Driving the 'Internet of Things': an interview with Infiniti Red Bull Racing head of technical partnerships Al Peasland

Al Peasland tells Danny Palmer how connected devices, wearables, thermal imaging and even augmented reality could benefit the F1 team

Technology has always been a key part of Formula One racing and it's often in this cutting-edge arena where new IT trends first make their mark before being made available to the enterprise.

Take big data, for example. Nowadays it's rare for an organisation not to have a strategy for collecting and analysing data but it's something that only relatively recently became mainstream in business.

However, big data analysis has long been part of Formula One, both when it comes to the action on track and researching and developing car upgrades off it.

Now, organisations regularly talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) as an area of untapped potential for business efficiency and upgrades, but as Al Peasland, head of technical partnerships at Infiniti Red Bull Racing tells Computing, it isn't new to F1 racing.

"The car itself is sort of an Internet of Thing; it's a connected, smart device, and predominantly what we focus on," he explains, adding that "the ability to start looking at bringing other devices on board that will talk directly to the car, that can send data directly to the simulation software" is an area of interest for his team.

For example, Infiniti Red Bull Racing is experimenting with wearable devices, using them to monitor the health of race engineers and pit crew as they travel across the globe.

"We take the health and well-being of our employees incredibly seriously," Peasland says. "The people who do travel are working long hours, they're going to all four corners of the globe; their flight times can be uncomfortable, then they're working long hours in the garage.

"If [using wearables] helps the performance of the team, prevents them getting injured during the season, helps them be more alert and agile and actually speeds up pit stop performance, then that's great."

Augmented reality

Peasland hints that technology such as augmented reality within wearables could also have a place within Red Bull Racing - that is, if the regulations set out by F1 governing body the FIA allow it to be used.

"There are always areas where you want to get more information to more people than just the driver. And if you can do that in discreet ways, it just may be that it's more secure to flash it on a head up display in their goggles than on a screen in a garage.

"Maybe there's potential for protecting IP, helping with strategy as well as just providing more information to the right individual. There's definitely opportunities there," Peasland says.

Infiniti Red Bull Racing has a long-standing technical partnership with AT&T and has now expanded it to involve a mobile device management platform, which includes AT&T's Security Event and Threat Analysis (SETA) technology, something that Peasland tells Computing will further improve network security.

"The AT&T security tool that we'll be rolling out is going to really help us with tackling threats and unwanted interest in our network," he says.

The Red Bull Racing team has also decided to drop BlackBerry in favour of Samsung as its mobile device of choice. The move was made in August 2014, prior to that season's Belgian Grand Prix - a race won by Red Bull Racing's Daniel Ricciardo - and Peasland details how the quick turnaround between devices was crucial.

"Obviously with the nature of the business we have, the deployment has to be very robust because we're immediately travelling, there's very little time for things to go wrong and so we've got to be very confident when we deploy a new solution that it works," he says, explaining how a smooth switchover was ensured.

"There was a lot of work within the IT department in terms of trialling and piloting and making sure that it was a smooth transition for the workforce. We went travelling and the smartphones were working, you're getting your emails immediately."

Peasland describes how using Samsung phones instead of BlackBerrys has drastically improved mobile collaboration within Red Bull Racing.

"The big thing is we can access more of our business systems with it and also the fact we can use it as a personal device is a big step forward at the racetrack," he says, before going on to describe the Samsung as "just so much more user-friendly".

"I can legitimately work on my phone rather than with the BlackBerry which was more of just a business monitoring tool. You'd send a few emails, but it was difficult to open attachments and presentations, it missed out," Peasland says.

"As we go forward we'll have SharePoint on here so we'll be able to access our business intranet on our phones; all of those things are being piloted and will be deployed and then it will start to change the business again."

Seeing red

One area Infiniti Red Bull Racing is also driving innovation with mobile devices is through thermal imaging software. Watch any F1 race on television and you'll see shots from a thermal imaging camera, demonstrating which parts of the car and its tyres are hot.

But that sort of technology isn't just restricted to broadcasting and now Red Bull is using technology from thermal imaging firm FLIR to allow engineers to monitor heat via an attachment to mobile devices, allowing instant analysis of where problems might occur.

"FLIR One is a device you plug into your smartphone and turns your phone into a thermal imaging camera," says Peasland.

"You haven't got to fit sensors to the car. It's contactless and that helps because we've got devices we use around the factory inspecting electrical cabs and switches - if one of those is starting to go wrong it will get hot. So you can analyse it without going near it," he says. "It's a real safety device."

Along with safety, data security is one of the most important things for a F1 team - as McLaren CIO Stuart Birrell previously told Computing. Peasland describes how AT&T's SETA security products enable the team to ensure IT network security.

"It's not just about putting a big firewall around everything, it's about threat analysis as well. It's about looking at our weak spots, where could threats come from, monitoring that activity," says Peasland.

"It's a big area of the business we have to protect and that's the key, making sure we can do more and more without opening up any weak spots," he adds.

However, security and agility need to be balanced in a way that doesn't compromise either, which means employee trust is important.

"For us to be an agile business, we need to trust people with lots of information and we need to have tools that can give us lots of flexibility, but at the same time we need to do it in a very secure way," he explains.

"There's a point where, in order to move the business forwards, you have to open up and give people more information and more access. But you can't afford to create more loopholes at the same time," he continues. "Which is why we partner with people who do it better than we do."