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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

OT Some years back I was given a tour around the McLaren workshop. The work that goes into those machines is impressive to say the least.

I knew a guy on the electrical testing team and he said that they had just spent the better part of 2 weeks tracking down a single misfire from a race. Turned out two tracks on a PCB were slightly too close together.

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How on earth did they manage to locate that fault? That would be an awesome story to be told in detail.

The amount of sensors they have on the cars is insane. Each race they basically set up a data center in the paddock. Then that is remote linked to the teams HQ DC over MPLS links.

Here is a quick bit about it.

http://en.f1i.com/magazine/73067-f1-telemetry-data-race.html

I've tried suggesting to smaller teams on social media that they make their data public. What do they have to lose? No responses.

I have no idea actually. The kit they had was amazing though. My favourite was the machine for testing their radio link. It was a long room full of baffles and at one end they put the receiver. At the other end was a large machine that spent all day shaking the life out of the transmitter.

In the electrical testing room they had a few car simulators that effectively had the whole car in (they were about 5 ft tall from memory, large boxes). The could start them up and run the entire system physically.

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