“I think the impact that we are generating is truly transformative for the industry.”
Speaking to Tamir Plachinsky, CEO and founder of Israeli motorsport startup Griiip, you’re immediately struck by the ambition he has for his fledgling company.
“[We] can change the entire business model at the core of the industry,” he continues. “It brings down the walls that exist today between all the users, so everybody is together on one platform. Imagine, if your favourite driver has just won a race, you can talk with them and tell them how much you enjoyed their race, or the driver can automatically upload the highlights to their socials, and esport connectivity, it’s really endless.”
Of course, it’s not uncommon for startup CEOs to be over-ambitious, believing that they have created the best thing since sliced bread, so let’s back up and find out how Griiip got where it is today.
Griiip was founded back in 2015 as a race car manufacturer. It developed its own open-wheel formula car, the G1, and started running a spec series for the cars – using much of Plachinsky’s experience running Israel’s first Formula Student team and working at Dallara, the legendary Italian race car manufacturer.
By 2019, Griiip had completed its second season of championship racing. But, today, the G1 racing series is no more. In fact, the last time any G1 model was driven in anger was in the RFactor2 virtual racing series.
So, what happened?
“Our slogan from day one was ‘bringing motorsport back to the people’ and we actually started the company as a race car manufacturer,” says Plachinsky, pointing to the naked G1 chassis behind him.
“Then we started the racing series, using our car – we called it the G1 series. And that’s where we really learned about the challenges and difficulties that are faced by the series, which are the basic building blocks of the sport. So, we looked for solutions and we couldn’t find anything. We wanted to stand out, we wanted to attract more drivers. We wanted to have more monetisation channels. So, we decided to develop our own solution and, eventually, this data platform became the centre of the company, and we closed the race car department and the series.”
That data platform, known as Ramp, appears simple and, in our data-obsessed world, relatively unremarkable until you dig a bit deeper.
Griiip’s RedBox sensor.
“The centre of the platform is a database – a very big and sophisticated database that sits somewhere in the cloud. This database receives and digests real-time data from the race cars, but the first challenge is that the majority of race cars are not connected in any way,” explains Plachinsky. “So, we developed our own solution called RedBox. It’s a small box that connects to the car’s systems – we do not install any kind of sensors in the car – RedBox connects to the existing sensors in the car.”
“We read the data, we send it through cellular networks, so there’s no infrastructure needed, and then it goes to our cloud,” continues Plachinsky. “This is the centre of the system, it’s where the data is stored and analysed. Both real-time and past events are visualised and then provided to the different end-users through a variety of user interfaces, each customised to the specific user group.”
Those end-users could be anyone from a racing driver to an esports competitor, to someone driving their own car on a track, to you watching a race at home on your sofa. As Plachinsky says, the true value of Griiip’s platform is its versatility.
“The database is one database, but each end-user gets the results they need. So, a fan at home does not need to get the same feedback as the driver. The fan might be using the second screen app that we’ve developed. Or it might go to another provider that uses our data, like a betting company. More and more, it’s all about how to make the sport more interesting, understandable, and engaging. You know, motorsport is not an easy sport to understand.”
But what do the insights and visuals provided by Ramp look like in practice? Fans of the German Touring Car Championship (DTM as it’s more commonly known) should be well aware as the series signed a multi-year agreement to use Ramp’s database to power its on-screen graphics.
At the moment, the on-screen graphics for most racing series are pretty basic, explains Plachinsky. “There will be a ranking, the gap between the drivers, and sometimes you see the fastest lap. That’s about as far as it goes. But you’re not really giving insights on the event, and also those numbers are changing. In Formula One, they’re changing five, six, or seven times per lap but the graphics are not continuous. it’s not something that comes alive on the screen.”
Griiip’s graphics for the DTM race series.
“We collect data all the time, so our graphics are really dynamic, giving you a sense of what’s going on, and the graphic language we are designing, we want to make it simple for you to understand. We do not use numbers, we have what we call dynamic ranking. We display it to you on a graph, so you can see how close the drivers are in respect to each other.”
But, for Griiip and Plachinsky, it doesn’t end with fancy-looking graphics.
“We are inventing the motorsport storytelling language. If you compare it to basketball, for example, you can see a very long list of statistics that define the player and the game and you can, even without watching the game, you can understand what happened – motorsport doesn’t have anything like that.”
“You might have the best lap, the positions, and who won the race,” he continues, “but that’s it. We have a language that includes dozens of parameters that defines every aspect of the drive on a performance map – you see how consistent they are, how good they are in overtaking, how they’re coping under pressure, defence, and more. We use that, plus our ability to detect events in real-time, to tell the story.”
Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything Plachinsky has said sounds like a bunch of marketing platitudes about storytelling and fan engagement. But you’d be wrong.
In its current incarnation, Ramp is about improving the look and feel of graphics for TV motorsport but, in the years to come, there are big expansion plans – which have been helped in no small part by investment from Porsche.
“We approached Porsche Digital in Israel and we told them that they might find what we have interesting,” says Plachinsky. “It was a coincidence that they had someone from Porsche Motorsport in Israel at that time, so they came to our office, and we presented to them and, from there, they invited us to present to several managers at the Porsche Motorsport offices in Stuttgart, in Weissach.”
But, as with almost everything else, the coronavirus pandemic intervened.
“We had to wait, we wanted to do a proof-of-concept,” continues Plachinsky. “Eventually, they decided to invest in the company, and we were super excited, we also performed the proof-of-concept which was super successful. It was amazing that our concept and what we envisioned was to have a lot of impact on the industry. And to get this feedback from pretty much the strongest player in the motorsport industry was the greatest feedback we could have asked for.”
“It gives us a stamp of approval from the biggest player,” he continued. “And we are progressing with Porsche to implement our platform in their future motorsport activities.” That’s right, the discussions today with Porsche surround integrating Griiip’s RedBox into future race cars.
But it doesn’t end there, Griiip plans to expand out of motorsport and into passenger cars.
“I expect that Ramp will also be implemented into future commercial cars,” says Plachinsky. “So, you take your sports car to the track and there you get access to our platform, which analyses your drive and compares it to other racing drivers. And that’s great for the manufacturers because they’re looking for service-based customers, so you add the subscription for using this to the cost of the car.”
“It can also be related to other areas of driving, like journey experiences, community tools, even insurance. There are several aspects that we can grow into, I can see Ramp being deployed on autonomous cars, analysing the drive of a computer so you can give it parameters of how to drive.”
So, with Porsche’s funding and a big contract with DTM, what’s next for Griiip?
“We have very clear goals for 2022,” says Plachinsky. “Expanding into more racing series with our current offering and to develop our second screen app which will allow viewers to really personalise the experience. They choose which driver they want to follow, they can dive deeper into the data predictions. That’s what the new generation of fans want to have – they don’t want to just watch, they want to be part of it.”
Keyword: “We are bringing the connected car revolution to motorsport” – Griiip CEO Tamir Plachinsky