Achmad Chadran, a Content Strategist at Micro Focus and Managing Editor of the online journal TechBeacon, writes about the carbon-reduction innovations that Jaguar TCS Racing is pioneering in its Jaguar I-TYPE 6 race cars in his bi-monthly Sustainability Track blog series.The next racing event, the 2023 Greenko Hyderabad Grand Prix, takes place on Saturday, February 11, in Hyderabad. Micro Focus is the technical partner of Jaguar TCS Racing.
Diriyah double-header
The excitement was palpable at the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship double header in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, on the weekend of January 27th. Jaguar TCS Racing put in a spine-tingling performance, with Sam Bird finishing third in Friday night’s race and fourth in Saturday’s race. Mitch Evans finished 10th on Friday and 7th on Saturday. After Diriyah, Bird stands at 4th position and Evans at 9th in the drivers’ standings.
What’s great is that the season is early yet, with many more thrilling races still to come.
Mission: carbon net zero emissions
While we root for Team Jaguar to garner more wins and amass more points, Jaguar TCS Racing’s larger, more ambitious mission is to enable the reimagination of Jaguar as an all-electric, modern luxury brand from 2025. Its Jaguar I-TYPE 6, designed for the new Gen3 era in Formula E, is the first race car to feature both front and rear powertrains, with 250kW regen in the front and 350kW regen at the rear, which doubles the regenerative capability of last season’s Gen2 model and removes the need for conventional rear brakes.
Its involvement in Formula E, recently named the world’s most sustainable sport in the 2022 Global Sustainability Benchmark in Sports annual report, showcases Jaguar Land Rover’s commitment to achieve carbon net zero emissions across its supply chain, products and operations by 2039 as part of its Reimagine strategy. Indeed, the team enters the 2023 season after having been awarded FIA Three-Star Environmental Accreditation, the highest possible rating. The recognition affirms Jaguar TCS Racing’s best practices and commitment in environmental management, as well as its continuous effort to improve its processes.
Likewise, renewing our Official Technical Partner relationship with Jaguar TCS Racing for a third year affirms Micro Focus’ commitment to reducing our global carbon emissions to “net zero” by 2050. Our world-class Vertica Analytics Platform, IDOL Unstructured Data Analytics, and Professional Services enable the team to collect and process vast amounts of data, to create more accurate predictions, make better time-critical decisions during races, help maximize efficiency, and minimize carbon footprints. Here’s how these three resources help Jaguar TCS Racing advance environmental sustainability.
Vertica: advanced analytics from myriad data sources
As part of a Season 7 initiative to rebuild its data processing and analytics environment from the ground up, Jaguar TCS Racing worked with Micro Focus to migrate from its legacy NoSQL system to an advanced analytics and machine learning platform powered by Vertica. Thanks to Vertica, in Season 9 there are no longer limits to how much data Jaguar TCS Racing can analyze as the team now has full access to all the raw data from every practice, qualifying, and race session. This information is as vast as it is valuable, and all of it is now available for analysis.
IDOL: finding insight in unstructured data
This vast trove of strategic data includes unstructured data, too. This data comes from sources such as radio communications, broadcast footage, and social media coverage. Micro Focus Professional Services experts in data analytics worked with the Jaguar TCS Racing team to fully understand the race environment and worked collaboratively with them to create a solution. Micro Focus recommended IDOL, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven platform providing text, audio, video, and image data analytics to cut through the noise and extract maximum and real-time value from unstructured data. IDOL converts speech to text and prioritizes it into an AI-based workflow solution providing actionable insights. This provides vital input to Jaguar TCS Racing’s own race strategy across the race weekend.
Micro Focus Professional Services
With the software platforms deployed, Micro Focus Professional Services implemented IDOL to enable the ingestion of a large body of unstructured data from a variety of sources, providing real-time insights based on energy and tire strategy from practice and qualifying sessions. In the words of one Jaguar TCS Racing Performance Engineer, “Micro Focus Professional Services became an extension of our own team as we worked on the IDOL-driven app and user interface. We had so many things to take into consideration: recognition of different accents (as of course drivers and race engineers speak different languages), how to reduce background noise, interpret common messages, and how to present and interact with the data in the most user-friendly way. And of course, all this information needs to be presented in real time.”
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So while Micro Focus helps Jaguar TCS Racing manage each race, we’re also helping them achieve something much longer-lasting. It’s a logical extension of Micro Focus INSPIRE, our environmental, social, and governance program, which puts the environment at the core of the way we operate. You can learn more about our INSPIRE program by downloading our free e-book, Environmental Transformation: Embracing environmental sustainability at Micro Focus.
