Nominal partners with Pratt Miller Motorsports at Rolex 24 Daytona to bring real-time engineering software to endurance racing

the brother of the previous guest from Nominal, Cameron McCord.

Technology Brothers.

Wait, no, not brother.

Sorry. Uh, co-founder. co-founder.

Got it. Okay. Well, you know, you build a business with someone for a while. People just assume you're brothers, but uh anyway,

sec second spouse is what I like to say, but

yes. Yes. Exactly. Thank you so much for taking the time to get where you call.

Where are you calling in from

guys? Uh hello from Daytona, Florida.

No way.

You are in you're

you're in the garage. You're in the pits at the Rolex 24. So fantastic. Um, we are here. So, I'm a phenomenal uh, you know, the company Cameron, Jason and I co-ounded. Uh, we announced our partnership this week with Pratt Miller Motorsports.

That's amazing. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you.

Great timing.

Um,

oh, come on.

Come on.

Come on.

That's fantastic.

Yeah. If if you uh if you don't know who Pratt Miller Motorsports is, you know, they are the heart and soul of the Corvette racing team in the Ma Race series. So, you know, this is this is fullon heavy metal sport dynamism right here.

This is

Hey man, I'm about I'm about 30 feet from a McLaren. Anyway, all you know, this entire garage is full of pretty probably every every famous sports car, you know, but um I don't know if you know, but the most dominant of them all for the last 30 years has been this yellow Corvette right here.

Very nice.

And that yellow Corvette. Um

look at that. Wow.

No sticker.

There we go.

Incredible.

Uh how's good stuff?

Have you caught any of qualifying yet or have you just been too locked in? Yeah, this is the epitome of uh forward deployed because we just sent a founder to make sure this went perfect. Um but it's been it's been really fun. Yeah, I've been here for a couple days. Um we are so think like last night we were running our late night practice sessions. Uh so Daytona itself is a like brutal race to start the season. It's a 24-hour race. Um, I'm not sure if you like me have now seen a best picture nominee, but uh, in the F1 movie, Brad Pitt's F1 movie, the first seven or eight minutes is actually Sunny Hayes, Brad Pitt, racing here at the Rolex 24.

Um, and it's him racing the night shift. So,

yeah.

Um, Amen. Um, yeah, him racing night shift. So, you know, last night's practice session, every team gets one night to go out and actually like see the race conditions at night. um you know different temperature profiles, totally different um you know race profile. You have like I found out like at turn five right here you have headlights from the parking lot that you have to deal with like

yeah it's been a wildly interesting journey but um you know on the you know on the nominal partnership side it's also been just really fun to see like you know we've we've had a lot of wonderful meetings and things about strategy and race strategy and this and that but like you know we are watching it come alive here. Um, so a lot of the practice and qualifying and everything else has come back to uh, you know, how do we help them use a lot of data to win?

And the the pressure is on, right? They're going for the fifth fifth win this weekend. Is that right?

Impressive.

We've been following we've been following a little bit mostly the mostly the Shopify team. We've been following a lot Toby and really there's a lot of tech people out there. It's great.

There is. Yeah, you the the tech community here is like small but strong. It is like the epitome of motorheads. Um you know it's people that late in life, you know, found thermodynamics in their life and are like this is the coolest thing ever. This is way cooler than Kubernetes. Like

it's the best. [laughter]

It's the best. Yeah. And and for us, we're we're the timing is great. We were at the track uh with with a friend of the show uh Paul on on Sunday and we were just doing like really quick laps. We'd go out for like five, you know, five 10 laps and then take a quick break and kind of like settle down and we'd be spinning out on like the [laughter] like the fifth on like

and like realizing like actually like when you're going like these endurance races, it's it's

also just like from an engineering perspective, you know, you take the car out for a couple laps and you let it cool down and check the tire pressure. Like 24 hours is endurance, not just for the humans, but for the actual vehicle. So can you talk a little bit about uh what goes into bringing that level of performance to the vehicle, what your role is, who the key players are in your world, who are you interfacing with?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Um okay, so yeah, 24 hours is brutal. You are right. Um you know, the the rest of the season there there is a 12-h hour race in the season. I think that's in Sebring, but you know, the rest of the season is 1 2 3 4 5 6 hours and you you know, you rip the car as hard as possible. So big 24-hour race. the strategy you're bringing in is much more around, you know, of all the things you have to care about more than anything, the cars get beat to hell. But, uh, it's fuel. Um, you know, it's like this this bad boy will burn a full tank of fuel about once an hour. Um, and so a lot of the pitch strategy, a lot of like the totality of the race comes down to really like managing all 24 hours well. Um and so our our role in this, you know, we we come alongside this absolutely elite engineering team um and help them, you know, make those make those calls. Sometimes it's the high, you know, highest level. Um you know, do we need to switch drivers earlier? Do we need to do something else? I have a

I'm going leave another Oh, okay. I got a fun one. last night. Um, one of the things we were looking at is I can't give away all the secrets, but I know everyone says they do this, but Pratt Miller like actually does this and does it better than anyone else. But, um, last night they were talking about, you know, managing fuel from a like, uh, consumption standpoint. So, think like, you know, we're watching how throttling is happening, a bunch of other things. think when this comes into play is the car is, you know, you're behind someone else and your goal ends up being how can I get them to stay on the throttle as much as possible cuz if they burn more fuel than I burn

and we both go into the pits together, the long pole in the tent of a pit stop is refilling the tank.

So they refill for 5 seconds, we refill for one second and we run right past them. Interesting.

Um, and that type of stuff like that is not a like trivial thing to do. Like that is complex math happening. That's tons of different telemetry, you know, like nominal. And to be clear, like Prep Miller has building been building elite software here for 25 years. I was in like the third the second grade when they started building race software, you know, like um this is much more around like

teams like this are amazing because they just are obsessed with winning. Um, and so this whole partnership has really blossomed out of like that openness. You know, like we have plenty of wonderful, elite, amazing customers that have interesting things that they've built and like, you know, there's a journey with getting them to like really adapt the way that we think engineers should work in nominal where Pratt Miller is like, "Okay, cool. I have all of this."

It's an engineering. It's an engineering sport. It's an engineering sport. Like I imagine a lot of those engineers could go in a second and walk down to Elsa Gundo and be hired on the spot, right? So, um,

amen. The amount of, uh, the amount of people that have left the Pratt Miller team to go to like the Anderles of the world, there's a lot. So, um, you know, bypass light, please stay.

Please stop poaching.

But, uh, zoom out for me and and, uh, try and make a little bit clearer uh, the involvement of nominal in this, how the products being used, where the end points are. Are you working on manufacturing new parts for the car, managing supply chain, uh testing, like what else uh goes in and then maybe contextualize it with the work that you do with other defense contractors and other businesses?

Yeah, totally. So, think like Pratt Miller selected us and brought us in think like how can we transform how engineers and all of their partners so they they don't just build these two cars, but they also build three more Corvettes in the field for other teams. uh you know how can they come in and like rethink fundamentally testing telemetry decision-m across race operations. So these are producing terabytes and terabytes of data this weekend. Um you know we have to do a whole lot with that during the weekend to make really good calls. And way more importantly we need to like catalog and catalog and index and manage like all of this volume of data. And then like you know what we do for the team is like it's not just about these 10 races a season. like you win when you have the same system integrated into your driver sim.

Brett Miller's also been way far ahead in the way that they think about driver sims in the sports car racing league. So all of the data from the driver sim is making it back into nominal. Um, you know, we're helping them do like actually like rethink the like procedural operations of that and automating a lot of pieces of that. And this is like almost verbatim, you know, how companies in aerospace and defense, how companies in energy, you know, how our customers go get this work done across the board. It's just they have like win or lose on the line. So, um, they just they rip it out of our hands.

What about the other simulations that go on during a race series? I'm thinking back to the F1 movie. Most people are familiar with the scene where the F1 car is in the wind tunnel. Uh, everyone can visualize the wind or the smoke flowing over a vehicle. Is that the type of data that someone could pull into nominal and then analyze or are you acting more as just like a data layer and then there's another visualization software that would pull for that specific task? I imagine that there's a lot of point solutions still in place, but how do you fit into that?

Totally. Okay. I'll I'll tell you about the old world and we'll go to the new world. So, um, they have a team here that manages like all of the Corvettes on the field. So, not the Pratt Miller race team, it's like the Corvette racing team. Um, you know, I last night was sitting with them and watching them flick through somewhere between six to eight different pieces of software to like root cause a problem. Um, a little bit of analysis here, a little bit of data management here, go find the thing over here. Like, nominal has been built on the principle of like clarity really, really fast comes with an into stack. Um it is how you manage the data. It is how you monitor the data and it's how you analyze the data. So

you know these engineers happen to nominal um and they're doing everything from figuring out you know yes wind tunnels and other things are important that's you know it's ultimately like small small parts of the team thinking about something like aerodynamics you know like way more of the team is thinking about um you know how are these settings affecting you know this particular force. So it's pressures, temperatures, voltages, vibration, um video data, log data, um you know, all the different word people use in engineering, multimodal, you know, like all the different types of angles um that you need as an engineer to make a judgment call. Um but at the end of the day, it's like, you know, we want to help them make really good judgment calls and then have a really good record of why. And if they can do that really fast, like we've kind of succeeded in the partnership.

You mentioned like terabytes of data coming off the car. What's the telemetry like? Like how is that actually is it like a are they connected to Wi-Fi? Like how how do you get the data off the car while it's on the track?

Oh man. Um that is a fun complex thing.

Um okay so you know every race actually just has a lot of regulation here. Um so like NASCAR you can't pull any data off the track.

Um F1 has like a mesh network where they purchase ripping streams all day long. Huge really high data rates like kind of all the things. Um, sports car racing is actually like a really interesting middle ground here where um, they do have telemetry coming off the car that, you know, race engineers are sitting in double decker, you know, fold out pit stations,

TV and stuff.

Oh, yeah. With everything around them, it's like monitoring monitoring the situation.

They're situation monitors. We love it.

It's it's the epitome. Um, and yeah, so they'll they'll have data come off the car, but then the really interesting part is like it can't be that high rate of data. They're only allowed to bring very specific sources. Um, and then every time it comes in for a pit stop, um, they'll do things like they put an umbilical into the car and that is like actually how they have a secure communications line with the driver.

The rest of the race, everyone can listen to everyone else.

But if you want to if you want to give your driver a little edge and do it and then

Amen. [laughter] Um, and and then if you want to get the high the high volume data off, there's a technician that goes in and like, you know, pulls out a data stick and puts in a new data stick and all that starts go getting processed. Phenomenal. And another tool. So, um, that's the that's the fun.

That's amazing. Well, good luck to everyone. Thank you so much for taking some time out of a busy day to come chat with us.

Yeah. So many so many more questions. This was awesome. Well, that's great. My only ask is please I need you to if you don't have a team in IMSA I need you to pledge allegiance to the yellow Corvette.

That's the only thing plans for the weekend. Rolex 24 I love an American manufacturer.

He loves he's uh he's got his eye on the the ZR1 X already. So

it's a good car.

Anyway,

great stuff. Great hanging, Bryce. Good luck this weekend.

Have a good rest of your day.

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