Shanghai Daily news

With the world’s speediest men winning back both the annual drivers title and the team championship, the Ferrari team is driving forward with more efforts in its technical improvement.
It’s working closely with Inf ineon Technologies Co, Europe’s biggest producer of automotive-related semiconductor products, to develop a data acquisition device on its race cars to help push them faster.
The device, which the two partners call DAQ, is put on Ferrari race cars to collect data during the race to help analyze the car’s performance.
Under their plan, the first car installed with such a device will be in place by the end of this year and will attend the next round of racing from the beginning of next year.
“We hope the DAQ system will help our racers to run faster than other teams,” said Dieter Gundel, who works with the electronics department of the Ferrari team.
“Race cars are different from ordinary cars, which can test hundreds or even thousands of cars to collect the driving data before their mass production,”said Gundel.
“But it’s a different story for race cars. The more accurate data we get from one car, the more possible we can beat others next season.”
Neither partner would reveal how much has been spent on the DAQ program.
The program started in the spring of last year and by June this year, the first device was put on cars for trial.
For Infineon, the world’s second-largest automotive semiconductor maker, providing data systems to a top Formula 1 team may be far more difficult as they have to be as light and as small as possible.
“We have to make the DAQ device smaller and smaller as it’s installed on a race car,” said Reinhard Ploss, senior vice president of Infineon’s automotive and industrial business group.
Ferrari and Infineon are also planning on more cooperation and the next step may be improvements on engines, the core part of a race car.
Ferrari has claimed the constructors championship this year, even though there are still three races left on the 18-leg grand prix calendar.
Its two drivers, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, have already been crowned as the No. 1 and No. 2 in the drivers’standings.
German-based Infineon is trying to make its way into more auto markets, especially countries like China where auto demand is growing, by supplying products to the world’s fastest racers.
The semiconductor maker saw its revenue from the auto semiconductor business rise more than 8 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of its 2004 financial year.