As a sponsor of Formula 3, I got to visit a Formula 3 / Formula 2 team yesterday and have to say, the racing sport it just insane. The amount of knowledge and effort and money it takes for a team to operate, just below break-even, it's on another level. I think racing must have some of the most passionate people in any industry.
Also a fun fact on one of the businessmodels in racing: the team operates like a specialized car-rental service. They do everything, except drive. The driver has to rent the seat for a season, this is where the team makes money.
Then there's 2 or 3 drivers. Of these, one is talented, the others are there for their funds.
There is often a popular resentment of "pay drivers" for not being up to the standards of top driver talent. But the fact is that anything but the top levels of the sport would not exist without their involvement. Motorsports is an incredibly expensive venture.
I know someone who was in alcohol funny cars (drag racing) for years. Someone bought his seat out one year. On paper it seemed like a good deal for the team. Their first two races they crashed the car, basically nullifying the money they brought.
Was the driver not responsible for that financially? It’s my (limited) understanding that crashes due to non-mechanical failures are the financial responsibility of the driver.
The logistics of delivering support for one race car as opposed to three doesn't change too much.
There's a certain set of specialty tools and equipment (also staff) that's required to support one car. Supporting two/three doesn't take too much more.
For quite a few years, my business provided race support for 8-10 kart racers. Space and logistics for transporting things was probably the biggest concern.
How do the teams get the truckloads of stuff from race to race, especially internationally? I assume everything connected by land is able to be traversed by road/rail in time to make the next race. Do they put a whole truck on a plane? Do they have trucks on every continent and just move palettes of stuff?
This youtube video does a good job explaining the crazy logistics of the F1 calendar. Multiple cargo ships constantly in motion, overnight truck deliveries, all in very carefully orchestrated ballet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OLVFa8YRfM
People shave flown with hard cases full of carbon fibre car parts before now
I assume they rent trucks for most of the Grand Prix but since England and Milton Keynes is the home of F1 teams most can drive to Europe ahead of a race weekend.
One has to note though, those paydrivers aren't the best possible people to drive those cars for sure, but many of them are very, very talented drivers - just not enough to be sitting there purely on merit.
We all, for example, made fun of Nikita Mazepin, many calling him Mazespin and such (and hated him for his personality etc.). Even that kid was better (in some ways) than a lot of non-F1 drivers with quite successful racing careers.
There are some embarrassing examples we all know, but I'd say 80% are really good, just not F1 (or 2, 3) level.
I have a bit of a pet hate around the use of words like “insane” to mean “unusual to the general public”. There’s nothing insane about this, they’re applying a tool designed for the job to doing the job. “Insane” would be hiring a team of chimps to slowly whittle away the metal using banana peels.
I'm really curious about the simulators they use for testing, if you know anything about that aspect. It seems like a chicken-and-egg issue: you see how a new part affects the car on the track by using the simulator, but the sinulator has to use parameters/assumptions put in by the engineers about how the part works. Won't it always just validate their assumptions?
You do hear about teams struggling with correlation issues, where their simulations just aren’t matching reality.
They do use some of the limited practice time F1 teams are allowed to do things like run the car with aero rakes (lots of pitot tubes on scaffold like structures) attached or the covered in dayglo flow-vis paint to gather real world data.
I've built those simulators and testing equipment. You test assumptions in simulation, verify and improve it in the tests, and ultimately on the track in Barcelona.
Well, I think most bolts don't go through that extensive QA process in general
But yeah I agree this one is your run of the mill engineering, if only done for a part that normally doesn't see such testing (maybe in Aerospace and military applications)
It seems it's part of the suspension so it would be natural to be a part that has tighter tolerances
Maybe taking telemetry data and rider feedback to calculate ideal suspension settings, engine mappings, etc. In other words, putting the best possible car on the particular track.
The video forces us to think that they turned on all the machinery to produce just a single bolt, which is unlikely to be true. They filmed a single unit from a much bigger batch. These bolts may have the same complexity of one used in a 737.
> [...] racing machine that only borderline-superhumans can withstand the g's of.
Suggestion: Make cockpits tilt inwards. Sideways-g becomes down-g. Much more pleasurable ride. If the driver is really the limit, and not the added mass for this.
Before regulations come into play the added weight and space requirements for the swivel will make your car unusable, the added complexity will make the car unreliable, the weight distribution change will make the car unpredictable.
Then the swivel will likely be illegal because it’ll lacks the integrity necessary to be part of the survival cell unless it’s ridiculous (and paragraph 1 is even worse), and its disintegration would have a very high likelihood of killing the pilot, and harming spectators. If you swivel from the outside of the survival cell you now need even more hardware to swivel the entire cell, which means you need more structure to hold the car together (under up to 9G race loads) around the swivel, thus making paragraph 1 yet again worse, as you’ll have yet more space requirements, and weight distribution changes.
Also it’ll likely fail on back to back turns (e.g. Istanbul’s 12, 13, 14 or Spa’s bus stop chicane).
The required minimum level of athleticism among drivers has only increased over time, but "borderline superhumans" is a weird exaggeration.
> Make cockpits tilt inwards. Sideways-g becomes down-g.
The drivers who experience the greatest effect of g forces, really pushing the limits of what's practical for the human body throughout the duration of a race, are the ones racing on ovals (not F1 drivers). Those tracks are already vectoring the g force downward rather than to the side.
For F1, most of their physical challenges come with the forces they experience during braking, and the effect of those forces on the neck. Doing something weird with the cant of the seat could theoretically change that pulling-the-head forward or to the side force into a pulling-the-head downward force, but if you think about what's really needed to do that (you're going to rotate the seat backwards ninety degrees? so the driver is looking at the sky when he's braking?) you can see the problem.
The driver is not the limit. The grip + downforce is the limit: if they try to do the worse corner (e.g. Copse-Silverstone ~4G) any faster than they do, the problem won't be the driver fainting (like it could happen in extreme maneuvers at a fighter jet), but the car slidding out of the track.
Back in the day, I competed as an amateur in my local round of the WRC. The car I competed in was self-built from a base model Skoda Felicia which cost me £40. (immaculate, low mileage, but with a broken camchain so the engine was dead). Obviously cost me a lot more than that in the end, but still only maybe £6k built.
Motorsports news found a part from a focus WRC which cost the same as the purchase price of the car, which was a single nut. Made for a good comparison and story, and quite a few people mentioned that to me the week when we did the event...
At my university we had a racing team that competed against other colleges in like a mini F1 type league. Every year they would start with a giant empty table and build their race car from scratch.
The team was very competitive , i think they won the league championship every year I was there, and it was considered a pretty big deal in the engineering school to get on with them. I remember they had guys who could weld coke cans together and every machine tool you could imagine and skills to match. One year, a kid on their team got picked up by Ferrari or some other big racing team and became a minor celebrity on campus. (My university was by no means “top tier”)
I was in a robotics competition team and they let me use their machine shop so I got to know them.
I worked at BMW for many years. I didn‘t do anything relate to their F1 program but once I talked to an engineer that did.
He was a mechanical engineer that designed different parts for the road cars. Once, people from the F1 team went to him because they had an issue with a part breaking frequently and asked him to improve it.
He designed another part and told the F1 guys that this will easily last for thousands of hours. They weren‘t happy. They told him they only wanted the part to last for 2 hours and the one he designed was too heavy. He had to do it again…
> They told him they only wanted the part to last for 2 hours and the one he designed was too heavy. He had to do it again…
As someone in the racing industry, the ideal engine/parts/etc are what will get you across the finish line (and meet the other requirements like how long engine components have to last) as fast as possible, and no more.
There is a lot of money put into the sport, and extracting much of the money comes from the win/place, not whether or not the car will last 40k miles.
If something blows up/breaks after crossing the finish line, it doesn't matter much... just rebuild it for the next race.
Everyone is looking for every advantage they can find.
"Behind every shit-talking, shade-throwing, sauna-enjoying DTS cast member is a small army of engineers agonizing over the literal nuts and bolts of the cars they pilot."
Also a fun fact on one of the businessmodels in racing: the team operates like a specialized car-rental service. They do everything, except drive. The driver has to rent the seat for a season, this is where the team makes money.
Then there's 2 or 3 drivers. Of these, one is talented, the others are there for their funds.