MATOXLEYINTERVIEW:JENNYANDERSON
From UK club racer to KTM’S Motogp Electronics Strategy engineer.
Jenny Anderson has lived most of her life in data. When she was a kid she fifitted fitted a sensor to her racing kart. Then she added another, then another, then another. Logging data became an obsession, which went with her when she graduated to cars and then into bike racing, aboard a Suzuki SV650.
Now she fifinds herself with one of the neatest but toughest jobs in motorcycling: working for the factory Red Bull KTM Motogp team, as Pol Espargaro’s electronics engineer. This means she’s in charge of all the control strategies – traction control, anti-wheelie, engine-braking control, torque delivery, launch control and so on – that keep his 270bhp RC16 V4 on track.
Anderson’s story is a testament to the joys of fifinding an interest when you’re young, following your heart and investing yourself into doing what you love. ‘Obviously I love data – it’s my job and it’s my passion,’ says Anderson, 33-years-old from Woking, Surrey. ‘And one of the things I love most about bike racing is the fact that you never really know what’s going to happen one lap to the next.
‘In cars there are so many things you can understand a lot easier, because all the vehicle dynamics are much clearer. They’ve been researched for many years, the equations exist to explain almost every situation and you can simulate a lot more because there’s no variable you can’t control. The biggest thing with a bike is that you have a guy who weighs 60 to 70 kilos and you have no idea where he is on the bike when you’re looking at the data. It’s a mystery.
‘In bikes the rider makes a massive difffference, the rider is everything – their confifidence, their ability, their talent. I noticed this when I started racing bikes – on two difffferent days my lap times could be very difffferent depending on my mentality, my feeling, my confifidence.’
Anderson’s racing journey began when she was nine-yearsold, racing 60cc kiddie karts.
‘The data thing started when I was a teenager,
racing 250cc super-karts. Sensors were becoming more commonplace and it was just curiosity – what can we learn from this? Super-karts have a proper engine and gearbox, so we got an rpm sensor so we could play with the gearing. ‘Then we found all the other stuff you can buy: steering sensors, brake-pressure sensors, lambda probes for fuelling and jetting, wheel-speed sensors. It all evolved from there.’ Anderson wasn’t a geeky kid. ‘My favourite things at school were music, woodwork, and art. And at that age
I never thought that data was something that could lead anywhere or be a job. It was purely a hobby.
‘When I finished A-levels I became a postie, to get fit and get paid at the same time, then go racing at the weekends. All I wanted to do was race – work, save money and spend it on tyres. That’s all I cared about.
‘Then at some point you realise you’re not Lewis Hamilton and it’s time to find a proper job. I was a bit lost, I had no real direction, so I was looking at night courses at a local college. They did a foundation degree in motorsport engineering and I thought, maybe this could be interesting. That opened my mind to what’s possible.’
After that Anderson got a bachelors and a masters at Oxford Brookes University. ‘I did my masters dissertation on an F1 sidecar; I don’t know why! I was going to a few bike races at Brands Hatch and I met Matt Maclaurin and Ade Hope from the AMR F1 sidecar team, and I said, “do you mind if I stick some sensors on your sidecar to try and learn something?” They were ace and I owe them a lot.’ When Anderson got her first paid data job with a car team she started racing bikes, on her rare weekends off.
‘I’ve always been a massive bike and Motogp fan. When I was growing up I was watching Valentino Rossi, and screaming at the TV. It was another world from cars – these guys were like gladiators.
‘In 2013 I bought an SV650 for £4000 and I had ten grand of datalogging stuff on it, which I’d taken off my singleseater race car. I struggled coming from cars to bikes because when you start something when you’re very young you learn subconsciously, you don’t realise you’re learning. So not only did I have to learn new cornering lines for bikes I had to unlearn my car lines. Also you need a lot more feeling for the limit of the tyres and there’s more bravery required.’
The KTM gig started in 2015 with an advert in a magazine.
‘During sessions I’m in the garage with Pol… and anything electronicswise he shouts at me’
‘KTM didn’t even have a Motogp bike at the time. When I applied for the job I presumed it was with their Moto3 project. I sat down for a Skype interview with their head of electronics Dan Goodwin. He said, “hi, I’m interviewing you for a job with our new Motogp project.” I was like, cool! ‘Initially they were a bit hesitant to take people from car racing because there’s a mentality that they are two worlds apart. But one of the reasons they took me was that I was working with GP2 and GP3 cars, which use Magneti Marelli hardware and software, which Motogp used from 2016. So Dan said, “here’s the ECU for the bike we are going to build, get something ready so it can run.”’
Anderson was data engineer for KTM’S Motogp test team, then data engineer for Espargaro and finally strategy engineer for the former Moto2 world champion. Electronic-control systems are a mystery to most motorcyclists, so what does Anderson actually do? ‘During sessions I’m in the garage with Pol, his crew chief and his data engineer. The data guy is responsible for running the bike, the crew chief does everything on the chassis and anything electronics-wise Pol shouts at me! If I’m watching Pol on the TV and I see a movement on the bike I note it down and ask him when he comes in – “you had a moment at Turn Three, is this something that’s bothering you?” After each session we have a debrief, when Pol picks out the key points he wants fixing for the next session. ‘I make all the software maps and tune the maps during the sessions – the torque map, the traction-control map, the engine-braking-control map, the anti-wheelie map, the launch-control map and the shifting map.
‘The biggest things are the torque and traction-control maps, getting the right balance between the two. During
race weekends you’ve got different scenarios to consider. In qualifying you don’t care about tyre wear, so I just want to make sure I don’t restrict Pol in any way, but if something happens there’s enough TC to catch him. Then you think about the race – how can we get the best performance without burning the tyre?
‘Between races I spend a couple of days analysing what we’ve done, what we’ve learned and what we could’ve done better. Then I spend a couple of days starting to think about the next race – what happened last year and what happened the year before.’
Although Anderson’s job is about data, it’s also about building a relationship with the rider.
‘I really like working with Pol and I understand more and more when he explains his feelings. Sometimes he doesn’t explain things in words – he does it with his arms and with noises, which means I need to look for this or that. One of the biggest parts of this job is to translate what the rider feels and what he says into what you see in the data. This is one of the most challenging things.’
The complexity and mystery of motorcycle racing can be as frustrating as it is fascinating for Anderson.
‘It’s not easy from the engineering side. We can make a change to the bike, but comparing the data between two runs is often very dicult because in the data you don’t see the change you’ve made, you see the results of the change you made. Guys like Pol adapt so quickly. If what he’s doing on the bike doesn’t work anymore he’ll do something different the next lap. But if, let’s say, he starts forcing the bike more with his body because it’s not turning the way it was before, you can’t always see that in the data. ‘Sometimes I don’t like to watch the TV, especially in qualifying, because the risks Pol takes to do what he does are unbelievable. People don’t appreciate that the guy in P1 isn’t necessarily the guy taking the most risks.
‘I have huge respect for the riders, especially Pol. He’s so motivated and so focused. Whether we’re fighting for 15th or the top ten, every session he’s 100 percent. I love my job, can’t imagine doing anything else!’
Motogp is back on track, and on your television, at the first preseason tests at Sepang, Malaysia, 7-9 February. The 2020 Motogp championship gets underway in Qatar on 8 March.
‘The complexity and mystery of motorcycle racing can be as frustrating as it is fascinating’