How Aston Martin leans on IT to give Formula One drivers an edge

“My job is to make the car go faster,” says Clare Lansley, chief information officer for the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One team. “And we do that through technology.” 

With races in 24 geographies this year, ranging from Brazil to Australia to Azerbaijan, Lansley and the IT team she steers work fast and furiously to crunch data to determine the ideal aerodynamics, engines, and tires that will give drivers a competitive advantage, without losing sight of traditional IT responsibilities like cloud-computing and cybersecurity.

Nothing matches the adrenaline-fueled work that’s focused on the racetrack. Drivers debrief with the IT crew to share what they’ve intuitively felt in the car following a race. But those insights are still validated by the data, and everything from weather patterns, road conditions, and race location altitude will factor into Lansley’s decisions.

What if a rainstorm were to hit Florida ahead of the Miami Grand Prix? The IT crew quickly springs into action by looking at datasets and perform modeling to “completely change up your race strategy,” says Lansley. The team has precious little time to pause and reflect because improvements must be made between race events.

Lansley joined Aston Martin Formula One in July 2022, after stints at Jaguar Land Rover and McLaren Automotive. She oversees every element of IT, including what it takes to run the car and infrastructure security. When Formula One is in China for a race, it raises unique questions about cybersecurity, like if it is okay to run race mechanics in the WeChat messenger. Maybe not. 

“You’ve got to think about the territories you are going to and all the different elements,” says Lansley.

After billionaire Lawrence Stroll invested millions in Aston Martin, there was an acknowledgement that the newly rebranded Aston Martin Formula One team would need to spend more on IT, security, and hardware to put technology in the driver seat. “We’ve had real advances in the past 18 months,” says Lansley.

The British carmaker has had a busy week as it heads into the next Formula One race, the British Grand Prix, held at the Silverstone Circuit in England. On Tuesday, Aston Martin announced Andy Cowell as CEO of the Formula One team, joining from Mercedes. A few days earlier, driver Lance Stroll, the son of part-owner Lawrence Stroll, extended his contract with the team for at least two more years.

It also marks the one-year anniversary since Aston Martin opened a new 400,000-square-foot campus in Silverstone, putting all 700 team members under one roof for the first time in almost two decades. Design, engineers, and manufacturing all work closely side-by-side to craft components and determine the right settings and configurations for each race car.

The new building also led the Formula One team to embrace a hybrid cloud model with Microsoft Azure, a project it undertook in just six weeks. “I don’t need massive servers, consuming a serious amount of power, just to go and run those simulations,” says Lansley.

The team has also invested in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the past few years, though the prioritization has been on creating a more secure infrastructure, working with fewer software vendors, and developing more rigorous IT governance.

“I want one clean set of master data and everybody’s got to be using it consistently,” says Lansley. “It’s a journey and a cultural change. You have to take people with you.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

CDK Global hack highlights risk of one big industry vendor. A cyberattack on software company CDK Global, which recently sent U.S. car dealerships reeling, has put a spotlight on the risk of relying on a single niche provider dominating a single industry, The Wall Street Journal reports. Airlines, banks, and hospitals are all in a similar bind, as they tend to lean on a very few select vendors to book flights, process payments, and maintain patient data. But untangling from highly specialized software providers also comes with challenges. For example, adding vendors can introduce new avenues for cyberattacks. And it also requires training workers who have spent decades using the same system. 

Can anyone catch Nvidia? Chipmaker Nvidia, which briefly became the world’s most valuable company last month, has greatly benefited from surging sales of chips that power AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. The question many are asking is who can beat Nvidia, which controls 80% of the AI chip market, though Fortune says a more pertinent query may be: How much market share can AI chip startups—including Cerebras, SambaNova, and Etched—along with cloud providers and semiconductors giants, seize? “If AI is as big of a trend as we all believe it is, you’re going to have this really healthy ecosystem of chip makers and software creators born to solve application-specific problems,” says Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group.

AI-fueled stock market may echo dotcom bubble. Excitement over AI has lifted the S&P 500 index to new highs this year and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index has increased in value by 70% since the end of 2022, Reuters reports, drawing some comparisons to the dotcom bubble more than two decades ago. Tech stocks today are trading at 31 times forward earnings, compared to as high as 48 times in 2000, an indication the current rally is supported by sturdier fundamentals. But observers caution that too much AI optimism could lead to a bubble bursting if tech stocks continue to soar higher.

ADOPTION CURVE

IT loves AI, but so do the lawyers. IT workers use AI more than any other department within corporations, with 85% of IT staffers claiming to use the technology weekly, followed closely by marketing (80%). That’s according to a new survey of more than 7,000 full-time employees around the world conducted by software-as-a-service provider Freshworks.

If anyone would be at the frontlines of using AI, you’d expect it to be the techies of course—especially since part of their job may involve testing and evaluating new AI tools for the rest of the company. More surprising is the finding that in-house legal departments, famous for being the most risk-averse wonks within an organization, are big on AI. According to the report, nearly half of workers in legal departments say they now use AI technology on a weekly basis.

ChatGPT and other generative AI-based search tools are the most common AI tools used on the job, Freshworks reports, with one in three workers saying they are using ChatGPT today.

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– Moog, a defense and aerospace contractor, is seeking a SVP and CIO based in East Aurora, New York. Posted salary range: $325K-$400K/year.

– RAPP, a marketing agency, is seeking a VP of technology based in New York City. Posted salary range: $175K-$210K/year.

– United States Space Force is seeking a chief technology and innovation officer based in Dayton, Ohio. Posted salary range: $144.4K-$191.9K/year.

Hired:

– Kyndryl appointed Kim Basile as CIO, succeeding Michael Bradshaw, who is assuming leadership of the company’s applications, data, and AI practice. Basile previously held leadership positions at Lockheed Martin, Leidos, and Vanguard before joining Kyndryl.

– Mazda North American Operations, the U.S.-based operations of the Japanese automaker, named Neeru Arora as SVP and CIO, effective July 8. Arora will lead IT and the company’s digital transformation and report directly to CEO and President Tom Donnelly.

– Pearson announced Dave Treat has been appointed as CTO, effective this week and reporting to CEO Omar Abbosh. Treat will lead technology innovation and architecture, including Pearson’s AI presence. He joins the education company from Accenture, where he most recently served as a senior managing director.

– Primer Technologies, an AI/ML tech firm, has appointed Joe Chang as CTO. Chang previously served as CTO of Uber Freight and cofounded Marin Software, a software-as-a-service provider.

– Spineart has named Laurent Nodé-Langlois as CTO, where he will lead the medical firm’s strategic initiatives, including a focus on digital surgical planning, navigation, and robotics. Nodé-Langlois previously served as managing director at General Electric.

– Cogitate appointed Lava Jois as CTO, spearheading the development and implementation of the company’s insurance software tools and innovations in AI, data analytics, and data science. Jois initially joined Cogitate in 2021 as a VP.

– Casper Labs appointed Greg Whalen as CTO, where he will lead the company’s engineering team with an immediate focus on the launch of Prove AI, a governance AI tool. Whalen previously led engineering teams at Amazon Web Services, Xendit, and Experian.

– QuikTrip has named Bryan Williams as CIO, ascending to the role after 19 years at the convenience store operator. He began as a programmer analyst in 2005 and held several leadership roles, including most recently, director of technology.