For passionate motorsport fans, the excitement of the race track is only part of the car experience. They are keeping a close eye on how the engineering world is moving rapidly from one race to the next as they pursue accelerated innovation.

The teams they support push the boundaries of R&D by developing vehicles with high adrenaline levels. This shapes not only the racing strategies of the teams, but also the future of driving. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Automotive Industry Senior Application Manager Richard Felton states that the struggle of racing teams to gain superiority over each other in vehicle engineering has been going on for more than a century.

He states that teams are working to develop more aerodynamic designs, more powerful engines and more responsive suspensions. However, today the competition is in a different area: getting more value from data about racing cars.

This determines both the winning teams and the values ​​that the brands sponsoring the races want to achieve. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) models developed by racing teams now potentially constitute the most valuable legacy in motorsport.

The race to turn data into innovation

Winning the last five laps of the iconic 24-hour LeMans race and becoming the new champion of the 2023 FIA World Endurance Championship Toyota GAZOO Racing Europe’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy Leader Dr. “Every time we test drive or race, we get a tremendous amount of data,” said Marc Hilbert. “The reason why the future of racing lies in artificial intelligence is the volume of data collected at this level,” he says.

The World Endurance Championships provide a unique opportunity to support the rapid development of Machine Learning (ML) models and the types of data they can use. Toyota GAZOO Racing team declared its championship with its vehicles taking the first two places in the race held in Bahrain in November. The team uses the Amazon SageMaker ML platform to work through the large amounts of data it obtains from races. This data, collected in different areas from vehicle performance to weather conditions, reveals the best options for optimizing the performance of vehicles in extraordinary situations that may be encountered in motor sports.

Dr. Regarding the data they collect, Hilbert said, “What we collect is not just data that is measured or observed continuously over a certain period of time, such as temperature indicators. We also collect audio data of the communication between the driver and the pit, as well as images obtained from the video signals inside the vehicle via television. “I think this will lead to a significant wave of innovation in motorsport,” he said.

Toyota GAZOO Racing uses Amazon EC2’s scalable computing infrastructure to achieve such innovations, and the use of this service is not limited to the racing team. Dr. “We use cloud technology from AWS to connect everything we use on the track to our driving simulator,” Hilbert said. In this way, we can test new setups before going to the race, and through these simulations, we can observe how they work and how our drivers feel about these setups. “We benefit from cloud technology at every step of our vehicle development work, from our racing cars to our passenger cars,” he said.

Bringing the racing spirit to the highway

Eliminating the distinction between race track and highway lies at the core of Toyota’s approach to motorsport. Thanks to AWS’s cloud services, Machine Learning (ML) models that helped win the 24-hour Le Mans race can also be used by engineers developing Toyota’s next generation passenger vehicles.

Dr. Hilbert said: “Soon after running a simulation at our Toyota GAZOO Racing headquarters in Cologne, our colleagues in Japan can also examine the results and use the parameters obtained from this simulation to apply them to the passenger cars they produce.”

The collaboration of data and artificial intelligence made possible by the AWS cloud service enables Toyota to innovate in three important areas. First, autonomous driving technology and the data it produces are helping to improve how race cars perform in traffic.

AI then optimizes aerodynamics, fuel and tire usage, making both racing and road driving more sustainable. Finally, the simulations used to develop race cars provide customers who want to buy a vehicle with the driving experience developed by Toyota and include them in this experience.

Dr. Hilbert continued: “Artificial intelligence can make driving and racing more accessible and fun. “When people drive Toyota’s vehicles, they will know that the machine learning data in these vehicles is derived from racing, and they will be able to bring the spirit of racing to the highway experience!”