The Data Drive Behind the FE Championship Fight

Time：2023-08-18 14:20:23 Browse：117℃

       In the early hours of July 31, 2023, the ninth season of the FIA Formula E World Championship wrapped up in London, with Vision Racing taking the title after the final two rounds, the first time an independent team has won the championship over a manufacturer's team since the race was classified as a world championship.

      Vision Racing is one of the few non-manufacturer teams in FE, and its owner, Vision Technology Group, is a green technology and new energy company, but how did it manage to win the championship against Porsche, Jaguar, Maserati, McLaren and many other manufacturer teams? Behind the scenes involves the underlying gene common to electric formula and new energy - data-driven.

      Vision Racing is currently one of the few teams in the FE paddock that has competed continuously from season one to the present with no major changes to its core technical and engineering teams, and although the team's ownership has changed from the original Virgin to Vision since 2018, the change has not caused upheaval for the team, and in terms of results has put the pedal to the accelerator. Vision Racing has chosen the data-driven path, allowing data to be the source of what drives the team forward.

         

      The earliest competition in automobile sports is the mechanical performance of the vehicle, how strong the engine power, how stable the chassis, determines the ultimate victory or defeat belongs to.

      Later, the driver's technical level also became the key to victory, and then later, the team's strategic arrangements play an increasingly important role in the race, and now, the software is the key to the team's victory.

      In the vehicle development stage, the number of software engineers has been more than half of the race engineers to study more is no longer mechanical, but the software, adjust the race car is no longer wrenches, screwdrivers, but the steering wheel on the knob, keyboard and mouse.

      Teams are spending less and less time on the track and more and more time in simulators and server rooms filled with high-performance servers.

      These are the data-driven, software-powered, computational sciences that permeate every aspect of motorsports, from R&D and design to race testing.

      Drivers from the past only focus on driving technology, but now more and more need to drivers to develop their own data capabilities, in the race, the driver in addition to the perception of the track to be as sensitive as ever, but also need to lap times, electricity, power consumption, energy efficiency of these data to build more and more sensitive perception ability, only then, to become a qualified driver in the new era of data-driven racing.

      This trend was most evident in Formula E, where manufacturer teams often gained a quick competitive advantage by investing heavily, but as time stretched on, teams like Vision showed even more outstanding competitiveness after accumulating enough advantages on the right data-driven path.