Eddy Cheever’s Red Bull Cheever Racing team will have its two drivers backed by wireless IP at The Brickyard.
In IRL Racing, the best drivers have backing from a whole team of professionals, who monitor every facet of a car’s operation. The more a team can learn about its car during a race means it can do more to keep that car running.
According to a Forbes report, the Red Bull Cheever Racing team will back its two Toyota cars driven by Alex Barron and Patrick Carpentier with wireless Internet Protocol technology.
This weekend’s Indy 500 will feature products from networking company Cisco at the track. Several Cisco Aironet 1300 wireless access points will be in place, communicating the sort of data to mechanics that telemetry devices used to do.
Those telemetry devices had their shortcomings. “We were very limited in what we could do,” says Eddy Cheever, team owner and himself an Indy 500 winner from 1998. “At Indy, the telemetry would go dark on part of the track.”
More access points have been setup throughout the Cheever racing team’s presence at the Brickyard, so access to vehicle information will be available in the garage and the trailers. There will be audio and video streams so the crew can see and speak to the driver, and watch the car itself.
That data will let Cheever’s crew spot problems with tire pressure, vehicle drag, or other issues that can be corrected in the pits. They can even send the data to Toyota engineers in Tokyo for review.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
