THE processor chip that powers Apple Macintosh computers may help McLaren鈥檚
Formula One racing cars to compete in next year鈥檚 world championship. The Year
2000 controller, developed by McLaren鈥檚 sister company Tag Electronic Systems,
is the first car control system to use software running on a consumer PC chip
rather than special pre-programmed chips.
Tag will be using the PowerPC chip, which IBM, Apple and Motorola developed
to compete with Intel鈥檚 Pentium chips. The designers say that Pentium chips
generate too much heat to work in a sealed metal box with no ventilation. 鈥淲e
needed something rugged, and tough as old boots,鈥� says Peter van Manen,
operations director at Tag鈥檚 development centre in Woking, Surrey. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛
risk car failure because of electronic failure. And it鈥檚 hard to believe how
horrible the working environment is in a Formula One car鈥�.
In the early 1990s, racing car designers experimented with on-board
electronics that transmitted performance data from sensors round the car to a
trackside computer. This computer sent back real-time signals that controlled
the engine, gearbox, clutch and suspension. The driver only had to steer,
accelerate and brake.
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Then in 1993, motor sport鈥檚 ruling body decreed that Formula One cars could
only transmit data, not receive it. So today鈥檚 cars need an inbuilt control
system. But until now no one has been able to make an on-board computer that is
small and light, has enough processing power to give complete control in real
time, and is sufficiently robust to keep working throughout a race.
Racing teams have so far used controllers with dedicated chips connected by
heavy cables to 70 heat, pressure and velocity sensors dotted round the car. The
only way to tweak the controller has been to rewrite the program and change the
chips.
Tag鈥檚 new system relies on four PowerPCs working in parallel. The car
vibrates too violently for for programs and data to be stored on disc drives, so
flash-memory chips are used instead. Light, thin wires carry data round the car
as an 8-megabit-per-second serial stream.
During a race, data from the car鈥檚 sensors are processed in real time to
optimise engine performance and vehicle stability. Tag鈥檚 engineers at Woking
regularly update the operating system, and e-mail new versions to tracks round
the world as soon as they are ready. If this year鈥檚 tests are successful, the
controllers will be used for the season which begins with the Australian Grand
Prix in March 2000.
Tag will sell the new system to rival teams that it already supplies with
engine controllers, including Peugeot and Arrows. But only the McLaren team will
get Tag鈥檚 proprietory software.