From Muy Interesante we never tire of reminding you how important competition is in the development of automotive technologies. The systems that save us today when braking, such as ABS , or stabilize the car in the middle of the curve, ESP, were extracted at the time of the races. Little by little, they have been refined to produce production vehicles that are more efficient, easy to drive and, above all, fast without being unsafe. But experimentation on the track goes far beyond pure driving , it has also brought us the sensors, cameras and radars that we use today to connect our vehicle with the network and even our smartphone. What would come to be the telemetry that we wanted to talk about with the engineers and technicians of the Alpine Elf Matmut Endurance Team .
When preparing the Alpine A480 for a World Endurance Championship (WEC) race, many parameters must be taken into account. Le Mans, the legendary French 24 Hours track, measures more than 13 kilometers and, despite the distance, the team continuously receives information about everything that happens on board. It is the Hypercar category and, beyond the quality of its drivers and mechanics, the data becomes the key to victory.
In the Alpine box
WEC teams, as is also the case in MotoGP or Formula E , work as if they were a single person. His coordination is overwhelming and even more so if we have in mind the chaos of a box, with the pressure of time on his shoulders and all his supplies at hand. Behind the screens, the carts full of tools and tires is the area of the screens, hidden from the sharp eyes of reporters to study and play with the numbers .
We spoke with Thomas Tribotté, Alpine Elf Matmut Endurance Team Operations Engineer to discover the ins and outs of this section of the team which, as he himself acknowledges: “In the Hypercar category, the race does not just take place, but is managed with a impressive amount of data ”. In the Alpine Elf Matmut Endurance Team they have an A480 as the protagonist , which again participates in the premier category of endurance.
To improve their tuning in the LMP2, the lowest category, they worked with 200 parameters to study. “Now, in Hypercar, this figure has risen to 500. This telemetry system sends us between 2000 and 2500 data continuously . To select and analyze them, we are eight engineers at the stand . Each one takes care of a part of the car. For example, there are two engine engineers who oversee power management, which is paramount in Hypercar, ”explains Tribotté.
Data wins
Data surveillance is key to achieving victory, whether in Endurance, Rallies or Formula 1. This information is classified into categories and, in the Alpine team, they are divided as follows: “Firstly, they are those that refer to reliability with, in particular, the temperatures of the brakes, the engine, the gearbox and the pressure of the tires . For this most essential data, we have set up alerts. Some are even activated directly in the car and are intended for the driver, ”explains Thomas Tribotté.
Its relevance was clear in one of the editions of the 24 Hours of Le Mans with the LMP2 . “We detected a technical problem. ..but thanks to telemetry we were able to manage the fault and wait for the most opportune moment to repair, and it was during a neutralization. In the end, we still won the LMP2 category ”. Asked about the challenges for next season, in the premier class, they will focus on exploiting the amount of fuel on board by optimizing their refueling.
