Blog Post #1: Let There Be Write

As you may have read on the other pages of this site, my name is Antonio De Sanctis. I’ve created this website, and as an extension this blog, to write about all topics pertaining to motorsport, to share ideas, and interact with the motorsport community. As this is my fourth year in racing at a professional level (yes, four years already), I’ve come to understand that those who work in motorsport don’t just do it for the paycheck, their passion fuels them as well. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always bored my family and friends with conversations about race cars and F1. In elementary school, while others spent library periods playing on the computer, I was compiling pictures of Ferraris to hang in my room. From karting to when I was a kid, to running my first CFD studies in high school, it was clear that my passion for motorsports was deeply rooted in my DNA.

This year, I have been fortunate enough to find myself back at R. Ferri Racing, the team where I got my start in racing. When I rejoined the team, I told my team manager, Enrico, that I wanted to be more than just a data engineer. A data engineer plays a critical role in a racing team, but I wanted to continue forward in my push for race engineering as that is where my interest has always been. This has led me to do things I’ve never done before, developing my own methodologies and practices from the ground up, and refining my tools to make my decisions as reliable as possible.

When I initially started at R. Ferri Motorsport at the end of May 2020, I knew little about the professional motorsports world. At the time, I was an Aerodynamics and CFD lead at Ryerson Formula Racing, my university’s FSAE team, but I cannot stress how different a real team is from FSAE (The importance of participating in FSAE, as well as my thorough enjoyment of my time and my work there, will have its own dedicated blog post in the future). As a second-year mechanical engineering student, I had to learn about the ins and outs of racing from scratch, but I couldn’t have asked for a better environment in which to start my learning process. Enrico, Giuseppe, Neil, Vaz, Steve, and everyone else at R. Ferri Motorsport have been immensely kind, superb teachers, and most of all patient when I ask to go to technical inspection at a late hour. When I started motorsports engineering, there were many avenues to be explored. Initially, I was working on a lap time simulation model for our race cars, helping to better understand how the vehicle would perform on track. To create the model, I needed to know about the state of our race cars (tire set/age, fuel load, setup) at any given point during the weekend. So, in order to develop a lap time simulation model for the car, I had to create a reliable documentation and setup tracking system to be used by myself and the mechanics. It is obvious from the situation above, that the path to completing a project, especially as a junior engineer with no experience in the industry, can be difficult when there are so many interlinked pathways. This is just one example of many where guidance and documentation on how to approach a problem are so critical for a young engineer. Even though I was fortunate enough to have received that support, there were always so many niche questions left unanswered. Some solutions to certain problems come with experience while others require thorough thought experiments to work them out. From a mathematical and methodical standpoint, race engineering consists heavily of trying to quantify, correlate, and understand why things happen the way they do. The issue at hand though, is that the approach to quantifying, correlating, and understanding, isn’t straightforward, and will vary significantly from one engineer to the next.

What I envisioned from this blog was a place where engineers of all levels of experience could come and compare their thinking and methodology. Quite often, it’s easy to fall into your own logical traps, especially if you don’t work through problems with your colleagues. Whether it’s creating a race engineering spreadsheet in Excel, setting tire pressures, or even determining the best way to prepare for technical inspection, there are so many aspects of being a race car engineer that can and should be discussed. This will further enhance the capabilities of the collective community. This blog will feature posts of a few formats as I’m hoping to write about a wide range of topics; namely, technical articles about some of the topics mentioned above, answers to questions in comments from social media posts and emails, general discussions, and analysis of technical items throughout multiple disciplines of motorsport. As always, feedback on how to improve the blog will continuously be appreciated.

Thank you for visiting adsmotorsports.ca, and I look forward to an informative collection of blog posts to come!