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The History of ATLAS#

In 1991 the first TAG telemetry system for Group C sportscars rode around in an articulated trailer, and every view had a monitor of its own. Today ATLAS Viewer puts more than 20 kinds of display on whatever screens you have, and we have not needed a trailer in a while. This is how a trailer became a platform.

We started out as TAG Electronic Systems in 1988. Since then we have also been McLaren Electronic Systems and McLaren Applied, and we are now Motion Applied. ATLAS (Advanced Telemetry Linked Acquisition System) has come along for every one of those names.

A note on names

Historically, "ATLAS" meant the application engineers used to look at data. Today ATLAS is the whole ecosystem and ATLAS Viewer is that application. This page says "ATLAS" for the product as it was known at the time, and "ATLAS Viewer" for the application today. See Start here for the ecosystem as it is now.

The trailer, 1991#

Our oldest picture of ATLAS is a photograph of a trailer. Inside was the first TAG telemetry system for Group C, and the racks already carry the ATLAS name.

An engineer at a keyboard in the 1991 ATLAS trailer, facing racks of monitors showing a Histograms screen, a circuit map, strip-chart traces and a Main Screen of values

ATLAS trailer · 1991 · Articulated trailer containing the 1st TAG telemetry system for Group C

Look at the screens and you will spot some old friends. One is titled "Histograms" and is full of bar gauges. Another shows a circuit map with the car's position on it. Below them are strip-chart traces and a "Main Screen" of values, and there is a block-colour plot too. Every view has a rack-mounted monitor of its own, which makes this the original multi-monitor set-up, and each one wears an ATLAS badge. Histograms, circuit maps and traces were all there in 1991, and all three are still display types today.

The person behind it was Dr Udo Zucker, who led TAG Electronic Systems. Before that he had developed the electronic ignition and injection control for the TAG-Porsche engine in McLaren's 1984 MP4/2.1 Our first big contract was Mercedes-Benz's Group C programme. Motor Sport's 1991 look at the Mercedes C291 confirms that we supplied the engine management and a comprehensive telemetry system, which Zucker said sent five million bits of information per second.2

Got an archive?

We are still hunting for the first dated reference to the ATLAS name, and for descriptions of the earliest screens. The earliest dated statement we have found is iRacing's 2011 release, which says ATLAS was developed in the 1990s to support McLaren's own Formula 1 team.3 If you have material from the period, we would love to see it.

Into the paddock, 1992 to 2007#

Honda's departure sent McLaren to our control systems for 1993, and the telemetry came with them. McLaren credits us with the MP4/8's engine management, chassis control, data acquisition and telemetry.4

The next decade was about making everything smaller, faster and smarter. In 2000 we introduced 32-bit PowerPC ECUs, with software generated automatically from model-based design tools.5 The TAG-310, ancestor of the standard ECU, first ran in 2005.6 In 2006 we won the FIA's contract to supply the standard ECU from 2008, together with Microsoft, and our managing director, Peter van Manen, could say that we already worked with all the F1 teams.7

ATLAS was growing up too. It became a client–server system on the Windows desktop, with an ATLAS Server built first in Visual Studio 2005, then 2008. Remote Data Servers could be daisy-chained, so the track, the factory and the engine supplier could all watch the same live telemetry at once.8 The client ran on garage laptops under Windows XP or Vista, with Excel 2007 alongside for further analysis. Exactly when ATLAS made the jump from dedicated monitors to the desktop is one of the things we are still working out.

The paddock standard, 2008 to 2017#

From 2008 our standard ECU was on every F1 car, and ATLAS had become the standard data package in the paddock.9

A lap at Monaco#

A favourite picture of ATLAS 9 at work is a printout from the 2011 Monaco Grand Prix, analysed by data engineer Brian Jee. You can see it in the ScarbsF1 write-up.9

It tells a whole story on one page:

  • Two drivers, two laps, overlaid in red and blue against lap distance.
  • A cursor that reads the exact value on every trace as it moves.
  • A time-difference (TDiff) trace that ATLAS draws automatically whenever layers are overlaid, so you can see where time was won and lost.
  • A dot on a track map that follows the cursor. ATLAS built the map from lateral acceleration and distance data, and coloured the corners by lateral-acceleration thresholds.

Then it went to the drivers as a printout in the garage.

ATLAS 9 worked like a spreadsheet: a workbook of pages, and on each page the displays an engineer had built. They chose from nine kinds: Waveform, Scatter, Circuit, Histogram, Summary, FFT, Map, Bar and InPlace, which hosted ActiveX controls with full access to the data.10

An ATLAS Express window from 2011: waveform traces for two laps, a table of values including TDiff, a track map, and workbook page tabs along the bottom

ATLAS Express, 2011, running a workbook of pages. Two laps are overlaid, with TDiff in the values panel and a track map alongside.

Beyond Formula 1#

ATLAS turned out to be good company away from the F1 grid too.

  • NASCAR

    In 2011 we became NASCAR's official ECU supplier, and electronic fuel injection made its debut at the 2012 Daytona 500.5

  • Formula E

    We supplied the motor, transmission and electronics for the first Spark-Renault car.11

  • Sim racing

    In May 2011 we gave iRacing members ATLAS Express, a version derived from the F1 software, for analysing their own racing data.3 Its set-up guide even shipped a sample workbook.12

Rebuilt from the ground up, 2018 to 2021#

Around 2018 to 2019 we rebuilt it. ATLAS 10 was a new visualisation platform "built from the ground up" for faster, easier access to data.13 We designed ATLAS 9 and ATLAS 10 to run side by side, so nobody had to switch overnight.

  • A platform for plugins

    ATLAS became a shell in which most functionality, from displays to recorders, comes from plugins.14 Developers could write their own display plugins in .NET. Today that is the Display API.

  • Open to other tools

    Engineers could feed data from third-party tools into ATLAS 10 and see it next to everything else.15

  • Compare sets

    A feature of ATLAS 10,16 and still how Viewer overlays runs today.

Race Tech reported in March 2019 that teams would be evaluating ATLAS 10 that season. Our support site carried a provisional 2018 F1 release schedule, and guidance on importing ATLAS 9 workbooks.

How far we have come#

In 1991 an engineer sat at one keyboard in front of racks of monitors, one for each view. Thirty-five years later, the ideas on those screens have held up: traces against time or distance, a cursor that reads every value, overlaid laps with a time difference, and workbooks of pages of displays. Everything around them has grown.

35 yearssince the trailer photograph
9 → 20+display types
3 APIsand a plugin platform
5 stagesfrom configuring hardware to analysing data

The 1991 ATLAS trailer, with racks of monitors

1991A monitor for every view

An ATLAS Express window from 2011 with overlaid laps, a values panel and a track map

2011Two laps overlaid, with TDiff and a track map

An ATLAS Viewer workbook today, with waveforms, a circuit map, a scatterplot, tyre temperature displays and a satellite map on one page

TodayA whole workbook of displays at once

Here is what changed, piece by piece.

  • One trailer → a whole ecosystem

    ATLAS Viewer now sits in a chain that runs from configuring hardware, through streaming and enriching data, to storing and analysing it. Take the tour in The five stages.

  • A monitor per view → any monitors you like

    Displays dock or float, group into pages, and are saved in workbooks.

  • Nine displays → more than twenty

    Including a 3D Surface Map, a Bing satellite map, video and a steering-wheel PCU Dash simulator. See all the displays.

  • Two laps on paper → compare sets, live

    Overlay several sessions, with TDiff in the Waveform display. Learn how in Laps, markers and comparing runs.

  • Excel on the side → functions inside Viewer

    Write functions in FDL, C# or MATLAB, and run Simulink models through vTAG.

  • ActiveX controls → plugins and three APIs

    The Display, Automation and SQL Race APIs.

  • Printouts in the garage → one shared database

    A SQL Race database a whole team can use at once, plus session references and configuration bundles.

  • Daisy-chained servers → and Open Streaming

    The same live path, plus a Kafka-based layer that remote or late-joining consumers can read.

Where to go next#

  1. Formula1.com: how Niki Lauda's final title-winning car, the 1984 McLaren MP4/2, changed F1. Motion Applied's own history page names the Mercedes-Benz Group C programme as our first large contract. ↩

  2. Motor Sport, July 1991: Under scrutiny, Mercedes C291. ↩

  3. iRacing, 2011: iRacing partners with McLaren Electronic Systems. ↩↩

  4. Motor Sport, May 2024 on McLaren's 1992 and 1993 seasons, and McLaren heritage: the 1993 MP4/8. ↩

  5. Electronics Weekly: embedded processing at McLaren. ↩↩

  6. New Electronics: developing an engine control unit for all F1 teams. ↩

  7. Microsoft, 11 December 2006: Microsoft and McLaren Electronic Systems win the FIA contract. ↩

  8. formula1-dictionary: F1 ECU and the ATLAS architecture. ↩

  9. ScarbsF1, 2011: Telemetry and data analysis introduction. ↩↩

  10. ATLAS product sheet, undated. ↩

  11. Motorsport.com, 2013: McLaren, the power behind Formula E. ↩

  12. McLaren ATLAS iRacing set-up guide, which installs into an "ATLAS 9" folder. ↩

  13. ATLAS 10 support section. ↩

  14. Motion Applied: ATLAS and Writing a Display Plugin. ↩

  15. Race Tech, 2019: Five F1 tech facts every fan should know. ↩

  16. ATLAS 10 Automation API notes, which list compare sets as ATLAS 10-only functionality. ↩