McLaren preview standard ECU

The 2008 Formula 1 season will herald the start of a revolution. Research and development funds will be spent not on the duplication of common components and infrastructure, but channelled towards pure performance and road-relevant innovation. Every team on the grid will use a standardised Electronic Control Unit (ECU), and a technical partnership between McLaren Electronic Systems (MES) and Microsoft has been awarded the supply contract by the FIA. Although the unit is referred to as a ‘standard’ ECU, it’s actually a very sophisticated device, and will play a vital role in helping shape the cars of the future – on the road and track. “It’s not about dumbing down to one level, it’s about elevating everyone up,” says Peter van Manen, managing director of MES. “A common electronics platform developed from a best-of-breed system has the potential to make a big difference for the whole grid.” The ECU is the nerve centre of a Formula 1 car, controlling the power train and delivering data by dealing with more than 6000 different parameters. Reliability is a priority. The physical boxes are therefore only slightly modified versions of the units that have been supplied to other teams for a couple of years. Vital issues in any new design, such as cooling the processors, had already been addressed.

Proven hardware

“We know we’ve got something that works on a racing car,” says Jonathan Hand, technical director of MES. “We didn’t want to risk supplying a possible 12 teams with a brand new piece of electronics that had never been used on a racetrack.” Although the hardware was already proven, writing the software was a huge technical challenge. It demanded the evolution of a common code that would satisfy the needs of the teams, running a variety of different engines and gearboxes. In order not to be pulled in different directions, the team went back to basics. For example, what happens during a gearshift: “We broke down how you manage the engine behaviour during the shift, and looked at the point at which you ask the gearbox to disengage one gear and re-engage the next,” says Hand. “If you consider those steps in sequence, what you want to do with one gearbox is pretty much what you want to do with any other.”

Highly configurable

It may be a generic solution, but the ECU has detailed architecture. It’ll give teams flexibility in how they set up their software, which options they choose to enable, and how they fine-tune parameters. “The system is designed to be highly configurable, and the team that learns how to configure it best will do better,” says van Manen. Inevitably, many of the headlines revolve not around the functions the ECU offers, but one that it doesn’t: traction control. This feature, like launch control, will not be available in 2008.

The contract is testimony not only to MES’ technical prowess, but also to the level of confidentiality for which it is renowned. Some observers raised their eyebrows at the award of the ECU deal to a company that shares its name with one of the competitors. It should have come as no surprise to the teams, as they already use MES components, including the high-intensity rain lights. Formula 1’s reaction time is the envy of other industries. The rapid response is shown by the speed with which the ECU project progressed. The contract was awarded on July 5, 2006. Work began next morning. Teams were supplied with the system specification in September 2006. Production started in November and the first items were delivered on March 9, 2007. All competitors ran the unit on the racetrack in Barcelona on November 13-15. The unit’s debut at this, the first winter test, was a success: it completed 16,000km – equivalent to 50 race distances – without any real problems. “The debut performance, running during three days with no failures, was a milestone that we were all quietly very pleased about,” says van Manen. “The target was always to have something running and stable before teams started testing their new cars in 2008.” The finished version highlights the colossal leaps forward made between the initial ‘STAR system’ – which raced in 2000 – and the STAR 2 system that evolved into the 2008 ECU.

Winning combination

Its predecessor had a memory of 256 megabytes and a maximum of 192 logging channels, yet STAR 2 has a memory of up to one gigabyte and 512 logging channels. There has been a staggering progress in ECU processing power in recent years, up from about 200 million instructions per second (MIPS) to almost 2000 MIPS. The ECU on a modern high-performance sports car, such as the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, uses less than 50 MIPS to run the engine and conduct all of the onboard diagnostics. The new ECU’s initial incarnation did not fully reveal the hand of the engineers behind it.

“We didn’t want to be changing everything on day one,” says van Manen. “It needs to do a job, needs to supply high-fidelity data to the teams, but also acts as a road map for what will be available as it develops.” McLaren migrated from its own internal systems to a Microsoft Windows platform in 1999 and immediately reaped benefits. “Much of Microsoft’s core technology is already widely employed in teams’ factories and pit-lane garages,” says van Manen. “The next step in the process is to add the management of data from other sources as well as the racetrack, such as engine dynamometers and wind tunnels. For that we will need to use the latest Microsoft SQL and business-intelligence software to manage these extra data sources. This is a great opportunity to take some of the residual clunkiness out of those interfaces. A more efficient infrastructure also has potential cost savings. It allows the teams to exploit relatively inexpensive and powerful PCs and widely available software tools.” Twenty megabytes of raw data are received from a Formula 1 car in real time every lap. More efficient management of this data could involve huge benefits, for race teams, the automotive sector, and for the aerospace, finance or pharmaceutical industries. “We are pushing boundaries with this project,” says van Manen. “Everything we’ve seen since being awarded the contract suggests the tie-up between MES and Microsoft will be a winning combination.”