R&D Part 1: Here to Win

the front runner. It's a hard place to be. Everyone's gunning for you. But what I love about it is problem solving. You're given your chassis, you're given your engine, and you're given the track. How do you shave seconds off your time? My name is Joyce. I'm a research engineer here at OpenAI. I also lead the motorsports collaboration with Chip Ganassie Racing. I came to Indie because I'm a motorsports fan. >> The dominance that we've seen out of this team, >> Chip Ganassie was already looking to be the first motorsports team to truly figure out how to use AI to make them faster. The partnership was really a meeting of the world. >> You know, we have a DNA around here of trying new things and being on the leading edge. What's the next thing? How are we going to go faster? How are we going to beat the competition? How are we going to you know do better than we did last year? >> This year we are trying to figure out how to connect all the data that the team has. >> I think if we go back and look historically at that event uh it's pretty lively. >> Chip Ganassie is a very datadriven team. They have myriad data sources. They have historical data. They have data coming from every test session, every race session at a volume that's really kind of impossible to process. AI enables them to pull this data more quickly and look at it in different ways. Help them find advantages in between sessions. Really only a couple hours to take your learnings from them in the car. Long Beach is probably our biggest event after the IND500. We finished second last year. Prep is is huge. I would say it's more than 50% of our weekend. We analyze like what happened in 2025, in 2024, 2023, and so on and so on to try and see if there's trends. With Open AI, we're able to analyze a lot more data, a lot more races, a lot more strategies that are competitors cars and see what's best. 1/10enth of a second can make the difference between winning or losing a race. >> People think, "Oh, just have the fastest car and you'll win the race." The fastest car plenty of times doesn't win the race. Chip has a saying, do the simple things right. Pit stops are one of the things that they have really figured out how to do right. My name is Will Plamer. I'm the human performance trainer here at Chipanassie Racing. Indie car pit crews are different from other types of racing like NASCAR. They're taking either ex-colgate or professional athletes, paying them to just go and pit the race car. Our crews work multiple jobs, whether it's a mechanic, truck driver, engineer. than you know being called on at the most pivotal point of a race to pit the car. >> To put in context, uh an indie car pit stop is about 7 seconds. Chip Ganassie is actually pretty good about just being 7 seconds. Most other teams are slightly over 7 seconds. >> Guys, game plan today. We're going to warm up and then >> I use chat GPT is kind of I call it my assistant strength conditioning coach. >> Our hips towards the sky. I put in a week of workouts and saying, "I want you to write me the next one." And it listens for the most part and grows. And that's the cool part. >> What's that? >> Is that why I can't hear you? Cuz they're blabbing in my ear. >> Biggest challenge of being on the timing stand is to filter through all these signals that they're getting and deciding what is that crucial bit of information to get out to the driver. >> Imagine a driver sitting in the cockpit not knowing what's happening behind him or in front of him. How's that back behind Ericson? >> I paint that picture during the race. >> It's a very small gap. It's pretty busy out there. >> If he says a strategy is the strategy, I just go. >> Our engineers are using a variety of tools. >> Um, including some open AI confidential stuff. >> Maybe don't put that on the for everybody else to know. This Long Beach circuit synonymous with long blasts at high speed, but probably the most technical and challenging corner is that turn 11. A tight righthand hairpin. Incredibly tough to get right. >> All right, next time I will be green. Let's have a great day. >> Sounds good around once again, boys. Let's try and finish our victory lane. How are the tires? >> Yeah, they're still good. >> For 29 laps, Valex Po has sat and waited. Bided his time. >> At some point, what we need to do is just get on Felix's ass if we can't do it. So, we can try to pass him in the pits. >> You have to have more than one strategy for a race because your whole day can change fast. We may decide, okay, we're coming in this lap, but other cars may be pitting around the same time. We may just decide we have enough fuel to do one more lap. >> They could see all these cars bunched up and came into pit lane together. That >> Felix Rosaquist makes it in. >> That wasn't part of the plan. >> This was the opportunity. >> That's where the trust comes in. 5 4 3 2 1. >> That engineer tells them exactly how many seconds you need to fuel for and they do exactly that and nothing more and nothing less. >> We make changes on the fly. Oh, it's a RACE UP PIT ROAD AND PO MIGHT JUST HAVE barely beat Rosen out. It is tight. It is Alex Po. >> Let's go. >> Long Beach DP 3036. Woohoo. >> Congrats, man. We'll meet you in victory lane. >> Thank you, buddy. >> There is really nothing more visceral than seeing our models leave our lab and translate into real efficiency gains on and off the track. I think we've just dipped our toes in the water of what's possible here. In racing, we're always condensing against the time. >> Can we do some donuts? >> No. >> No donuts. >> It's the last race for the engine. >> No, it's two tests. I'm still going to do two tests. Okay.