Learning in the real world
There’s a dream scenario in which trackside reliability engineering is barely noticed because everything fits perfectly and works right out of the flight case. The reality, even in a season as successful as this one, tends not to be quite so simple. F1 cars are prototypes, design teams like to take risks, and parts are produced at a rapid rate. Not everything can go perfectly or work the first time of asking.
As a reliability engineer, Abbie will work proactively to minimise the risk, while ensuring the team are prepared to deal with any instances where a new component doesn’t quite fit right or function as intended out of the box.
Dell Technologies’ AI Factory helps with this by adding automation, skipping manual processes, and sorting through the data captured. It speeds up Abbie’s job and allows her to prepare more thoroughly in the short time she has to work proactively between race weekends.
“Our aim is to be as proactive as possible,” says Abbie. “The ideal is that nothing is a surprise, and we never have to fire-fight. Realistically, that’s hard to achieve, especially with the rate of development being as high as it is.
“Where there is a problem, we want to contain and resolve it quickly, but we also want to make sure that problem doesn’t happen next week, or two seasons from now. The issues that you see on track are perhaps the one per cent – but even the 99 per cent that are never seen on track, we’re working to ensure it doesn’t happen in the garage either.
“How many issues are we dealing with on a race weekend? It really varies across the season, but it might be anywhere from 50 to 100 plus. More, of course, at the start of the season when the car is new, fewer as we get to know it.”