Super-fast geeks, or hot-blooded F1 racers?

Nico Hulkenberg (right, with a Williams team engineer) says the computer doesn't have the feel that the driver has in the car. Photo / Supplied

In the deafening, high-octane world of Formula One racing, there seems to be a love-hate relationship going on when it comes to IT.

The typical F1 team's trackside garage appears both cleaner and more laden with technology than some IT workshops.

Pit crew are permanently attached to laptops and fat broadband cables are busy pumping megabytes of telemetric data, collected on board the racing cars, back to some remote mainframe computer where it undergoes serious analysis.

But while technology is inextricably part of their sport, the elite petrolheads of F1 want to make it clear successful racing is about much more than good IT, and that they are much more than just super-fast geeks.

Nico Hulkenberg, a rising poster boy for the Williams F1 team, is a case in point. The 22-year-old German is part-way through his first season as an F1 driver after a bright start in motor racing, including winning the GP2 Series championship last year.

One thing he's not is a sofa-bound generation Y computer gamer. He prefers doing his racing on a real track, not in front of a plasma screen.

"I don't have a PlayStation or Xbox. I'm not that kind of guy," he told journalists ahead of his second F1 outing, the Australian Grand Prix held in Melbourne in March.

Hulkenberg even refuses to get overly excited about Williams' super hi-tech F1 simulator, a piece of equipment many a young gamer would love to take for a virtual spin.

"It's a lot better and more accurate than a PlayStation," he concedes. "It's okay to use it for a certain amount, but not too much. You don't feel the forces - the speed, the G-force, the force on your body. It's just a computer that gives you the oversteer or understeer, which is not right. It's not natural is it?"

Even when he's out on the real track, Hulkenberg is doing his racing under the glare of a sophisticated IT network. There are about 200 telemetric sensors on each F1 car, feeding data back to the pit and on to the team's super computer back at its UK headquarters.

Telecommunications company and Williams team sponsor AT&T is tasked with ensuring the data gets back to base as soon as possible. It is a job made harder by the fact Formula One is a mobile spectacle, with the teams on a constant global tour, hopping between grand prix venues.

Once the race is over, and the data has been analysed, there is plenty of opportunity to revisit the race and compare Hulkenberg's driving with the performance of his teammate, the more seasoned F1 competitor Rubens Barrichello.

"That's how you improve and ideally push each other," says Hulkenberg. "They show me overlays of Rubens' lap and my lap. Sometimes I'm quicker in this corner, he's quicker in that corner. You see the line; his braking lights are turning on earlier or later, or on a different line."

But Hulkenberg isn't a slave to accepting all the IT analysis and recommendations about how he should be improving his driving.

"Sometimes the computer tells you to go a certain direction, but a computer doesn't have the feel that the driver has in the car," he says.

If there is a disagreement between man and megabyte cruncher, he says he will either work out a compromise with the Williams engineers, or he'll follow his instincts "and then we'll find out who was right".

The F1 action hits Istanbul this weekend with the running of the Turkish Grand Prix.

The last outing, in Monaco a fortnight ago, was a disaster for Williams with both Hulkenberg and Barrichello crashing and failing to finish. In Hulkenberg's case, he slammed into a tunnel wall.

No doubt there has been extensive data crunching to determine what went wrong. Whether Hulkenberg and the Williams computer agree on the analysis is unknown.

* Simon Hendery travelled to the Australian Grand Prix as a guest of AT&T.