What’s Formula One ever done for us?
When you are driving around in your own car, it’s difficult to believe claims from some Formula One officials that the sport is driving technological developments in the road car world. There is a significant difference between Lewis Hamilton’s Mclaren and your Ford Focus, and it would appear that the only thing F1 has ever done for us drivers is waste more fossil fuels and give us Nigel Mansell in Moneysupermarket car insurance advertisements. However, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Safety improvements
The safety record in Formula One used to be appalling. In the days of the 1950s when drivers were safer racing without seat belts (because they had a better chance of survival jumping out than if they remained seated in the petrol bomb of a car they drove), there were eleven driver fatalities. Things have moved on significantly since then, starting in the early 1980s as drivers began to campaign for safety improvements.
This saw the introduction of carbon fibre chassis’s, which were much more expensive for teams, but also much stronger. However, the biggest improvement to F1 safety car in 1994 following the death of Ayrton Senna, when the sport introduced mandatory crash tests for cars which forced the teams into significantly increasingly the strength of the chassis. This meant that the car manufacturers involved in the sport developed new techniques which helped them improve the strength of cars. Responding to the marketing campaign of Volvo (which positioned the brand as being the safest on the road), the car manufacturers began to transfer these technologies to their road cars.
This allowed them to adapt to increasingly stringent EU laws about car safety and also allowed them to combat the marketing campaign of Volvo. Without the efforts of people in the F1 community such as Bernie Ecclestone, Jackie Stewart and Max Mosely, it is doubtful that road cars would be as safe as what they are today. Indeed, there is an obvious correlation between deaths on UK roads and deaths on race tracks. F1 has been the engine driving these safety improvements.
Performance
Despite the effects of the recession and increasing cost of fuel, there is still a demand for sports car. Formula One has been a research and development exercise for the road car companies involved. Sports car equipment such as traction control, ABS (anti-lock braking systems), active suspension, skirts and ‘flappy panel’ gearboxes were all first developed for use in Formula One. The most obvious transfer of this technology was the 2002 Ferrari Enzo, which was basically a slightly downgraded road legal version of Michael Schumacher’s championship winning 2001 Ferrari. Much of the technology used on the F1 car was simply transferred onto the Enzo, with Ferrari aiming to make their greatest ever road car in homage to their founder, Enzo Ferrari.
It isn’t just Ferrari who has done this. Mclaren have also introduced two road cars which were inspired by their F1 car technologies. The Mclaren F1 first introduced in 1992 is still to this day one of the greatest road cars ever produced. It was designed by the Mclaren F1 team’s designer Gordon Murray and only 100 of the high performance vehicles were ever produced. The cars aerodynamics were also designed using the same techniques as Mclaren’s F1 cars and it set a standard for drag produced, being the most aerodynamically efficient road car ever produced until being beaten by the Bugatti Veyron fifteen years later in 2007. Mclaren are due to release a new road car in 2011, which is one of the lightest road cars produced, with the company using F1 technologies to produce a carbon fibre tub for the chassis.
Environmental technologies
This supercar technology isn’t really relevant to the majority of us, but the latest KERS (kinetic energy recovery system) technologies being produced in F1 will be transferred onto our future road cars. Ferrari has already used the technology in the design of its first ever hybrid road car the 599, while the Williams F1 team has developed a flywheel KERS system which will be used on some London buses. This technology takes heat energy from the brakes and turns it into power for the engine by storing it in a lithium battery. This will help improve the range of electric cars as car manufacturers gain an understanding of how to create lighter and more efficient lithium batteries through their involvement in F1 as part of the natural competition of the sport.
The introduction of KERS and other environmental technologies has also prompted Porsche to state an intention to enter the sport in 2013 in order to help develop the environmental technologies used on its road car fleet. Therefore, the next time some one tells you that F1 is just a waste of money for car manufacturers; you know how wrong they are.
