The Power of AI-Native Networking in Formula 1®

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;19;15

Unknown

Hi, I'm Ben Williams from Juniper Networks. I'm here at the Aston Martin Formula one technology campus. I'm going to be joined today by the network experts from Aston Martin for trackside and the campus. And we're going to be diving into what goes on behind the scenes of an F1 team and the role the network plays in getting the car on track for the race weekend.

00;00;19;18 - 00;00;37;26

Unknown

So whether you're a technology or you're just a fan of F1, we'll have something for you. Welcome everybody. I'm delighted to be joined by Brian and Ross from the Aston Martin Formula One team. Thanks for joining us today. Please introduce yourself to everybody. My name is Brian Johnson. I'm the head of the trackside team for Aston Martin Formula one.

00;00;37;29 - 00;00;59;28

Unknown

I've been here for about up to three years now and, I was in Formula One for about another 12 years before that. Thanks, Brian. I've been. I'm Ross maiden. I'm an infrastructure engineer here at the technology campus for the Aston Martin Formula One team. I've been here now for probably about five years. Previous to that, I was serving in the military.

00;01;00;02 - 00;01;29;00

Unknown

Okay. Thanks, mate. So everything here at the campus and at trackside, you know, it's built to put the best possible car out on track on a race weekend. That's what the fancy. But what happens behind the scenes to help support the team? Here at the factory, we've got everything from designing the car all the way through to testing, manufacturing, and obviously delivering the car for the trackside.

00;01;29;03 - 00;01;51;04

Unknown

And how does that work out at trackside engineering? Maybe some unique challenges there. Yeah. So I'm responsible for everything a track in terms of IT equipment and networking. And that includes mission control back in the factory as well. So two very key areas for making the mix, the car go around the track. And so clearly based on that, there's a lot that that goes on.

00;01;51;06 - 00;02;12;03

Unknown

Other than just the race, you know, it's constantly work going on here to make sure that you can put the best possible car out there. Can you give me some examples of some of the unique challenges you have in your rolls? Probably a bit of added pressure there. Given what you've talked about, but it'd be great to hear about some of the things that you have to do, specifically the challenges that you have.

00;02;12;06 - 00;02;41;24

Unknown

Yeah. Here at the factory obviously operates 24 seven. So the biggest challenge is making sure that the network is resilient here. And it's operational 24/7. So people can manufacturer and design throughout the day and trackside for well, it's a never, never simple track. We start from early in the week. So we're all aware a week before the race, so we have to, cable the whole garage before we roll out Ruxin.

00;02;41;26 - 00;02;59;17

Unknown

And then every event different, every truck's different. Every garage is different. So, there's always comes with its own challenges. Getting the network up as quickly as possible so we can get online. Making sure there's no issues is key to. And also then running the connection back to the factory so we can all interact from back here as well.

00;02;59;19 - 00;03;17;22

Unknown

Challenges. There's always there's there's not never see one every week. Yeah. And I guess maybe a common misconception, something that I've learned also working with you is you don't get that full week to be trackside and doing set up the window that you have is quite limited. Quite limited. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And especially on back to back races.

00;03;17;22 - 00;03;35;27

Unknown

So we'll pack down on a Sunday night, loosen 68 hour pack up and then the either in Europe or fly away. You have to then all the equipment on the freight or on, on an airplane to another country. And then you have to set it all back up again. So sometimes you might not get access to the equipment again.

00;03;36;04 - 00;03;57;07

Unknown

So sometime Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon to then start to set up again. And so the window to set up you need to be online and operational by and then by Wednesday morning for all the engineers and mechanics coming in to work in the car. Yeah, that's definitely a kind of unique situation to have to tear everything down and then go spin it back up really quickly.

00;03;57;09 - 00;04;14;04

Unknown

Something else I learned was, was in between that time, things might be learned in one race where you might have to do something differently between races before the next one. So there's a lot of focus returns to the factory here. You know, to your point 24 seven operation. So is it kind of all hands to the pump after the race as well?

00;04;14;04 - 00;04;36;17

Unknown

It can very much be, obviously you're going to learn a lot of lessons. Is a lot of data coming back off the car? Over a race weekend, the data comes back to the factory for a lot of our into our mission control. So, engineers here and, strategists. And that can take that data and use it live for the for the race and feed that back to the track.

00;04;36;19 - 00;04;58;07

Unknown

But then afterwards, obviously they're going to take the data, what they've got from that race and use that to potentially design new parts, make improvements to the car and then develop it for the next race. Right. So with that in mind, what are the needs you have from network infrastructure in these environments? Maybe we start with the campus.

00;04;58;09 - 00;05;29;25

Unknown

Like we said before, it's resilience. It's it's having the confidence in the network that it's going to stay up, that we're not going to have problems with it because with engineers operating 24 seven, any amount of time that, impacts their work. And so downtime in the network can be very, very critical, especially if we operate in the wind tunnel, where time is very limited in their the, small outages can be costly, very costly indeed.

00;05;29;27 - 00;05;51;01

Unknown

So yeah, resiliency is the key one for us here. It just needs to be reliable and trustworthy and trackside buying, I guess. Very similar story. But Ross said resilience is key. We can't afford for any time lost in track. The the race weekends are getting shorter and shorter. The sessions have started, they've become shorter and used to be an hour and a half.

00;05;51;01 - 00;06;16;25

Unknown

Right. Practice sessions, no zone hour. So any any downtime at all. Then, then that's cost time or cost performance to the car. So yeah. Resiliency. And then just performance as well. So it has to be fast. We have to make sure that we've got plenty of on what's available on the networks, because the amount of data flowing through the network between the engineers and the on the IT trucks is always increasing all the time.

00;06;16;27 - 00;06;37;27

Unknown

So the amount of data they're analyzing is always increasing. So again, resiliency and performance is key. But I think you know we've been working together for for a couple of years now. So it's quite an established partnership. So you've been using the AI native networking platform that we provide. What key differences and benefits have you seen from using that in in that time?

00;06;37;29 - 00;07;05;02

Unknown

We've got one of the most advanced, technology centers in Formula One. It's a very new network to us. And the key for us, which best is giving us is giving us the visibility of that whole campus network in one pane of glass so we can monitor it, administer it all from one place. Whereas previously we'd have to be looking at maybe logging on to individual devices to configure those.

00;07;05;02 - 00;07;38;03

Unknown

So it gives us so much more flexibility. It also helps us reduce the time it takes to do tasks. So this campus is always evolving. It's expanding changing constantly week by week. So having that ability to quickly deploy new network infrastructure very quickly, push more devices out there, expand office space for people is absolutely critical. So the quicker we can do that, the better.

00;07;38;05 - 00;07;59;08

Unknown

And I know when we first started on this journey, one of the big things you were looking at was how to move away from the kind of on premise or typical controller based architecture. You know, we've obviously put you on the cloud. How how different is that being and what have you seen from that? Well, first of all, it gives us one less headache to think about.

00;07;59;09 - 00;08;24;28

Unknown

We don't have to worry about controllers or other devices like that. Having up in the cloud, we know it's readily available. It's always going to be there. And then obviously, because it gives us that visibility, the whole network, we're able to push out updates very easily to across the whole campus. You've got multiple buildings here, so we're not having to leave our desks basically to to carry out updates or configuration.

00;08;25;00 - 00;08;42;18

Unknown

Excellent. And the always on nature of a cloud and probably helps you at track side as well. Yeah very much so. And I know you've worked really hard. You know, with Richard, your networking partner and with us around, you know, almost redesigning some of the trackside topology to give you extra resilience. Can you talk to us about that?

00;08;42;25 - 00;09;04;24

Unknown

It's been a fantastic journey, really. Him? We are now really one of the one of the few teams in the building that's got full dual home resiliency across all the key areas in our garage. So everything from the pit wall to our central island in the garage to just key areas that can't go down during the session, got really, really important engineers running the car.

00;09;05;00 - 00;09;29;20

Unknown

They just need reliable network. So factors we will not go down during our session with two links tabular. So that's really helped. And also just that ease of access I can be out on the wall on a Tuesday or Wednesday setting it up. I can be on my laptop wirelessly and I can make a quick config change, quick make a quick Vlan, change, whatever it is, or having a coffee over hospitality.

00;09;29;21 - 00;09;49;04

Unknown

You can do the same thing. So it's brilliant to have that touch around and just touching on that. Actually, we've talked in the past about you know, how how the transition was to move to a kind of juniper powered network. And again, you've templated a lot of the trackside deployment and similar to what we've done here at campus.

00;09;49;07 - 00;10;08;09

Unknown

But also what does that mean in terms of kind of managing the infrastructure when it is operational? So templates has been very key for us because as I think a lot of a lot of the public don't really realize that we've got safer it we do a lot of our free time. So to do that we just to keep costs down because it's cheaper than air freight.

00;10;08;15 - 00;10;26;16

Unknown

So we have six sets of of all our key pieces of equipment and six sets of our network switches and our pit walls or side roads or sets of everything. So the fact that we want to see them configured, ensuring that when we pull it out of the safer it it's going to have the same conflict as the last rested.

00;10;26;18 - 00;10;44;24

Unknown

So that's all tab that we normally power that on. It pulls down the config for that area. And it's, it's it's how it was last year, one of the different devices. So that's been really revolutionary for us. And has that helped the team kind of learn a new technology. Has there been any kind of assistance there or how's missed Halton doing that.

00;10;44;24 - 00;11;06;16

Unknown

Well it's actually no we don't actually need network accredited engineers anymore to be able to support our risk team. That that could be, in the mess. No is so simple and easy to use. Well, my 16 year old son could go out and configure a change in the network. It's that easy. So it's, it's just makes it just life easier.

00;11;06;16 - 00;11;33;24

Unknown

Or we don't have to be subject matter experts anymore. And just doing networking. Yeah. And so in that sense, then you're not necessarily having to learn climb down to the nth degree a great template just to be honest. It's not not everybody's got the time to learn, but parts in some areas because whether there were a different vendor that would render experts before June a completely different technology and learning cloud is not everybody's got the time to do that.

00;11;33;24 - 00;11;57;29

Unknown

So in fact, it is easier to use and learn. It's spread. And one last thing. I think predominantly the trackside environment is quite centric on wired infrastructure. Let's zone on the wireless. What are your plans for that and how are things changing there? It is starting to change was was Juniper Technology? It was before before I joined the company.

00;11;57;29 - 00;12;15;10

Unknown

It was all wired. And that is time consuming. Setting that all up in every garage and song. Some garages are more complicated than not than others. Some of our flyaway events, you have to try and you have to drill holes in walls just to get wires through to split garages and stuff. So making it wireless is making it easier.

00;12;15;10 - 00;12;46;14

Unknown

So we can now deploy wireless devices now around the garage that are more reliable. The engineers and mechanics can access to our full corporate network from wirelessly now where it wasn't not achievable before. Reliable. Okay. Thank you. So I am going to talk about AI. It's a huge topic in the industry. I think probably to the extent that some people are trying to work out what's genuine and not certainly when I speak to customers, they're almost fatigued by the discussion points around the industry of it.

00;12;46;16 - 00;13;07;00

Unknown

I think the way that we try to address it is talk to our customers about exactly how we implement AI or machine learning, and what are data scientists do in the background to train these models to troubleshoot networking problems? We use skeptical about AI and networking. And and what benefits have you seen since using mist?

00;13;07;02 - 00;13;35;09

Unknown

Yeah, obviously I was skeptical. You hear a lot of reports. You read a lot of news about what I was doing. You see a lot the some of the basic results of it. Look at social media, people using AI to generate pictures and documents and speeches and all sorts of things. But here what we're actually seeing from juniper missed AI is that it's simplifying tasks for us, or it's automating tasks for us.

00;13;35;11 - 00;14;04;04

Unknown

That that then helps us carry on with more important tasks that we can get on with, as opposed to getting bogged down with the sort of day to day running of the network. The fact that it can also alert us to issues preemptively if we've got problems with a network, bad cables, for example. It's essential because it just reduces the time it takes for us to resolve problems and get people back on line again.

00;14;04;06 - 00;14;28;01

Unknown

Thank you. And I guess some of the story tracks I definitely the troubleshooting element on the as I said, no one about issues before you're actually hearing from engineers and stuff like that is brilliant. So only a few weeks ago, we were able to preempt an issue where the network wasn't performing how we thought, but we we had the alert coming in.

00;14;28;01 - 00;14;48;02

Unknown

It was bad. Optic on on the, on the network. And I was just needed at 5 or 10 at the time. So that was great that I was able to do the learning and that I was able to preempt of approach before we had the, engineers or mechanics complaining about the network at the time. But yeah, I think that's fairly consistent with what we hear.

00;14;48;04 - 00;15;07;23

Unknown

I think the term most of my customers uses stocks as kind of firefighting. And like you said, can focus on some more productive tasks, that, you know, that, that you should be doing to, innovate here at the campus and at trackside. So that's been really insightful. I'm gonna talk a bit about or ask you about, the future, what's coming up.

00;15;07;23 - 00;15;29;08

Unknown

So, you know, we've been working together as a partnership for a while. I would say the technology is embedded now. What's coming up next in terms of features and capability that you want to use or turn on? I think here, the factory, we're not quite as far forward as the track side piece with some of the features that Gina promised I was pushing out.

00;15;29;11 - 00;15;56;22

Unknown

We've only just enabled Marvis Minis, but that's also that's immediately giving us some info and, performing and availability of certain services, which is good. So I think for the future, that capability, seeing where it goes and what else it's going to be able to provide is it's going to be amazing for us because like I said, it's that automation piece for us that, is critical for making our lives easier.

00;15;56;28 - 00;16;19;24

Unknown

Okay. Yeah. And talking about Maurice and is Brian and it's not deployed at trackside yet. And that's something we're talking about. Give you the benefit of kind of free testing without devices even being connected to the network. What what's the next steps for that for you? I think, as you said, more of as many such a very next step to something where we like to stay in line with what the factory or vice versa, we're doing.

00;16;19;24 - 00;16;43;28

Unknown

So and as creators, I think wireless is, one. So we definitely want to increase further across the garage. And even in hospitality, just making sure that people can roam around, freely without having to do more wires, because the more risk there is than the last time there is to set up. Everything's been squeezed so that if we can improve the setup time, then that's even better for us.

00;16;44;01 - 00;17;12;05

Unknown

And then again, we don't know what's in the future for, for telemetry on the car. We know it's using old technology. At the moment. We're using RF, but we and other programs where we're using the 4G, 5G, cellular technology. So everything's heading towards less wireless, more wirelessly, connectivity. So I'll like anything's possible. Really. And what about, the wider IT infrastructure?

00;17;12;05 - 00;17;34;28

Unknown

Obviously, we're talking specifically about networking here. What about some of your other technology partners, and any kind of integrations that potentially you're looking at in future? Well, obviously here at the factory, we're just in the process of going live with ServiceNow as our incident management tool. So the integrations that are available with that were going to be great for us.

00;17;34;28 - 00;18;08;26

Unknown

So if we do get potentially hardware going down or having errors, the fact that it can raise a incident for us automatically without us having to do that is going to be great. And then, again, it goes through to simplifying our day to day tasks. Thank you both for the insights. Really, really insightful stuff. I think everyone who's tuned in and listening and watching, just get a bit of a glimpse bar in behind the scenes to see what happens in front of and leading up to, you know, the critical events of track side and race weekends.

00;18;08;28 - 00;18;36;14

Unknown

I've got a few questions in here, from people who've tuned in. So some generic ones and some some technology ones. What's been your favorite race this season so far? And and why? Not necessarily for the team, but spa as always. One of my favorite races just for the how spectacular is, cars going full pelt through a rouge is is amazing.

00;18;36;15 - 00;18;57;15

Unknown

That's probably one of my favorites. Okay. Good choice. But I think for me, it was possibly Japan. Just, my first time went out to Japan this year, and I just saw the fans are so unique. I was leaving track about ten, 11:00 at night, and we were driving back to the hotel and they were still queuing, waiting to see who was in the cars.

00;18;57;17 - 00;19;17;21

Unknown

It was a so unique, so, when you walk out the, the pit lane on the Sunday morning and seeing the fans that were just different. So yeah, that's probably my most. Yeah, yeah. Favorite memory this year for racing. Yeah. So Fernando Alonso is an integral part of the team obviously is a great racing career. How is it having him on the team?

00;19;17;24 - 00;19;39;24

Unknown

I think it's a huge boost. His presence alone and his reputation is huge in formula One. So having him as part of our team just feels incredible. If he comes into the factory for debriefs, there's a lift basically as a lift to the team. So yeah, just his presence alone I think is a huge impact on the team and you probably see more of that trackside, I guess.

00;19;39;24 - 00;19;58;03

Unknown

Brian. Yeah, he's is such a nice donor to us person as well. Him he's he's so approachable. So we can he will walk on with evil. Evil introduced. He will just come up and say hello to you. It's it's not that upstairs downstairs type of the type of person. He is a really nice guy to talk to and it's just got the aura.

00;19;58;03 - 00;20;16;23

Unknown

But, you just know what he delivers. And he's not a young driver anymore. Is he under. So what he does out on the track, I don't know how he does. So. Yeah. Fantastic. Excellent. Technology wise, or just kind of project wise. Can you talk about what happens next as part of the technology campus and what's happening?

00;20;16;23 - 00;20;35;08

Unknown

Obviously we we're now going live with all three buildings here. So, this whole campuses, it's just become one, you'll see, as you're aware, is one huge project. But obviously the big ones coming ahead will be the wind tunnel towards the end of the year. That will just it's going to be a massive impact on the team.

00;20;35;08 - 00;20;56;04

Unknown

It's going to be a huge asset having our own wind tunnel and space. There'll be lots of telemetry data and information again to to add on to what's coming back already from, you know, externally at the moment from the track to, oh, there's going to be a huge amount of data coming from that. There's a question about, what kind of impact the network has on race car performance.

00;20;56;04 - 00;21;18;16

Unknown

You're at trackside type. Is that something you can talk about? Yes. Of course. So it just again, I will go back to resilience, sleeper performance. We're always obviously sending so much data through the network all the time, either to between the two tracks. We're doing all that analysis. And just that performance, machine learning and all that.

00;21;18;18 - 00;21;38;05

Unknown

But there's also the, the, the, the tools on, on people's laptops. So they're having to see the data when it's all analyzed. So the network has to be performant. But also we're downloading data from the car obviously. So that us going straight into the juniper network. So from the medical. So it's all has to be performant and can be slow.

00;21;38;05 - 00;22;02;12

Unknown

So it's it's just integral that we have a fast reliable network all the time. Yeah. And one integral part of the campus here as well relates to that, which is you've got Mission control here. So they're looking at that data as well. Yeah. All life. So we'll get life data back within depending where you are in the world, obviously with latency about five seconds run that from the car going around the track.

00;22;02;13 - 00;22;29;02

Unknown

You're getting the back of your life. Okay. So it was 30 engineers and our mission control all looking at the live data and all the different tool sets that they're using Dominos to in strategy to performance, whatever it is on the car. And not only Mission control. We're also and we've got the simulator as well. So it's all feeds as it all kind of earlier so that we didn't have to touch on earlier where we're building a brand new simulator at the moment as well in the new building.

00;22;29;09 - 00;22;48;28

Unknown

So that's that's going to be going live in the next few months. So again, just add more technology is always ever increasing. Yeah. Sounds like you're both going to be pretty busy. Never stops. Yeah. On the mission control side actually two it sounds like they're actively input into the race strategy with the team trackside. Are you working quite closely together during the whole race weekend?

00;22;48;28 - 00;23;08;07

Unknown

Yeah. Very closely. And so they'll all be talking live on different channels on the intercom system, which all again feeds through the juniper network. So between on track and on factory. So they're always feeding back. And different teams have got different different areas to look at. So doing different types of analysis that feed not directly back to track or not.

00;23;08;08 - 00;23;40;04

Unknown

And that could be making small changes in the car or making small strategy decisions. So live in the restaurant. And you mentioned earlier, you know it's a global sport. Different time zones. So they adjust themselves to your time zones where you are in the world I guess. Yeah. And and it was a, I put like got two people that travel around the world and one person on Mission control, so they have to get up at midnight to do the Australia races, etc., to come in to drive in and do, mission control support for a 12, 14 hour shifts.

00;23;40;07 - 00;23;58;03

Unknown

So yeah, it's it's follows the sun or for the racetrack and some extent. Yeah. So yeah, everyone's got got their role to play here and at trackside, which is fantastic. But this has been really insightful for me. I'm sure everyone is tuned in as well. So I just want to say thank you. Thanks for spending the time chatting to me about this.

00;23;58;05 - 00;24;14;24

Unknown

Thank you, everyone for joining in. If you want to know more about our partnership with Aston Martin F1, please follow the links provided. Thanks for tuning in by.