Fast thinking: How Andretti is tapping into AI to boost its race teams

The term AI is often met by eye rolls. It conjures up dodgy images of people with six fingers on one hand, but what does it mean for motorsport?

TWG AI recently announced partnerships with its sister organizations, Andretti Global in IndyCar, Andretti Formula E and the Cadillac Formula 1 team, but it’s not about making flashy social media posts or questionable music for the garage playlist, and it’s not about the dreaded takeover of the robots either. The partnership will deliver real benefits to TWG’s race teams, and the human element will very much remain.

“It’s machines complementing people, because we're resource limited in terms of the number of people that we can bring to the racetrack, so we're always going to try and maximize that,” Andretti Formula E team principal Roger Griffiths tells RACER. “But what AI will allow us to do is to change the way that we work in terms of efficiency.

“We're going to put as many brains into making the car go as fast as possible, or making the team operate in the most efficient manner, or being able to do analysis around our social media performance.

“Where AI will take this is perhaps do some of the heavy lifting for us. So we can use the human beings to focus on the innovative aspects of it, to do human things, and AI will help us have that massive resource data available so we can really dive deep into what it is that we're trying to get.”

Drew Cukor is president of TWG AI. He came to the role after serving as a colonel in the U.S. Marines, where he was an intelligence officer for 25 years, working on early defense AI programs. Again, dismissing fears of AI taking over, he likens its involvement in motorsport as being not too dissimilar to something we already do in our everyday lives, albeit on a grander scale.

“Can you imagine doing math without a calculator? Well, can you imagine making sense out of the kinds of feeds that these engines produce? The work that these guys do, all by yourself? You want a calculator right next to you, and we're building that,” he explains. “We're going to build that for this team so that the guys can see new signals and react to them.

“Augmentation is really what we're talking about here. We're really talking about data and analytics. AI can be a part of that, but it is not necessarily the end all. We're really talking about taking a bunch of data streams coming from all kinds of different places – could be from the car, could be from social media, it could be a lot of different sources and bringing it all together.

“Imagine merging all that data together and then saying to yourself, ‘There's really interesting signals in here that could be very powerful’ but the human mind can't make sense out of it. We just can't – we have amazing skills and abilities to decipher and see trends and patterns, which is why drivers are so amazing when they get behind the wheel and they process so many things and understand. But there's things in data that just don't come innately to the human.”

While an obvious starting point for AI motorsport applications might be strategy predictions and simulation, Griffiths says they are "not putting boundaries" on what it can do, whether that’s on track or off it.

“Strategy is just one application,” he says. “What we're looking at is, are there five applications? Are there 10 applications? Are there 500 applications of AI? We're not putting boundaries on where we think this can go.

“And this is the exciting piece for me – it's two different groups of people coming at the same problem with two different sets of experiences. What we believe that we can do together, the combination of those experiences will bring out new ideas, new thought processes, new applications.

“It's not just about engineering across the board, that's what's the most exciting thing. I mean, you can win races in many, many different ways. In Formula E, yes, there's a race on the racetrack, but there's many other races that we're trying to win, whether they're off-track related or on-track related, that will show that the group of TWG AI and and Andretti Formula E together are the most successful team out there.

“It's not just about being on the podium for the race. It's being on the various podiums across the whole spectrum of the sport.”

The on-track battles are only one front in the war Andretti is employing AI to try and win, with some elements applicable across multiple racing platforms. Mitsuaki Futori/Getty Images

As well as improving each individual race team in all its aspects, the new partnership also has the potential to bring each element of the TWG Motorsports umbrella together too, where they can share advances that will move all of them forward.

“Whether it's an IndyCar, a Formula E car, a sports car, an F1 car, whatever it might be, they're fundamentally very similar vehicles,” says Griffiths. “We're a little more unique because we're an electric motorsport program but vehicle dynamics applies in the same way. So I'm sure there are things that we can learn across the various programs that we can port over to other applications. And some of the things, particularly if it's social media-related, may also work across the other TWG programs, not just motorsport programs, but some of the other entertainment properties that the market team.”

It’s not just TWG properties that can benefit, either. With Cukor’s military background, he wants people from that part of his career to learn from motorsport, too.

“I'm going to talk to [Griffiths] about this, because I want to bring military commanders here,” said Cukor. “We have a lot to learn from this team, like the precision and the teamwork and just bringing it all together at the very pointy edge. Most sophisticated technology in driving has immediate applications in the military context.

“This is what AI fundamentally does, it brings all of these different kinds of ideas together, and it mixes in. It creates new knowledge. That's what we're doing here. We're going to create new knowledge, we're going to create new technology. We're going to create an entirely new strategy, and it's going to be because we're bringing all these different disciplines that were previously unconnected and didn't make sense and now it's all going to come to this fine point.”

One thing both sides are conscious of, though, is the financials. New technology costs money, and racing – at least in F1 and Formula E – operates to strict cost caps. So money won’t be poured into this new venture to make it work, but that in itself will help the technology improve by being forced to work within its means.

“There are cost caps, right? So we want to be careful, because of obviously the competitiveness of the group, so these aren't going to be like, ‘Let's go to the moon’, like trillion dollar averages. We're going to fit it within what the teams expect, and that's going to bring a certain amount of maturity in technology that already exists. It's just us gluing it all together.”

Griffiths adds, “It's something we're very, very conscious of. We've worked in the cost cap environment for the last three years, we know that the FIA is going to be looking very closely at what we do, and we want them to look really closely. We want to be completely above board on how we apply the value of the partnership to the cost cap.

“So we're having conversations with the FIA to ensure that they're very comfortable with what it is that we're trying to do. We're not trying to hide everything. We want it to be open, we want them to be part of the discussion, we want them to guide us, and we believe we can come up with the right formula that we can justify why we're doing something at the value that we believe we're doing.”