Few sports are as heroic as race car driving. Traveling at speeds that would make an average driver’s head spin, these precision machines hurtle through an ever-changing pattern of competition. In the world of auto racing, though, the speedway isn’t the only place a race can occur. The teams that design the cars frequently race against the clock to get the cars conceived in time.

Just as a driver can end up facing unexpected conditions that change the nature of a race, a design team can be influenced by outside events. Worst-case, such events can turn completing the design on time and on budget into an effort nearly as heroic as winning on the actual track. 

That’s what happened to Triple Eight Race Engineering, one of the most successful race car teams in the world. To compete in the 2007 season, Triple Eight suddenly had to design and build a race car in record time. The design work was not only completed on time but the car also ended up winning the prestigious British Touring Car Championship (BTCC).

Although Triple Eight’s success was due mostly to the dedication and talent of the entire team, there’s no question that advanced computer architectures from AMD, enhanced by graphics chips acquired along with ATI in 2006, played a role. Without them, Triple Eight may have found it more difficult to complete the winning design.

The Race Behind the Race 

Triple Eight Race Engineering was formed in 1996, primarily to design, build and race automobiles from Vauxhall Motors, a Bedfordshire, U.K.-based subsidiary of General Motors. Vauxhall manufactures passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, notably the popular “sporty” Vectra and Astra coupes. 

For automobile manufacturers such as Vauxhall, racing teams provide a source of positive publicity—especially when they win—and over the years, Triple Eight has racked up a truly impressive record of achievements. It was the first BTCC team in history to win the “treble” (Manufacturer’s Title, Driver’s Title, Team Title) four years running. The company’s Australian division took second place in the 2006 and 2007 Australian V8 Supercar competitions and won the prestigious Bathhurst race twice in succession.

As the 2007 racing season approached, Triple Eight wanted to continue its winning ways. There was only one hitch: The BTCC changed the regulations, limiting both the amount of development time and the amount of money companies could spend on the cars. And that was a major blow for Triple Eight, because—for a variety of technical reasons—the car it had been racing, an Astra Sport Hatch, could no longer compete. Instead, it would have to switch to a different model, the Vectra, and it would have only a few months to create a completely new design based on this new car model.

BTCC cars look like the manufacturer’s car only from the outside. Such cars, in fact, are almost completely retooled in order to be competitive at the track. “Essentially, we take the same body shell and a few standard parts and then redesign about 90 percent of the car,” explains Triple Eight’s technical director Kevin Berry. Some of the modifications are primarily for safety; Triple Eight adds a safety cage, so that the driver is protected in the event of a crash. But most of the changes simply make the car lighter and faster. “Most of the car’s internals must be redesigned entirely from scratch,” says Berry.

In previous years, Triple Eight was able to build on the design work for the Vauxhall Astra that it had done for previous seasons. Now, however, it would be forced to essentially start from the ground up and build an entirely new virtual model, with all the sundry pieces and parts that would go into the final design. That presented a major challenge to Triple Eight, because the firm employs only 35 people, six of whom are design engineers. 

Even under normal circumstances, it’s a daunting challenge for such a small design team to create a racing configuration that can compete at the highest level of a demanding sport. Because the organization was already proverbially “lean and mean,” the combination of the new regulations and the shift to a new model completely removed any room for error. The team had to get it right the first time—and in about half the time it would normally dedicate to a brand-new design. “It was an extremely demanding design project to create an entirely virtual model and make entirely new parts in time to qualify for the new racing season,” Berry explains.

The ‘Engines’ Behind the Design

Fortunately, Triple Eight has a state-of-the-art computer system to help with the design work, according to Triple Eight’s IT director, Richard Walker. “Our system consists of 10 graphics workstations: one for each designer, with four extra for engineers who do only part of their work online,” he says. The entire engineering system networked via Ethernet to a file-sharing server. 

For software, Triple Eight uses a 3-D design package, Autodesk Inventor, along with a variety of other programs for special functions such as stress analysis. The engineers model all the components in 3-D and then check them out in dynamic computer assemblies. These same electronic models are used for the machining of the solid components that actually become the race car. “The ability to create a virtual model and play with it before machining the parts is a big advance from the old days of 2-D modeling,” says Berry.

Although software is obviously important, it’s just as important that the software be hosted on computers that are capable of running it efficiently. Computers, like automobiles, have “engines”: the CPUs and graphics processors that, respectively, power the main computer and the graphics card. These “engines” determine how well they perform with different types of software. 

Just like car engines, some CPUs and graphics processors are more powerful and flexible than others. That’s especially important with computer-aided design (CAD), because it is a compute-intensive application, according to computer industry analyst Rob Enderle of The Enderle Group. “Whether the CAD program is displaying data, creating models or doing virtual emulation, there’s an incredible amount of number-crunching. That constrains CAD applications to move at the speed of the slowest process,” he explains.

In the case of Triple Eight, the “engines” powering its design shop are AMD multicore processors and ATI FireGL™ workstation graphics accelerators (AMD bought graphics chip developer ATI in July 2006). And it’s a good thing, because without these advanced architectures, Triple Eight would have found it much more difficult to complete the new virtual model in time for the 2007 season.

A Race Against Time

From August 2006 to January 2007, the entire Triple Eight team scrambled to get the new model ready in time. “We were coming into the office at 8:00 in the morning and leaving at 9:00 in the evening,” Berry says. “We had to not only create the virtual designs but also go through several design iterations to get everything right and still leave six weeks to machine the parts for the actual car.”

The performance of the AMD and ATI architectures played a critical role in keeping people productive during the crunch. Of particular value was the ability to do a substantial amount of processing in the graphics accelerator rather than the CPU, according to Berry. “Before we had these systems, our engineers kept complaining that they were spending at least an hour a day simply doing rotations of their 3-D drawings,” he says. “Now that kind of work gets done so quickly that I no longer hear any complaints.”

The multicore CPU architectures also added efficiencies when the engineers were running more than one application, according to Walker. “The systems enabled our engineers to design and subsequently develop competitive race cars with extraordinary speed and efficiency,” he says. 

As a result, not only did Triple Eight complete the design in time to qualify but that design also went on to win both the Driver’s Championship and the Manufacturer’s Championship at the 2007 BTCC.