Re: F1 and customs
It was the time of limited fuel. The two options where race at the front (which looked good for the driver) and then run out of fuel (which looked bad for the team), or conserve your fuel and get the opposite effects. One particular driver "could not read the fuel gauge" to radio back the values! So a 'spy' (according to the driver) or 'assistant' (to everyone else) was needed in the cockpit.
The display was fed by the ECU and I hooked onto those data lines to gather the data (and as no-one else was doing it) I just sent the data out over a simple radio modem constantly (with error correction). You could get 3 copies of the data received down the pits straight at Silverstone for instance. Different frequencies for each car.
==> boffin icon as it was as simple as I could make it!