Running a contemporary Formula 1 car is one of humankind’s most sophisticated systems engineering challenges. Mercedes Formula 1 explains how electronics, systems engineering and data work in F1 and the relevance of each part of the team system.

Evan Short, Team Leader of Trackside Electronics Systems at Mercedes F1, says, ‘We generate data from a variety of sources. Primarily it’s from sensors on the car itself, and those can be anything from measurements of physical quantities, like temperatures, pressures, torques, and speeds, right through to things like the operation of the system like the internal state of all sorts of things on the car, like the gearbox.
‘Those sensors are physically connected, either through an analog system to the electronic control unit (ECU) on the car that runs the whole car or through a series of CAN network busses around the car that brings information back to that central unit. Taking the total amount of data generated over the weekend by the car, including video and all sorts of ancillary information, it’s close to a terabyte or even a bit more per car. But if you look at the really exciting bits of data which are the live data streams generated by the car while it’s running, we’re looking at about 30 megabytes per lap of live data and two or three times more once the car is in the pits and we offload the data from it.’
‘Track time and F1 is a very limited resourc...