The electronics of the most recent LMP1 race car with the four rings is more sophisticated than ever before. In 1989, an Audi 90 quattro in the IMSA GTO series radioed eight parameters to the garage where engine speeds and a few pressures and temperatures were plotted on printouts - a tiny step from today's perspective, but one that provided important insights at the time. 

Today, an Audi R18 e-tron quattro on more than a thousand channels, in cycles that in some cases only amount to milliseconds, generates data of crucial importance to a staff of engineers at Audi Sport. At Le Mans, the engineers constantly monitor their race cars for 24 hours.

Whether it concerns the functionality of the systems, compliance with the regulations or information that is important for strategic reasons, the race car - similar to a medical EKG system - continually diagnoses its condition and reports it to the team garage. 

For this purpose, the LMP1 sports car is equipped with an array of CAN Bus systems which interlink a wide range of electronic control units (ECUs). Sophisticated sensors measure various parameters, such as suspension and acceleration data, temperatures and pressures, or information in the area of energy management, to generate a database for the ECUs.

The race car has a direct online connection to the computers in the team garage. It is used for high-speed data transmission in real time for operating conditions, such as temperatures, that do not require a high transfer rate. This makes it possible to effectively transfer limited data volumes for a general assessment of the car's condition.

In contrast, the sports car gathers detailed data on each race lap and transmits it via a burst signal when the car drives past the pit lane. Data volumes of more than 20 megabytes are generated per lap, depending on the measurement configuration - equating to more than 10,000 A4 size pages.