14/03/2015
NEWS STORY
There is something fishy going on at Manor. The team was unable to run in the opening two practice sessions on Friday and again this morning, claiming the data it needed for the ECU was wiped from its computer systems as it prepared its assets for sale.
That seems difficult to believe given that the IT infrastructure of the team would have been designed very much with disaster recovery in mind – it is standard IT practice.
There will have been redundancies built in with the sole intention of keeping the systems running should the factory burn down, and special emphasis placed on the preservation of data.
Every business with an IT department will run regular backup processes. These will be run daily in most instances, overnight when the business activity is low, with weekly, monthly and annual backup tapes sent and stored offsite. These are often backup tapes, typically about the size of a beer coaster. Sometimes they can be virtual stores, but they are always offsite.
The data may have been wiped from the physical servers but what happened to the backups? Where are they and why haven't they been mentioned?
Furthermore, if the team was able to modify the 2014 car to meet 2015 crash test regulations that suggests it would have the CAD data from the cars on which to base its design changes.
So which is it? Were the servers wiped and the data deleted or not?
Talking ahead of qualifying, Graeme Lowdon admitted that despite a "Herculean push" time is running out. McLaren was the only team to break the curfew on Friday night, which begs the question, if Manor is working so hard to rectify its problems and get on track, why didn’t it also break the curfew?
Something at Manor smells more than a little fishy.
Mat Coch
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