SuperBike Magazine June 2020

75
Throughout the 2019 race
weekend Andrea Dovizioso
reaches speeds of in excess
of 350km/h. Danielo Petrucci
took his maiden win in the premier
and Andrea Dovizioso finished third,
almost the perfect result for the team
from Bologna. Behind these riders are
years of training, an incredible team
able to design, build and set up a bike
capable of winning a championship,
and Lenovo.
During lockdown Lenovo gave me
the opportunity to chat with Alberto Giribuola
crew chief to Andrea Dovizioso
and Daniele Romagnoli crew chief to
Danielo Petrucci as to better understand
the importance of a technical
partner.
In April 2018 Lenovo became the
technical partner to Ducati Corse. As
you know Ducati already know how to
build performance machines for both
the road and the racetrack, but like
so many other global business they
need to change the way they think, they
need to lead the digital transformation
and become a data driven company.
Choosing who they partnered with
was a logical choice, Lenovo a 34yr old
award winning company is able to provide
high level service and is known for
developing latest technology for home
and business use.
Ducati Corse compete in both the
MotoGP and World SBK championships,
this continues Lenovo’s ambitions
to become one of the world’s
most admired and globally recognized
brands. Not only does this partnership
mean that the team will be using
Lenovo PCs, Tablets, Laptops and
high-performance servers, at their
base in Bologna but also as they travel
from continent to continent.
At the track the Ducati Corse crew
will have a fully functioning top of the
line server in the race truck running
around the clock, and on the side lines
make use of 35 Lenovo ThinkPad P1,
Lenovo’s thinnest, lightest mobile
workstation worth about R55 000 each.
These workstations need to be durable
as life at the track is tough, they will
be exposed to very high temperatures
and humidity in places like Malaysia,
they need to be reliable at the speed in
which a weekend goes by there is no
room for error, as a team you cannot
be worrying about computer errors
and failures, they need to be light
enough to put in your backpack and
take to the hotel, the job of a crew chief
doesn’t end when you leave the track,
and most importantly they need to be
powerful, powerful enough to process
the large amounts of data gathered
from the start of the first free practise
to when the bike is shut down after the
chequered flag.
Approximately 50 sensors connected
to the various ECU’s will collect
digital signals including but not limited
to the bike’s velocity, gear shifts, bike
movement and brake and accelerator
pressure. All of this can collectively
aggregate more than 10 GB of data
per bike over the duration of the race
weekend. The combination of process
power, RAM and solid state storage
space convert this digital signal to data
to a line on the graph which a crew
chief can use to analyse in order to