The Critical Nature of Optimization

Recently I had the opportunity  to view the final testing and tweaking  of car #607, a late 90's Le Mans veteran, Audi R8. This car just a few years ago was the most sophisticated race car available. A durable, incredibly well-built car as far as race cars go. Many would say the R8 is superior to the new generation of Audi R10s that is Audi's first foray into diesel race cars. Amongst the competition to which an entire engine would be  sacrificed per race, this R8's engine can last forever. It is that good.

But the technology is only as good as the people putting it all together. Precision engineering and racing technology mirrors the creation of high-performance web sites for example, in a interesting way. For months and months the R8 team worked on getting the requirements nailed down, the parts together, assembling the framework and large components. Months passed as pieces of the puzzle like: wheels, drive train, engine, suspension, were individually tested. Some pieces were swapped out and replaced with items with different specs such that other components might work better. Months of this big picture adjustment occurred. Weeks after firing up the newly rebuilt engine,they started what is arguably the most important part of bring the Audi R8 to life: testing, tweaking and optimization. Down to the weight load on each wheel, which is adjusted by hand and a hex wrench to within millimeters of precision, every possible variable and system is tweaked to provide the best system performance for the next race. This is the portion of the build process where all of the team's experience comes into play. Optimization occurs for every track, every race and is configured down to being able to handle track conditions and the variables of say, the weather.

Without the optimization of the car, the R8 would be just another great race car with no real chance of winning a race. Much like launching a web site without spending time and effort going over usability, analytics strategy or thinking about optimization opportunitie