Ah, so it's not a disco. Bummer.
I guess race car stuff is cool, too. 
Photography by J.G. Pasterjak
A lot can happen during a 24-hour race like the Rolex 24 At Daytona, and the typical pit box of an IMSA team reflects the cutting-edge technological nature of today’s top-level endurance machinery.
We got a backstage tour of the Turner Motorsport pit box at Daytona from pit boss Stu Brumer. Stu has been around road racing most of his life, being the founder of BSI Racing and building championship-winning cars for every level from local club racing to the Rolex itself. These days he claims to be semi-retired, even though his retirement includes building and managing all of Turner’s pit gear for its IMSA and SRO efforts and managing its fleet of transporters. It’s certainly an active semi-retirement.
The first thing you notice about the pit box at Daytona is the size. Daytona assigns a single car effort like Turner's a generous 24 x 20 pit space, and supplies a tent to cover that space at the request of the team. Multi-car efforts are allocated more real estate, and teams are allowed to bring their own shelter as long as it fits within the allocated space.
Big multi-car teams like Cadillac and Acura set up multistory complexes right on pit row, with dedicated “offices” for each car on the squad.
In comparison, the Turner setup is more modest, but it packs a lot of utility into a small footprint.
“The minimum pit size we’ll have to work with over the course of a season is 20x10 feet," says Stu, “So all of our stuff is designed to be able to function in that footprint. When we get more room like here at Daytona it’s just a luxury to be able to stretch out a bit.”
One thing you don’t see in the pit space is a lot of hard parts. In reality, not a lot of mechanical work takes place on pit lane. If a car is damaged bad enough to need major repairs, they’ll simply go back to the garage and complete work there. So spares are brought in on an as-needed basis by runners.
“We hope to only go through two sets of brakes during the race,” Stu says. “But sometimes we’ll need three.” Rotors and calipers with fresh pads are changed out as a complete set, meaning no fumbling with loose pads. Just undo the dry break connection for the caliper, two bolts holding the caliper to the hub and yank everything off as one unit.
Those inch-thick pads, by the way? About $6000 per set.
One of the key functions of the pit space is to act as a communication hub. Instead of simple two-way radios, the Turner squad uses multichannel intercoms that connect the entire team. On a typical race weekend, Stu says the team runs up to seven separate channels of voice communication between drivers, engineers, mechanics, tire techs, strategists and runners. The channels can be merged, isolated, combined or separated in infinite ways to make sure that conversations happen between the people who need to be involved, and other parties don’t hear a lot of cross talk not relevant to their jobs at the moment.
The deck of the pit cart overlooking the pit lane is for the race engineer and the strategists. These folks have access to all the data coming into the pit box from both the car and from race control. The engineer’s spot is basically mission control, where they’ll synthesize a lot of info coming in from crew members monitoring more specialized channels. The strategist will use this incoming info stream, as well as feedback from the spotters who are positioned on top of the tower along the front straight where they have a view of the entire track to make decisions about fuel usage, tire life and on-track aggressiveness.
Overlooking the engineer and strategist is a station for the driver coach. This is usually one of the team drivers who is looking at a real-time stream of driver-performance-centric data coming from the car and can deliver real-time feedback and coaching to the driver on track.
All this data has to come from somewhere, and in the case of Daytona, each pit box is wired with a data drop. Each team is assigned a data port that they use to connect to race control, and race control also uses it to connect to them.
One of the main things IMSA uses that data connection for is to monitor fuel flow. In the old days, fuel flow during refueling was handled in a very analog manner. Stu still has the box of aluminum flow restrictors that IMSA would specify for each team to insert into their fuel hose for a particular race or BOP configuration.
Beginning this year the system is all digital. A flowmeter connected to the fuel supply valve lets IMSA know exactly how much fuel is going to the car and for how long. Digital readouts on the fuel nozzle and main fuel valve let crews know in real time how much fuel is flowing and if they’ve met their 40-second minimum time for a full fill-up.
Underneath the pit cart is another lineup of monitor stations set up to deliver more specialized data. The leftmost station is usually occupied by a BMW technical representative. That rep—who will be assigned to the same team all season—typically watches engine telemetry in real time, as well as serves as the team's main conduit between themselves and BMW.
Another station monitors the feed from race control. This is also where interaction between teams and race control takes place. If IMSA needs to contact a team regarding a penalty or simply for informational purposes, instead of sending a steward walking down pit lane they’ll just slide into your DMs at this station. Official contact will be handled via two-way text chat and issues can be solved far more quickly—and with a log of the interaction—than via sneakernet.
Other monitors can be tasked to monitor things like weather, or play World of Warcraft should the car end up in a tire wall.
The only regular station not built into the pit box is the tire engineer’s. “Our tire guy wants to be out by the tire rack,” Stu says. “Originally we had him connected wirelessly, but we found out there could be almost four-tenths of a second delay in his feed,” which Stu says was not ideal for how he wanted to monitor temperature and pressure data being transmitted from the car. “Now he’s hardwired,” Stu says.
Within the bowels of the cart that Stu outfitted—“It’s a CTech shell, but every piece of hardware and networking I designed and installed,” Stu says—is a massive pile of tech and networking. A pair of PCs, each running four separate GPUs, drives the main monitor banks for the engineer and strategist, and three 12-port switches route the data cabling to various parts of the rig. Every single feed coming into or through the pit box is also recorded, and the drives for each race are archived after the event.
All this equipment has to run on something, and Turner doesn’t rely on track power for mission critical functions. “The track power is not always 100% reliable,” Stu says. “And even if it is, you’re not always guaranteed to be on your own circuit, so when a breaker blows you have another problem to solve that you don’t need.” So the team relies on generators that they control to provide constant, reliable power. There’s also a 3000w battery backup inside the pit cart that can run the whole setup for several hours.
Ah, so it's not a disco. Bummer.
I guess race car stuff is cool, too.
I am seeing a lot of similarities in tech to what a TV control room looks like, minus the fuel rig, and it makes sense. Tons of moving parts with a big team split into departments to make the whole thing happen.
I always wondered why they used generators instead of power from the track but it makes sesne that they would need a dedicated reliable source.
Chris Tropea said:I am seeing a lot of similarities in tech to what a TV control room looks like, minus the fuel rig, and it makes sense. Tons of moving parts with a big team split into departments to make the whole thing happen.
I always wondered why they used generators instead of power from the track but it makes sesne that they would need a dedicated reliable source.
The broadcast studio is an apt comparison. The vast majority of the people, equipment and activities in that pit space is centered around data and information, not wrenches and bolts.
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