Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time, it is Bruce Cleveland. Now retired, his career in technology career in Tech spanned more than 40 years as an operating executive and venture capitalist. Bruce held senior executive roles in engineering, product management and product marketing at Apple, AT&T, C3.ai, Oracle and Siebel Systems. He was also an early-stage investor and author of Traversing the Traction Gap.
Here he writes about his passion for high-performance cars.
“I have been extremely fortunate to have owned multiple foreign sports cars from a variety of well-known brands. They are designed by amazing engineers and always look, sound and drive awesome. However, while they are high-performance driving machines, until last year I had no actual experience operating them at the speeds they were designed to achieve. I simply used them to cruise around on weekends with day trips to the ocean, redwoods, or other great California locations in the nearby San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2019, as I prepared to retire in 2021, I knew I needed a hobby that would keep me intellectually and physically active. I began to put considerable thought into what that would be and decided to try and learn how to drive and then pace a high-performance car on a racetrack. Over the years, I had enjoyed learning to fly and sail, so I thought this might be something new and fun that involves mental and physical skills.
At the time, my daily driver was a BMW M4, so after some investigation I elected to enroll in the BMW High-Performance driving school in Thermal, CA. They offer a series of classes that take you from complete track novice to securing one type of race license (Sports Car Club of America ). I enrolled in my first course and to my surprise I was one of the faster students. I was hooked and wanted to learn more.
After completing the BMW program and with a lot of help from one of my son-in-law's (he has a business called Laptimz and coaches people how to convert their street cars and track them), I began to take my BMW M4 to a variety of open “track days” or High-Performance Driving Events (HPDE). These are days where you can bring your streetcar – any type, any year - to a racetrack (e.g., Laguna Seca, Sonoma Raceway) and drive it as fast as you dare.
On HPDE days, you aren’t allowed to technically “race” against the other participants who are on the track with you. Instead, you try to improve your driving and generate faster lap times, competing against yourself. I had a good time doing this and asked my son-in-law to convert my M4 from a stock daily driver to a dedicated track car. So, he added a partial roll cage, aero, race seats, race harnesses, and race suspension components. And, a cool new livery (the name of the exterior paint job or vinyl wrap on a race car).
Then, a few months before I was set to retire, my wife discovered that Ferrari has a driver education program: Corso Pilota. For the BMW school, you don’t need to own one of their vehicles. but for the Ferrari program you must own at least one Ferrari before you can apply. Then, if you successfully complete the program and are approved by the race directors, you can enter and compete in their one-design race program: the Ferrari Challenge. The program is a race series currently featuring the Ferrari 488 Challenge Evo with 670 HP and top speeds nearing 200 mph.
I went through their training program from March through May of 2022 and once again put down some fast lap times. As a result, I made the bold decision to purchase an Evo and to participate in the Ferrari Challenge series. Although I had zero experience racing, I entered the last event of the 2022 Ferrari Challenge program held at Sonoma Raceway in September 2022.
It’s a track I have driven multiple times in my BMW so I thought it would be a good place to begin with the Challenge car. Unfortunately, to keep me out of the way of drivers competing for championship points in the lesser-experienced race groups, I was placed by the race directors in the highest group. Pros and very experienced drivers race in that group so I came in dead last but I had the opportunity to gain some much-needed race experience. And, my grandkids didn’t care – they loved watching grandpa on the track.
Technology and Racing
Over the past decade, real-time data with retrospective and predictive analytics has emerged to play a significant role at all levels of the sport. Every modern race car has onboard sensors and computers that track and capture the driver’s inputs and the car’s responses at every moment – steering input, brake pressure, throttle position, air/fuel mixture, wheel rate, tire pressures, and many other factors that affect car performance.
In fact, if you look at the design of the livery of my Ferrari, you will notice that it contains a series of mathematical symbols; I designed the livery to tell a story. The color up front is a nod to a great car– iconic Ferrari red. Then, blue where the symbols represent how data and machine learning have impacted the sport. When you combine a great car (and driver), with great data, you can generate the fastest lap time – represented by the violet color used in F1 and other series to denote the driver with the fastest lap time.
At the elite levels of racing such as F1 and the Indy series, onboard data is streamed in real-time to the race team engineers located on track and even remotely to engineers back at the factory. They use this data to dynamically adjust strategy as the race progresses (e.g., when to pit, when to change tires, how much fuel to carry, what adjustments to make to suspension and aero, etc.) For most teams, however, real-time data is captured in the car during an event and stored on an onboard SD card located in a small piece of hardware in my car called a vbox (onboard video streaming). This data is reviewed afterwards on a laptop using an application such as Race Studio from AIM.
My pro coaches get limited real-time streaming data generated by my car as I’m driving. This information is made possible by hardware/software applications such as the vbox and sent to their laptops via a gpx system. They use this information to provide me with real-time feedback about my driving and other racers via the radio in the car.
While modern, high-end street cars will let you make a few macro changes to your suspension, modern race cars enable the driver to make far more fine-grained adjustments to the suspension while they are driving. In the photo below, you can see that the steering wheel in my car has several buttons and two dials. Those dials let me change the “traction control” of the car on demand. I can make the car do more or less of the work to keep the wheels from spinning during turns and under control. I adjust these as I’m driving down straightaways in preparation for different types of turns or if tire or and/or track conditions change – from wet to dry or vice versa, for example. In other race cars, you can also change things such as brake bias – make the front brakes or back brakes grab harder – and other suspension adjustments. The Ferrari Challenge car is so well-engineered it automatically adjusts brake bias as conditions warrant.
Still, even with all the modern technology available, the results of a race are highly dependent upon humans – driver, coach, mechanics, etc. Before an event, I always sit down with my coach and we go over the track configuration on paper. There, he typically points out key things such as the gear I should be in at each turn, braking points, and other tips I can use. Below is an example of the 5-mile configuration of a private race course in Thermal, CA and the mark ups Alex Premat, my pro coach, made.
When you put it all together, you get the opportunity and the thrill of driving a phenomenal car at unbelievable speeds. Then, add 25 other drivers onto the track with you on race day and you have an adrenaline rush like none other. Watch this video with the sound turned up to get an idea of what its sounds and looks like to ride along with me.
While I am still in the early phases of participating in this challenging sport, I’m having a blast learning new things at my age and I hope to be able to continue for as long as I have the physical ability to do so!"
Keep up with Bruce at linkedin.com/in/brucecleveland and on Instagram – bclevela205
Just another typical retirement hobby to keep from getting bored...
Ha ha ha. Stay safe.
Posted by: Jeffrey Morrison | December 14, 2022 at 06:17 PM