MOTORSPORT: Aussie wins F1 innovation competition

An Australian technology wizard has won $50,000 as the first prize in a global Formula 1 innovation competition.

Paul Clarke, of Adelaide, devised a system for the Mercedes team – now consecutive world championship winners – that will display critical telemetry from its race cars and assist engineers, at tracks and the team’s factory in Britain, in acting on it.

Mr Clarke, who works for Australian IT consultancy Chamonix, is to go to the season-ending grand prix in Abu Dhabi at the end of November to receive the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize and a trophy for his entry, which he called Signals and Streams.

The competition was organised by Formula One Management, Mercedes and Tata Communications, the official connectivity partner of F1 and the Mercedes team.

The judging panel included the now triple world champion driver Lewis Hamilton, the Mercedes team’s technical director Paddy Lowe,  its chief strategist James Vowles, FOM chief technical officer John Morrison, ex-F1 drivers David Coulthard and Martin Brundle and Tata’s F1 business chief Mehul Kapadia.

“We received a series of incredibly strong entries from around the world,” Lowe said.

“The Signals and Streams application stood out for its creative, yet viable, approach to harnessing the huge volumes of data we generate during each grand prix and practice sessions.

“The winning entry demonstrated the potential to enhance decision-making with real-time data analytics and visualisation.”

Mr Clarke – who is 33 and has no tertiary degree -- is a specialist in “user experience and IT architecture”.

Among entities he has worked on projects for are Yahoo!, Telstra, Nokia, Warner Music and Fox, as well as governments and defence industry clients.

Mr Clarke predicted that in-race data analytics in F1 will become seamless.

“I’ve been a huge F1 fan since the late 1980s, so the opportunity provided by the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize to combine my technology expertise with my passion for the sport was a dream come true,” he said.

“My aim was to use modern approaches to data visualisation to provide clear, intuitive and instant information to engineers and drivers.

“I’m delighted that the jury saw the potential of the Signals and Streams tool to make a difference for the Mercedes team.

“My whole family has been drawn into motorsports, including my wife, with whom I regularly attend the Melbourne Grand Prix. My father follows motorsports closely too.

 “My earliest F1 memory was seeing Nigel Mansell’s tyre blow in Adelaide in 1986. I was too young (at five years of age) to understand the extent of the impact this event would have, but the memory of it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“F1 is the absolute pinnacle of motorsport, where the best engineers and the best drivers compete on a global stage.

“Motorsport is unique, a touring circus of fuel and passion. Every race, every session has its own challenges and, as a problem-solver and innovator, I found the concept of the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize intoxicating.

“The solution I proposed is designed to leverage the proven capabilities of traditional web technologies with the addition of modern protocols and concepts to produce near real-time, low- latency communications and form a consolidated view of quantitative and qualitative data sets.

“I called the concept Signals and Streams. Signals refer to data collected from multiple sources, which needs to be displayed unambiguously to meet the challenges faced by trackside engineers. Streams is a concept borrowed from micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, which presents messages from users, interpreting the data and events in real-time.

“The platform includes an element of machine-learning, using a concept called ARROW (artificial recognise-react oriented worker), which provides an autonomous analyst to compute vast amounts of data and scenarios based on incoming Signals and communicates with the team via Streams.

“My thinking behind the platform was inspired by the recent shift towards user-centric design and push-based interfaces.

“The design uses modern approaches to data visualisation to provide clear, intuitive, instant information and communications to the users.”

Tata’s chief executive of NextGen Business, Julie Woods-Moss, said the aim of the competition and the company’s work as F1’s official connectivity provider was “to demonstrate the immense potential of data in accelerating innovation in the sport”.

“Data is not only an invaluable tool in the teams’ arsenal – it can also take fan experience to a new level,” she said.

“It's inspiring to see recognition for ideas that … showcase what the future of the sport could look like.”