If you were powering around Turn One of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, you would hold your breath. Because at 230 mph, pulling 2.5 times the force of gravity laterally, in an eight-second blur with 30 other speeding cars, even an IndyCar veteran would hold his breath. Tony Kanaan does.
The 2004 IndyCar Series champion and 2013 Indy 500 winner found that out earlier this year thanks to a smart shirt in development by two Japanese firms, chemical company Toray Industries and IT services company NTT Data. The shirt is a modified version of the fireproof underwear Kanaan wears during races, and has fibers infused with conductive polymers threaded along the right arm and across his chest. (This conductive fabric is branded “hitoe.”) A device that slips into a pocket on the center of his chest collects signals from the fibers—measuring grip strength, breathing and his heart’s ECG trace—and relays this data to NTT through the car’s telemetry system.
Kanaan started wearing the shirt in 2015, but this past year was the first in which NTT collected a full season’s worth of data. And so it was the first year the team started to get real insight into what Kanaan does inside the car.