"Brutal, but welcome to my world" - how Aston Martin Formula One's CIO meets her challenge with data, cloud and chocolate

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Aston Martin's Grand Prix history can be traced back to the 1922 French Grand Prix, but the company and its distinctive British Racing Green livery only returned to the grid in 2021 after investment from Stoll. 

The organization—headquartered in Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix—has former World Champion Fernando Alonso and Canada's Lance Stroll as its principal racers. It is currently third after rivals Red Bull and Mercedes in the sport’s all important ‘Constructors’ rankings—constructors being the people or corporates who design the car—a position it hopes to improve before the close of the 2023 season in late November.

According to CIO Clare Lansley, cloud and data is fundamental to making sure the car design its billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll is putting so much faith in, the AMR23, keeps delivering. She says:

We're a P2 [second position] team now, but what happens next? We must sustain it. We've got the foundations in and sorted out the core, but going forward every part of IT directly needs to give the Team overall competitive advantage

Lansley and her team are making extensive use of the supplier’s proprietary ONTAP data management operating system and its FlexPod.

The latter is a range of integrated compute, networking and storage appliances that combine Cisco Unified Computing System servers, Cisco Nexus and MDS fabric switches, and the NetApp storage array in one box.

Aston Martin F1—whose full official name is ‘the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One Team’—says that the devices now accompany it to each of the 22 ‘Grand Prix’ world championship races it needs to compete in, from the March kick-off in Bahrain to the final event in Abu Dhabi.

Having this kind of appliance at every race means the Team’s main software group can use a Kubernetes cluster back at base to analyze car data at speeds fast enough to suggest tweaks in its settings that will lead to improved in-race performance in real-time.  Lansley explains:

The way the data gets off the car is through radio frequency at certain points around each circuit, and that gets transmitted back to the garage. At that point, it's up to us how you get it back to your factory to your team or your engineers: it’s your problem.

If we need to simulate something new—wind weather conditions are very typical, tire degradation from other teams have seen as a community, or we want to change something—we have to get live data screened off the car back to the factory so we can push that directly to our simulator, where we have our test driver stationed at all times during the race to see what settings are optimum. 

So, it's not just about analyzing the data; there are many other different work streams and threads that data also supports.

Even better, telemetry data can now get piped from the on-site garage back to the factory in half the time it used to--less than 10 minutes instead of 20, while the appliance’s built-in security features report access and help head off ransomware attacks and other possible threats. 

Allied to all this is use of the vendor’s SnapMirror technology to transfer data post-race back to mission control in the UK.

That is both increasing season performance analysis—but rapid data transmission can also be useful at an event too, of course. In F1, the Australian Grand Prix is notorious for a very short turn-around of only two hours between sessions. In this year’s race, Lansley says a compromise had to be on the spot in Melbourne on ride height to better balance the aerodynamic optimum and ride performance. 

Without the reduced access times for car data sharing between the data, mission control and the track her new stack gave her, the less efficient decision would probably have been made—and her Team would not have come in third.

Having useful appliances trackside is one thing, but having easy-to-transport and rugged ones is even more helpful. In what is called in the trade ‘the pack down process’ that’s important, as F1 is a highly mobile sport in more ways than one.

Why: not just the AMR23 cars but also the entire local garage (and all technology and tooling) needing to be physically dis- and re-assembled from track to track every couple of weeks.

Lansley says being able to quickly pipe all her data back to base after each event means her hardware can be shut down and packed up for boxing and immediate transportation for delivery to the next location. She says:

Keeping freight weight as low as possible is a huge part of our focus as we need to ship loads of kit around the world to different continents. The fact that these devices were going to reduce the freight weight and  footprint would be smaller than the previous kit was a massive boost. We need them to work out of the box, so they are given white glove treatment because they are so fundamental to operations.

IT just has to be efficient

Lansley also needs help from her tech investment in terms of meeting not just owner or fan demands, but strict compliance targets.

For example, a new pressure in F1 is the so-called ‘cost cap,’ which limits the amount a team can spend on its cars over the course of a given calendar year.

Introduced by the sport’s world regulatory body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), in 2021, that means constructors like Aston Martin have a maximum budget (currently, $135 million) for 2023—which needs to include all IT. She says:

Previously, investment focus was on car parts rather than technology, but the cost cap means anything directly attributable to running the car is considered in scope. Clearly, it's now part of my job to try and be innovative in reducing the IT bill, whether that's subscriptions in the cloud, license costs, the devices, the whole thing.

Lansley--whose career includes stints at other major automotive brands like Jaguar Land Rover and McLaren—came to Aston Martin a year ago with a brief to completely turn IT around. She says:

When I joined it became very clear that IT had been somewhat underinvested in, so it was all about back to basics and ensuring our infrastructure is performant, reliable, and secure. So, the concept of implementing a Data Fabric was absolutely fundamental.

Achieving that mission meant an initial phase of infrastructure refresh and building out of completely new data fabric support.

The next phase—which includes the imminent opening of a new Silverstone Aston Martin ‘smart factory’—is all about optimization of all that new infrastructure, she says.

This will include filling out a new Aston Martin F1 Data Lake, and use of the vendor’s SnapMirror and FabricPool tools for fast data replication and tiering.

Also on her agenda, she says, is using IT as much as she can to meet the Team’s sustainability commitments, which will center on data-driven monitoring and minimizing power consumption at the factory but also across the entire estate.

Lansley says she thrives on the pressure and knew the mountain that needed to be scaled when she took the job: 

An average day for me means a lot of listening, a lot of discussion: I’m listening to peers, I'm listening to team members, and I'm listening to partners—What do you need? What do you want? Was this a part of the business plan?

I need to understand your strategy from an engineering perspective, but big regulation changes are coming in 2026 and I need to be thinking how's that going to impact the tools we need to develop. And we are never not clear that P2 is the first of the losers. Brutal, but welcome to my world.

How do I cope? Chocolate helps.