An electrifying disruption for the entire racing industry

The Electric Racing Academy (ERA) is the world’s first all-electric junior formula racing series. Founded by Beth Georgiou, Rudi Penders, and Dieter Vanswijgenhoven in Belgium, its mission is to transform motorsports by making it more sustainable, equitable, and accessible. ERA’s first, single-seater racing series kicked off with events across Europe in 2022 and an inaugural race at the legendary Circuit Zolder.

Technologies:
webMethods.io, Cumulocity IoT, Thin Edge, AWS Cloud

Challenges:
Improving the racing experience for drivers, engineer teams and fans. Providing real-time data for coaches and drivers. Using technology to lower barriers of entry and promote accessibility. Taking racing green.

Outcomes:
Provided high-frequency, real-time telemetry data on the thin edge. Achieved live data insights at a level only ever realized by F1. Included driver messaging to enrich telemetry, for a continuous flow of performance insights. Immersed race enthusiasts in a thrilling, more data-enhanced experience.

Electric. Raw. Power. With intelligence.

The Mitsu-Bachi F110e is an electrified beast. An incredibly intelligent, truly-connected, foot-to-the-floor powerhouse. 

Bringing ERA’s vision to reality meant taking on an ambitious project to generate real-time racing data for drivers, coaches, teams, and fans. It’s a vision powered by a fluid flow of data streaming off IoT and other internal and external sources. It’s a vision that represents a future where competition isn’t about who can afford the most expensive car—but who can master the technology to create a democratized environment open to everyone, fueled by data-sharing, innovation.

The plan was to disrupt an entire industry. But it required a partner, and technology, ready to take on many world’s-first challenges. For starters, electric racing requires a new way of thinking about the car. Speed, acceleration, and torque now depend on the battery. And braking is no longer just a way to hit the right speed for the turn—but a multi-dimensional system for generating power, changing race dynamics, and recharging the battery.

A co-pilot worthy of the name

To meet ambition with ambition, ERA combed the market looking for a clear way to gain pole position. With every possible option on the table, ERA chose Software AG and the Cumulocity IoT Platform both in the cloud and on the thin edge. 

From vision to technology

With a Cumulocity IoT Thin Edge device installed behind the carbon-fiber driver’s seat of the F110e, the sky is the limit when it comes to the data possibilities. The car communicates with the cloud via 4G—a robust link to the Cumulocity IoT Platform—continuously streaming data about speed, acceleration, torque, RPMs, temperature, power from regenerative braking, and a whole lot more. 

Racing into the new era of Super iPaaS

To connect the F110e, and enable a democratized, green future for racing, ERA chose a new type of integration platform: Super iPaaS.

Software AG’s Super iPaaS is the only platform on the market that can integrate anything, anywhere, any way you want. Unlike a traditional iPaaS that only connects your SaaS applications, a Super iPaaS integrates ERA’s entire enterprise. 

Powered by webMethods.io and StreamSets, the Super iPaaS gives ERA access to a single pane of glass solution for APIs, Applications, Events, Data, and B2B, and empowers both citizen integrators and integration professionals on one unified platform. You can integrate everything easily in a hybrid, multi-cloud world while maintaining unified oversight with unlimited reach. 

Car-to-Cloud Integration

ERA’s solution literally integrates everything from car to cloud. Onboard, an embedded Asus PV100A in-vehicle edge gateway touches all systems from the driver interface, to cameras, and sensors that measure torque, temperature and beyond. 

A 3D-interactive display brings in the on-board data and integrates it with live weather information from OpenWeather, and live track data and coaching suggestions powered by AI through the ChatGPT API. Knowing the weather from windspeed to humidity, the contours of the track, and how the F110e is performing—gives fans a new way of experiencing the race. It also allows coaches and drivers to make the smartest decisions, while the car’s systems align with driver input to safely accelerate through the next curve. And every curve after that. 

For fans that new experience includes deeper access to everything from pitwalks, to a view of the driver experience, to AI feedback on driver performance. For organizers, a Square Space web shop means agile merchandising and sales, and a driver booking system means better allocation of people and resources. For drivers, generative AI provides a new level of racing insight, and new flexibility to make critical decisions as weather, car, and competitor data changes by the millisecond. 

For ERA drivers to make the best decisions, they need access to the best information. Much of this starts with deep insights pulled from the car’s CAN bus—a system that allows a car’s electronic units and devices to communicate—collected by an edge controller running on Cumulocity IoT Thin Edge. Data gets sent to the Cumulocity IoT Platform in real-time, so drivers can make better decisions based on everything from motor heat to predicted track humidity—without having to correlate complex patterns on their own since the system does the heavy lifting with the help of machine learning and AI. 

Things get even more interesting by building a digital twin of the car and correlating its data with external sources. For example, driver lap times can be analyzed against numerous factors, including weather, or tire wear, and then run through the Super iPaaS ChatGPT connector to enable AI-driver coaching. 

Fans win thanks to AI-enablement as well. Imagine a virtual, 3D-environment, where you can sit in the car and experience a race, or virtual access to the pit so you can experience the heat of the moment at the center of all the action. This is Dieter’s vision and with the help of the Super iPaaS it’s not far from becoming a reality. ERA will provide the first truly immersive fan experience in racing—a revolution to the one-way passivity of television. 

And when fans want to know more about the track, driver, car, or anything else—they just have to ask. Through the integration of the ChatGPT API, this is now available to answer any complex questions fans have in natural human language. 

The impact of Cumulocity IoT goes far beyond any single race or car. Unleashed, live data is attracting startups, and inspiring innovation to turn all aspects of the racetrack green. 

ERA will ultimately enable a testing environment for sustainable initiatives like recycled part prototyping and a plastic-free paddock. The ecosystem that grows around a green racetrack will go even further, including scholarships to include young and more diverse drivers, and innovations for adaptive EVs (Electric Vehicles) to suit a full range of bodies and needs. 

Data integrated everywhere means organizers can implement requirements related to minimizing tire and brake usage—limiting particle release, and directly saving energy—powering cars using sustainable sources, and potentially helping shape consumer EV industry building and operating standards. 

Thanks to ERA’s leading role, the use of streaming data will continue racing’s long history of helping transition safety and health innovations from closed tracks to the open roads we all depend on for day-to-day life. The same intelligence that helps ERA cars save energy without sacrificing performance today may power your own EV tomorrow.

ERA chose Cumulocity IoT in part because of its truly multi-cloud, vendor agnostic approach. And it selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of how seamlessly it could combine short-term operational data from Cumulocity IoT with long-term data from an AWS data lake. 

The result is that driving data collection, generative AI, and machine learning (ML) initiatives through Cumulocity IoT and AWS has produced massive benefits. 

For instance, while off-peak times barely tip the scales on ERA’s infrastructure load, as a race weekend kicks off—fans log in, teams begin to analyze live data for insights, and each of the 10 (soon 20) cars on the track transmit 1,000 datapoints per second of critical data related to car performance and driver safety. 

Turning data into decisions lets a team engineer anticipate when a part is likely to fail, a driver know how hard to push in changing conditions, and a marshal wave a yellow flag if there’s a crash, while dispatching emergency crews to a precise location in an instant. Because AWS is a scaling superpower, ERA saves on resources, energy, and costs without sacrificing safety. Which is good for the environment, drivers—and the bottom line. 

Any vendor, anywhere, any time

Using Cumulocity IoT hosted on AWS has given ERA the keys to start building apps with greater agility. Because the platform is multi-cloud, like the Super iPaaS, ERA retains the flexibility to work with any vendor, anywhere, at any time. So when ERA wanted to offer live video feeds for coaches and fans, it integrated GoPro® cameras on driver helmets—up, running, and viewable via the cloud—in less than a day. And when it wanted to work with Square Space for merchandizing the fan experience and deeper B2B integration, the process was simple.

The ERA of generative AI

The Cumulocity IoT x AWS advantage is only growing as ERA makes greater use of ML and generative AI. With Amazon Bedrock for large language models, and soon, a text-to-speech component, drivers get live insights that even a few years ago would have looked like science fiction. 

It brings together live weather and forecast data; real-time collection and analysis of vehicle datapoints; and historical data related to every lap ever driven in the series. When fed through AWS and Cumulocity IoT, and analyzed using cutting edge ML, drivers get customized speed, breaking, and driving-line suggestions based on a theoretical “perfect lap.” 

Until now, these capabilities were only open to the top teams in F1. But with Cumulocity IoT and AWS, ERA is democratizing these features for everyone. And changing the motorsports industry forever.  

ERA is changing motorsports forever. Its IoT platform, with leading Super iPaaS integration, is the digital backbone attracting startups that aren’t just transforming the cars—but the services in and around the entire racing industry. 

It starts with the unrestrained thrill that only electric racing can provide: instant, full-throttle torque off the line. It continues with a fully connected experience, powered by AI-enablement, streaming data, and awesome live analysis.  It changes the world thanks to a thriving ecosystem pushing the boundaries of sustainability so that everyone can truly live the experience. 

This is the new ERA in motorsports.