Racing to the Supermarket

What my Shopping Trips have in Common with TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team

This year I had the opportunity to visit the incredible Finnish round of the World Rally Championship at the beginning of August. As a racing car enthusiast, I had always wanted to see the 'Rally of the 1000 lakes', as it used to be called, with its various stages through the beautiful Finnish woods. It is the fastest rally on the calendar made all the more amazing as the speeds are achieved with trees just meters away. This is a real test of a driver's skills and it includes a series of jumps where cars get airborne for up to 60-70 meters.

Being at a rally you are only ever able to get a glimpse of the action as a visitor. Unlike the TV experience, where you are able to follow the whole course and see the start and finish, being present on site means that you have to put your focus on various spectacular stages. You have to be a real motorsports fan, because ultimately you park your car and then have to walk through the woods to reach just one of the many stages wind through the trees. Only if you are well organized or know the roads very well can you go and see multiple stages in one day - even then you can only get to see a small portion of a specific stage but you can get close to the action and then you really appreciate the speed and skill of the drivers as well as how amazing the cars themselves are.

It was also worthwhile to take the chance to not only go and experience the rally but to meet some of the folks at the TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team factory: The brains behind the highly sophisticated rally cars that have won the WRC multiple times in a row now.

Personal passion for racing cars

In order for a manufacturer to take part in the WRC it has to base its rally car on a production road car. That means each racing team has to homologate a certain number of cars that are then purchased by the public, and the manufacturers use those cars as a foundation for their rally car. Toyota's starting point is a Yaris, which is a very common car that is popular for reliability, a compact form factor and economic driving.

The manufacturer has built kind of a crazy version of the Yaris that they sold as a limited edition globally. I put my name down on the waiting list a few years ago for one of these cars and was lucky enough to receive my personal hand-built 'Rally' car version 18 months later. From the outside it looks almost identical to an ordinary Yaris but when you take it to the supermarket you realize quickly that it is something that's been designed with rallying in mind and far from ordinary.

According to TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team (TGR-WRT), when they announced they would return to the WRC in 2015, the concept of building a rally-inspired sports car was part of the plan. The vision was to take technical knowledge and experience from the highest level of international competition and apply them to a new road car that is also suitable for competition driving.

Fast and secure data transfer

What I have learnt by talking to the TGR-WRT IT team during my factory visit in Finland is the impact that feeding racing performance data from various parts of the car, mainly engine performance and suspension, back to HQ as fast as possible to optimise the car for the next stage. As the racing takes place globally from Europe to Kenya, Chile or Japan in harsh and very remote locations, the transmission of sensitive data recorded by the car's data logger has to take place in a secure and reliable way. Each branch office or remote location of the rally's stops has to relay information back to the engineers in the Finnish headquarters of the TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team.

The TGR-WRT IT department deemed that reduced complexity and the requirement for utmost data integrity to be an important criteria of success when they decided to switch to the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform as a security solution a few years ago. Their incumbent IT environment at that time was based on VPNs and firewalls, which added complexity and did not offer the desired speed and flexibility relevant for sharing testing or racing data as fast as possible. The switch to a cloud based solution provided the IT team with the required performance in remote locations and security based on Zero Trust principles.

As speed is not only a top priority for racing but as well for the back end IT processes, the simplification of the IT environment with a cloud-based Zero Trust approach not only enables fast and secure access for users, applications, and workloads, but also connects all remote locations seamlessly in a robust way via the Branch Connector. This allows the team to work from anywhere, even under extreme conditions.

Finish

My car just looks like a Yaris, but is really the slightly sanitized, road-going version of a rally car tested and optimized under extreme conditions. In the factory in Finland it could be turned into a full fledged racing car easily within a week. Reduction of IT infrastructure complexity and secure and fast access to data is a real innovation driver!

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