team has put together for us has enabled us to do that and gives us an advantage," Tai told Whitman.

"We won in London at the final race of last season and came second in our most recent race; this is working for us and it's because of your partnership."

How analytics is driving innovation at the DS Virgin Racing Formula E team

Alex Tai, team principal of Virgin Racing, explains how HPE technology is helping bring success to the electric car racing team

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