As soon as it was here, it was gone.
We have returned from the Sandown 500 feeling thankful for our sunshine state HQ and we also say “sayonara” to Victoria for another season. That means though that we are well and truly into the swing of all things enduro.
The key to the season of endurance, as we all know, is strategy. Throw away all that you know about SuperSprints, these marathon races are an entirely different kettle of fish. It’s that time of the year when we turn to those gurus who always have their faces in laptops deciphering what we can only describe as wiggly colourful lines (yep, that’s the technical term) and ask them, well, what does it all mean?
“Sandown is such a long race compared to what we have faced this season,” said car #97 Data Engineer Adam Reardon (aka. Alan From The Hangover).
“In terms of data logging itself, we need to reduce the amount of data we are actually logging in the car so it all fits into the internal storage (limited to 250MB by the rules). We are always paying attention to the vitals of the car as we normally do, however, extra scrutiny is paid to areas such as the brakes and fuel system.”
From start to finish, car #97 ended up using over 300kgs of fuel, used three sets of soft tyres, two sets of wets and clocked a fastest pit stop time of 14.3 seconds whilst changing from wets to softs. How’s that for data!
“If the race had been run under full green conditions the brakes more than likely would have needed changing,” said Alan.
“Fuel consumption and fuel remaining, on the other hand, is critical information that we need to constantly be feeding to the race engineers up the front so they have what they need to make decisions at a moment’s notice.
“It determines essentially when we can pit to make it to the end or how long we need to be stopped for on any given lap to fit specific levels of fuel into the car. We then also need to be across any messages to and from race control and relay these to the engineers in case they miss anything.”
But let’s not forget the additional spanner in the works come enduro season – the co-drivers.
“As we have the co-driver as well, it’s also about helping them to get up to pace, analysing driving lines and driving behaviour on the data, as well as on video,” said car #88 Data Engineer, Romy Mayer.
So, these Data Engineers aren’t actually sitting on Facebook or playing Candy Crush, unlike us media types then…
The Red Bull Racing Australia crew are more than pumped to head into the Bathurst 1000, now only two weeks away, October 6 – 9.
