Dragon Racing, now DS Penske
So Here’s a Fun One: Excel at 200 mph
Racing engineers basically live in spreadsheets. Every lap, they’re tracking battery levels, tire degradation, competitor positions - dozens of variables that determine whether they pit now or push for one more lap. It’s intense.
Dragon Racing came to me with what sounded like a silly problem at first: their engineers couldn’t open the same Excel file at the same time.
Yeah. Excel file locking. During a race. At 200 mph.
Picture This
You’re at Monaco. Actual Monaco - the race, not a vacation. Cars are screaming through the streets. Your driver radios in asking about energy reserves. You need to check the spreadsheet, but it’s locked because another engineer on your team has it open.
In racing, that kind of delay can cost you a position. Or worse.
And here’s the frustrating part - the data was RIGHT THERE. Formula E provides live telemetry from every car on the track. Timing, energy levels, positions, everything. But Dragon Racing couldn’t get it into their engineers’ hands fast enough. The official feeds existed, but the team was stuck copying numbers by hand, one engineer at a time.
I remember thinking: “This is one of the most high-tech sports in the world, and they’re being bottlenecked by file locking?”
So I Built Them a Bridge
The solution was actually pretty straightforward once you stepped back from the problem. I built a system that pulled live data directly from Formula E’s official feeds and pushed it straight into a database. The engineers’ spreadsheets connected to that database instead of trying to share files.
No more file locking. No more manual data entry. Multiple engineers watching the same live data simultaneously, each with their own view of it.
The tricky part? Race venues have absolutely terrible, unpredictable network connectivity. When the network hiccupped - and it ALWAYS does at race venues - the system had to reconnect automatically. No missed data. No gaps. You can’t tell an engineer “sorry, we lost a few laps of data” when they’re trying to make split-second strategy calls.
Monaco. Paris. The Grid.
The system went live for actual Formula E race weekends. Monaco. Paris. Real races with real stakes and real money on the line.
The engineers got their data in seconds instead of minutes. They could see not just their own car, but every competitor on the track. Energy levels. Lap times. Pit strategies playing out in real time. And because everyone was looking at the same live database, the whole team stayed in sync.
It’s kind of amazing how much competitive advantage you can get just by removing friction from information flow.
What I Took Away From This
Here’s what I learned about racing technology: nobody cares how fancy your system is. They care whether it works when twenty cars are doing 200 mph and the driver is radioing in, asking for data RIGHT NOW.
There’s no “please hold while we reconnect.” There’s no “let me restart the service.” Either the system works or it doesn’t.
Dragon Racing (now DS Penske) needed something that worked every single time, in venues with garbage connectivity, under conditions where failure meant losing races. That’s what I built. And honestly? Building something that HAS to work, that can’t fail - there’s a clarity to that kind of requirement that I really appreciate.
