Drew Cukor and Andretti Global on using Palantir to unify IndyCar race data and compete on milliseconds

Lads, we got the lads. Take a seat. Take a seat. Take a seat. Do you guys want to share? Yeah, we'll share. We'll share my Great. So, yeah, why don't you to uh kick us off with the introductions? Let us know who you are. I'm sorry you got stuck with a rough chair.

I couldn't figure out how to get the chair to up properly. Don't even try. It's not going to work. I already tried it. Uh anyway, introduce yourselves. Uh, so I'm Zach Porter, uh, a senior simulation engineer with Andrea Global on the Indie Car program. Cool.

And I'm Kyle Kirkwood, driver of the number 27 Honda for Andrea Global. Fantastic. Yeah. And I'm Drew from TWWG. Fantastic. Um, h how do how do all of you fit together? We're all under the TWWG umbrella. Basically, a bunch of different businesses within that. Drew can probably speak to it a little better than I can.

Yeah. I mean, it's a family. It's a great holding company. We have tons of businesses from insurance to uh asset management, investment, banking and you know sports, media, entertainment, western lifestyle. Yeah. And of course the crown jewel of just about everything is the awesomeness of motorsports. Yeah.

And the Andredy team and Indie Car. How long have you been involved with Andredy? Uh it's my my fourth season at Andred. Fourth season. Yeah. Alth [Music] time here. I think it's my fourth. No, it's my third. It's my third season with them, but I've also I've been a part of the family for longer than that.

I was with them in Indie Lights and then I joined back with them in in Indie Car. So, really five seasons, actually, if you combined it all. Yeah. And, you know, I'm I get to be this suit guy, so I sit and watch this, but I've been here a year. Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

Uh, and yeah, and walk me through the flow of like why you're here specifically at AIPCON, why are you uh working with Palunteer? Uh, yeah. Yeah.

So in indicar we have we we have a ton of data in a ton of different siloed places and it sits you know from stuff that we control like our car setup database and stuff and but it also sits in like databases from Indie Car that we don't control. We have to consume all these things and they're all connected.

They all represent performance. They all represent the pieces of the car and how they go around the track and and how we get faster and how we're relatively performing against the competitors.

And so we we came to Palunteer and worked down this path to to try and connect all these disparate data sets into one place where where our engineers can make better decisions faster, sooner um because in the end you know from practice one to practice two or practice two qualifying whatever it is that there's this limited amount of time that we have to make a decision.

The practice is coming whether you're ready or not. Y so the more informed we can be the better decision we can make in theory the faster we can iterate and be more competitive. So yeah, it feels like the maybe we're just in the era of like, you know, small micro optimizations just add up to greatness.

Uh are there any stories from your career or just uh racing in general that stand out to you where someone just discovered some secret that just gave them a mass advantage?

I'm thinking of uh in sailing there was this maybe it's a fake story I don't know but this idea that there was uh in in the what's the big sailing cup that Allison races in America's cupg yeah yeah it's all it's all catamarans now and and the and the story goes that they were all racing monoholes and someone looked in the in the rule book and said there's nothing that says you can't bring a catamaran and then in one day somebody brought a catamaran and just beat everyone and it was just one of the most fantastic stories.

Have there been any eras uh that you've studied where someone's just figured out something that just rewrote the whole I mean it would never be like this again but you had the the the fan car in F1, right? Tell me about this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell tell me the full story. Uh I don't know the full story. I don't know.

We're in an era of motorport now that things are super tightly regulated. It's really hard to find these big gains. But but what he's referencing back in the day there there was an era where where aerodynamics were kind of king and they the guys did a similar thing.

They looked at the rule book and said, "Hey, there's nothing that says we can't power the air inside the car on our own. " So, they built a car that had big fans at the back of it and skirts that ran down the side and the car literally suck sucked its way down. So, just so much extra down force.

I don't remember exactly how long it existed, but it wasn't very long. I'm sure it got banned. It's amazing.

But it was fundamentally dominant and there's there's been a lot of those kind of things now and and over time, but now we're kind of in this era of of fighting for these hundreds of second, these little micro moments.

That's where being able to drill down through big data is so powerful for us we'll be like we do a live show right so speed and timing is important and sometimes we're like oh this document isn't here we don't have this link and things like that you guys are racing around a track where every millisecond matters and so if you're jumping between different data sets and and uh systems of record I can imagine that's that's uh can be a disaster.

Yeah. And it's not just while while Kyle's on track. Yes, he's he's doing all of that, but then as soon as he's back, it's it's between sessions as well. It's it's the the clock's always ticking. We're competing on the track and off the track. Yeah.

I mean, we just have such little time to go through so much data and to be able to piece it all together and understand a full picture. You have to do a lot of different things, which our engineers are very good at, but it's time consuming.

So, if there's a way to actually consolidate it, simplify it, and make things more efficient, then it's going to allow our engineers to make better decisions down the road, which is optimizing performance on the racetrack. Okay. Talk about the tension between the three of you. I imagine that you only care about speed.

You care about speed and manufacturing. Can we make it? And you care about speed, manufacturing capability, and cost maybe. Cost. So, what Yeah. What What are the trade-offs?

Obviously, everyone cares about speed and winning, but uh but there are layers to the trade-offs because you can't you can't just always turn every dial to 11, right? Well, I mean, look, you know, I spent 30 years in the Marines. Yeah. And um you know, we got tired of fighting wars on PowerPoint. Mhm.

And you know, for business, we're getting tired of like making decisions off of rudimentary and incomplete systems that provide only partial solutions and it just takes forever to get data together. Yeah.

And so, you know, from a business perspective, we have to look at it and basically say, look, we want to transition to something better. And the cost of that is not just material like dollars. It's also change. It's changing mindset. And as you can see from Andredy, like they're all into this.

Like this team is ready to make that transformation, but it'll still come at a cost, right? There's people who are stuck in their ways. Look, I like to do things this way. I'm not used to that much data coming at me. I can't make decisions that fast.

like this is transformational and really fundamentally it's people, money, it's organizational and obviously when you got a great team like it's just going to go like a hot knife through butter. It's going to be amazing. That's great. Yeah.

Where uh walk me through some of the benefits and and and try and give me some anecdotes about where gains have come from throughout your career. Yeah, I mean like for for us, we we take in so much time series data on the car specifically that's the representation of what Kyle's doing on the track, right?

And what the car is doing and all of that and being able to connect that data to his feedback and ensure also that that data is is clean and it is correct.

You know, it's it's not like a a car that's just rolling down the road and it's hanging around and putting some sensor data out like he's fgging the thing around the racetrack and occasionally touching walls and other cars and it's more than touching.

It's really difficult sometimes to keep to make sure every system is working perfectly, right? It's it's a never- ending battle of trying to do that.

And so, you know, we're we're working really hard with some ML models and some stuff to pick out sensor anomalies and flag them automatically so that our our systems engineers don't miss them and they can go drill down and figure out why that sensors failed or where and what their knockon effects are and and in the end just get that part replaced immediately so that the next outing, the next time we're on track, we know the data is going to be as good as it could be.

That's that's been the the the earliest easiest wins for us is is kind of in that space. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a uh a how do you think about budget budgetary constraints? Is that something that's just set internally? like how do you work through?

I'm happy that I don't have to worry about you don't have to worry about but but I mean even zooming out for those who might not be familiar like like uh I mean we saw some we saw some drama earlier this week about salary caps and and different ways to get around things like how do you think about setting the budget for the team and then actually executing against that because that's got to be the last the last phase against uh how do you actually deliver something that you can deliver on race day every single day with reliability and not need to cut the cost later.

Let me let's talk like this is innovation. Yeah. Okay. So, we got to be careful here. Yeah. Right. So, if you come in I mean obviously there's dollar budgets, right? Because it's not unconstrained. Yeah. But at the end of the day, like what we want to do is we're talking about a fully connected business here. Sure.

So, they've got an HR shop, they've got a tech team, they've got engineering, they've got a ton of groups that all need to be brought together. So, apart from just the car and the magnificence of what we're doing, you've got to bring it all together.

And so we need room in space to be able to build out a complete connected business because frankly every signal across the business is value and by squeezing and optimizing and making things run more efficiently we end up with a better sport. Yeah.

And like I think at this point we're in that journey and so costs are going to be you know not giant but constrained and we're going to deliver and we're going to watch and see as this evolves until we land somewhere where we can finally say this is it. this is the benchmark and this is what we should manage off of.

Yeah. For us, for us, we're gonna ask for every tool we possibly can to make to make the car better.

He's gonna he's expecting us to do that to do that job and and in turn, we turn around to the commercial side of our business and and look at them and say, "Hey, it's it's your guys job to go out and find that sponsorship, find those things because if we don't use this tool, our competitors will. " Yep.

And and you know, we're in the business of winning and and if we're not going to try to do that, then why are we here? Uh take us through the the the next few months on the calendar, the rest of the year, the next year. So, we literally just ended the last race of the season like three days ago, four days ago.

Um, so we officially start our offseason and and this is where we sort of take some of our use cases and our ideas that we've sort of halfbaked and triled some stuff and look at it and and productionize it and and in in the end try and get all of these at least the first initial use cases ready to go for St. Pete 2026.

That's that's kind of the target and there's ton of prep from here to there. Yeah. And I'd say in the offseason racing is so expensive that you you're limited on how much testing you can actually do on a racetrack, right?

So it's very important that all the data that we collect and we utilize is is actually making a difference and we're actually able to progress with with with the data that we have. So um that's where the engineers come in, right?

We've got a a massive group of engineers that um take a lot of pride in their work and and they have five, six months from now until till the start of the next season that they dig in through maybe one or two tests that we get, maybe some wind tunnel stuff, maybe some various other things, shaker rigs we call it.

Um but we can't really get on track that much because of because of how expensive it is. So a lot of what we do is in the sim world and it is very data driven. Yeah. What Yeah. What does the rest of your offseason look like? Are you training and running? I saw the F1 movie and Brad Pittz running around.

Are you are you running guy or both? Uh, you know, it training is important, right? Uh, yeah. I mean, you you have to be as a racing driver, you got to be like a certain weight, certain size. You have to be um you got to have good endurance, but you also need to have some strength to be able to wheel the car around.

Right. Right. We don't have power steering. You're hitting the brake pedal as hard as you possibly can, and we're pulling up to four or 5gs for an hour and 40 to 2 hours at a time. So it it can get very physical very fast. Power steering. No power steering. No.

And the car and the car makes over 5,000 6,000 lbs of downforce. So um imagine driving your road car that weighs 8,000 lbs or something like that um around without power steering.

Flash that on the screen when there when you got the driver view so that you guys get a little credit because I think people assume it's like turning the wheel of you know a Tesla or whatever. Yeah. No, it's uh it's much tougher than people tend to realize. I that's specific to Indie car racing though.

Indie car racing, we don't have power steering. F1 does a lot of sports cars that you see, they do have power steering, but Indie car itself, they they do it for the sport. Um, and they've kept it that way for many years.

So, um, it's a little bit old style, but at the same time, it's good because it really translates it from the boys a little bit, right? Yeah. It's like it creates a sport out of it, right? It's a little bit more physical. People don't look at it as much as like, oh, you're just driving a car around some roads, right?

Pushing pedals, turning wheels. No, there's actually physical side to it. So, um the offseason is a lot of training, uh preparation. We do a lot of sim work and and uh driver in the loop simulators and um yeah, it just being ready for for the next race that comes up. It's hard.

It's hard though because you don't have G-forces. You can't you can't simulate G-forces for a driver. So, um having that involved is is um is something that you get acquired to as the season progresses if I'm being honest. Yeah. Uh what's your daily I'm sorry. What's your daily driver when you're not on the track?

My daily driver. So that is one is that is one of the great things about being a racing driver is you don't have to own a car. Oh, you don't own a car. You uh so I I race for a loner or something. Is that okay? So I race for Honda, right? An indie car. And I have a S2000 word with under glow. You have glow on the S2000.

No. I have a Acura MDX since they're they're sister companies, right? Um and then I also they're not sending you an NSX. They don't make the NSX anymore. They still got them laying around. Give them a call. We'll we'll we'll talk to them. We'll say we need we need it ripping around at NSX.

And then I also race sports cars for for Lexus as well. And LFA every day, obviously. They also don't make LFA anymore. So, yeah, just a million $2 car I can just go rip and depreciate real quick. I have an IS-500 at home. So, that's the other car. That's great. Fantastic. Uh, well, thank you guys for coming on.

This is fantastic. Anything else worth sharing before you get out of here? Okay. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you so much for wrapping up. Thank you. We will talk to you soon. Cheers, guys. Have a good one. Thanks. Goodbye. Um, Jordy, any other breaking news going on?

We have our next guest coming into the studio in just a minute. I believe we have Who do we have? We have someone else coming on. Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're we're good whenever. Uh, we kind of ran late. Now we're now we're running a couple minutes early. We will keep it going.

Palunteer CEO Alex Oh, I got these again. Palanteer CEO Alex Karp thinks the value of skilled workers is spiking even as big tech companies, possibly his own, may shrink. Our revenue is going up. Our salesforce is going down. He said on TVPN, "The number of people we plan to have in the future is less than now.

" Very cool. Um, scoop. We scoop. We're scoop maxing. We're newsmaxing, everybody. We're newsmaxing. Uh, what else? I think we're ready for our next guest if you want to timeline. Looking good. Lots of posts. Have fun. Um, welcome to the stream. If you're ready, we're good. We can we're we're happy to have you.

How you doing, John? Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, welcome. Thank you. Any relation to Brandon Jacobe with