Formula One Race Car Designs Technology News BMW Sauber F1 Performance Computer Chips: The BMW Sauber F1 Team finished its debut Formula One season (2006) in fifth place in the Constructors Championship, an impressive achievement for a team formed less than 12 months previously.

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The BMW Sauber F1 Team finished its debut Formula One season (2006) in fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship — an impressive achievement for a team formed less than 12 months previously. Like its competitors, the BMW Sauber F1 Team’s success depends heavily on the aerodynamic design of its racing cars — essential in a sport where the difference between success and defeat can be a tenth of a second. Together with its “Official Corporate Partner” Intel, the team looks continuously at ways in which technology can improve the design process, ultimately moving it further up the grid in the Constructors’ Championship.

The BMW Sauber F1 Team analyses the effect of aerodynamics on its cars through a combination of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and simulated tests carried out on F1 models in the team’s own wind tunnel. In CFD, computers are used to perform billions of calculations to simulate the airflow around a racing car as it speeds round the track. The team uses this data to understand why one design performs better than another. Unsurprisingly, CFD applications require enormous amounts of computational power and this is where Intel’s vast server processor experience is most relevant.

Over a four-month period, the BMW Sauber F1 Team and Intel evaluated the performance of the Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5100 series to power the team’s supercomputer cluster. They found that the Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 5100 series performed three times faster than the existing server processor running FLUENT* — the team’s CFD application. Based on these results, the team decided to invest in CFD, rather than an expensive second wind tunnel, to further improve its design process.

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