And bar codes are in the pits!
And bar codes are in the pits!
Bar codes provide slick action to V8 Supercars tyre supplier
Modern motor sport is a complex, high octane charged combination of sporting ambition and big business. The sport has been addicted to technology since day one, with protagonists striving to find a technical advantage to beat their rivals with, whether it is the first aerodynamic wings from Lotus in 1960s to pit lane computers that can control the engine as it races. Technology has not just been a major player in the cars; information management has been at the forefront of key successes. Great Britain’s McLaren has had a long and close relationship with Sun Microsystems, whilst Compaq/Hewlett-Packard is the title sponsor of the Williams formula one team.
Australia’s V8 Supercar championship may not be a global player, but it is the premier local championships and no-less competitive. Dunlop is the sole tyre supplier to the series. To help the championship’s organisers keep tabs on the tyres it supplies, and ensure teams stick to the rules, it had a bar code included on the tyres and monitored everything with wireless data capture devices.
The Australian V8 Supercar and Konica series wear-out 8500 Dunlop tyres. Managing the three types of tyre across the 35 cars in the Supercar series and 31 in the Konica series is a tiresome job. Dunlop and the teams have to comply with a raft of rules.
AVESCO, the governing body of V8 Supercars, insists on a “control tyre”. Thus a practice, race and wet weather tyre is supplied by Dunlop and only this type tyre is allowed to be used. The governing body also insists that tyres can only be allocated to a certain car, so if a team runs two cars in the series, it can not use a spare set from one car on the second car. As well as having rules as to how many tyres should be on wheel rims (four permanently mounted wet weather tyres and eight dry); there are even rules on how a team disposes of tyres. All tyres have to be returned to Dunlop at the end of the season. Dunlop in-fact owns the tyres, which they get back, tattered and race worn at the end of the season.
“It was imperative that we had a way of tracking each of the 8500 V8 Supercar tyres we will use, which led us to look at alternatives. I felt if we could develop an encoded system for each tyre, then it would benefit ourselves, AVESCO and all the teams involved,” said Aaron Jones of the complex situation Dunlop faced. As the National Co-ordinator of Motorcycle and Motorsport [sic] at Dunlop, Mr Jones went looking for an information management solution.
”Initially they knew they were looking for a system and bar codes was one of the most obvious solutions,” said Michael Andersen the account executive of Bar Code Products in Brisbane that designed the system for Dunlop. Mr Andersen referred to tracking racing tyres as being no different to any other product; it was just a very interesting environment.
”It is a unique way of doing it,” said Kevin Fitzsimons the operations manager for the V8 Supercars Series at Dunlop, adding; “It used to be manually intensive as we had to write it all down.” Mr Fitzsimons explained that the V8 Supercar championships is unique in that the teams can keep the tyres after each event for testing purposes, whereas other championships such as the Champcar Series in the United States expects teams to return the tyres after each event. Using the bar codes and Symbol data capture devices Dunlop is able to track each tyre to each team and car.
Special metal strips were inserted to the wall of the racing tyres by Dunlop at the racing tyre factory in Nagoya, Japan. An indent for the bar code strip was designed into the Dunlop SP Sport K5P5 racing tyre and SP Sport R92 wet weather tyre to cope with the vicious kerb bashing that exists in the saloon car series.
”Considering the tyres reach 100 degrees Celsius in race conditions the amount that peel-off is minimal,” Mr Fitzsimons said.
Whilst Dunlop engineered bar codes into the tyres, Bar Code Products wrote a database application for the handheld Symbol devices. Mr Anderson said the database was fairly small and needed to be simple to use at the race track, so the Clarion environment was chosen.
Now every tyre that is distributed to a team at an event is scanned and tracked to ensure that that tyre is only used by the racing car it was assigned to.
Dunlop claim that managing the distribution, rule compliance and collection of used tyres takes just three hours, where it used to take 25 hours. With the data collected and added to a database, organising body AVESCO is able to access detailed reports on each team and its tyre usage.
”Time is money and creating the reports is a much faster process,” said Mr Fitzsimons of the improvements the system has introduced.
With the 2002 season completed and the 2003 season due to kick off in Adelaide in March, the system will be in use for a further two seasons.