A non-boring story about data and Formula One motor racing

It’s a new Formula One motor racing season, and data people love to talk about motor sports because it makes work look a bit like play.

But while all the other data people and will talk about squillions of points of real time data, here’s a story about the driver whom the Greatest Of All Time believes to be the Greatest of All Time.

Enjoy.

The 1984 United States Grand Prix. Ayrton Senna, in his debut season, ends his race on lap 47 after hitting a wall.

After the race, Ayrton debriefed with the team’s engineer, Pat Symonds. ‘It’s impossible that I hit the wall. The wall moved’. He was so insistent that Symonds agreed to go and look at the wall.

It had.

The wall was made of large concrete blocks used to delineate the circuit, but someone had previously hit the far end of a block and pushed it, causing the leading edge to come out by a few millimetres.

Senna was driving with such precision that those few millimetres were enough for him to hit the wall that time rather than just miss it.

“That really opened my eyes. I knew the guy was good but that really told me how special. Not just the driving but this conviction, the analysis and then the conclusion: I cannot be wrong, so the wall must have moved.

Everyone else would say, ‘How on earth did I do that?’‘ but the conviction he had was just staggering. And he was right.”

Ayrton was right. But the wall, and Keke Rosberg, won.

On Lap 46, Senna had great data for his knowledge of the track.

On Lap 47, his data quality had got worse, but he didn’t know, so his data analytics were wrong.

On Lap 48, he was off the project.

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