- Top F1 teams spend over $400 million a year.
Why do they do that?
Well one thing, winning is great advertising
but racing is also a test bed
for new technology that eventually trickles
down to the rest of us.
At least that's what they'll tell you,
but I've never seen a 200 mile per hour Corolla
with downforce measured in tons.
So what exactly does trickle down from F1?
Well it turns out
that that tech shows up in some unexpected places
everything from airplanes to the entire airport
and electricity for homes and businesses.
Of course, F1 tech also shows up in the occasional hypercar
and some of the regular ones that your I could buy.
Hey F1, what you've freaking done for me lately, huh?
I freaking love you, I watch you, I nurture you,
I talk so good about you.
Let's figure out what you had done for me lately.
Let's go.
(upbeat music)
(becoming melancholic music)
(back to upbeat music)
F1 has always featured some
of the most advanced cars in the world.
And that's partly because racing is a way for companies
like McLaren, Renault, Williams, and Mercedes to develop
and test new technologies.
That eventually trickles down to the rest of us,
but how that happens, isn't very straightforward.
If it was we'd all be driving carbon fiber turbo hybrids
making 1,000 horsepower like the AMG 1.
To see how technology moves from F1 to every day,
we need to look back a couple of decades.
Last year, we had an entire episode about the
Williams FW15C, a revolutionary race car
from the '90s that had analog brakes, traction control,
a semi-automatic gearbox, active suspension,
and was even tested with a CVT.
The result of all that technology
was a car that won over half the races it entered,
but the FIA was afraid of runaway spending
by other teams trying to catch up,
so the FW15 became a victim of its own success.
Most of its higher tech features were quickly banned.
Many of those futuristic systems are still banned today.
So if your car has ABS, Traction Control, or even a CVT
it's actually more high-tech than an F1 car,
at least in those particular areas.
The thing is,
none of that technology originated in Formula One.
It was all developed independently for road cars
long before being adapted by big budget F1 teams.
Even steering wheel shifted semi-automatic transmissions,
a feature almost synonymous with F1,
the frigging low paddle shifters,
they go all the way back to 1901,
50 years before F1 even existed.
There's still horses carrying around buggies,
when a guy was paddle shifting his Model T.
Well, not quite a Model T.
More often than not, big F1 budgets are spent
refining existing technology and not reinventing the wheel.
The unique F1 technology that reaches the rest of us
is more complicated than just bits of racing equipment
that shows up and road cars.
So to see what trickled down from modern F1
you gotta look beyond just cars.
Engineering a winning racing car
is about optimizing everything,
squeezing the last 1% out of all the technology available.
A crucial piece of that is aerodynamics.
F1 cars need to generate massive amounts of downforce
to achieve maximum cornering speed
but high downforce, that creates drag
and that slows the car and reduces fuel economy.
F1 cars are only allowed to burn 110 kilograms
of fuel over the course of a race.
So they need to be efficient in reducing drag,
while maximizing downforce, is a constant battle.
So back in the old days
engineers tackled this problem by building lots of models
and testing how they performed in a wind tunnel.
I built my own wind tunnel here at Donut Media, no big deal.
I told you guys to send me whatever you want
and I would wind-tunnel test it.
One guy sent me a pony with a (beep)
anyways that is really time-consuming
and involved a lot of guess and check experimentation.
Then came CFD, creamy, functional, daddies.
Oh, that's not what CFD stands for, my bad.
What does it stand for?
Computational fluid dynamics.
Oh, must have missed that class in engineering school.
Then came CFD, computational fluid dynamics.
By running computer simulations,
engineers can test thousands of designs
in a fraction of the time.
F1 engineers at Lotus Renault
advanced the field of CFD so much that in the mid 2010s,
they were hired by Boeing
to adapt their F1 CFD program simulations for jets.
Jet engineers have basically the same problem
as F1 engineers.
Downforce is just negative lift
and drag increases fuel consumption for planes too.
So by using the CFD techniques developed for F1
to create a 1% decrease in drag
Boeing was able to reduce fuel use and CO2 emissions
producing a 14% reduction in operating cost.
And that's pretty much a win for everyone.
But computer simulations at F1
didn't just improve airplanes, it improved airports.
Dude, F1 is helping out the world.
You clicked this episode and thought,
"Hey, what did I get for my car," and now you're like,
"Dude, F1 is way bigger than I thought."
So it's airports, huh?
How do they do that?
Well, another important part of winning in F1, is strategy.
And that's not done by some race engineer
with a crystal ball, no way.
Teams like McLaren, use custom computer programs
to crunch through millions of possible race scenarios,
including running order, track conditions, weather,
and hundreds of other things.
The program then determines the most likely scenarios
and presents a team with different ways to
maximize fuel efficiency, tire life,
and optimize their pitch strategy.
It's like "Moneyball" for cars.
Did you ever see that movie?
Bradley Pitt is cute, but Jonah Hill,
he is a creamy functional daddy.
The UK's National Air Traffic Services worked with McLaren
to adapt their race management software
to control air traffic in the United Kingdom.
Programs that started in F1 now predict things like
which flights are likely to be delayed,
available space in the sky
and resources on the ground to optimize air travel.
That not only reduces delays.
It also means planes spend less time taxiing
or in holding patterns, and that means they burn less fuel,
lowering cost and reducing emissions,
also reducing angry passengers.
- I will (beep) kill everybody.
- Formula Ones engine development for the past decade
has largely been about improving efficiency
and reducing emissions too, while still making huge power.
So current F1 combustion engines have a thermal efficiency
greater than 50%.
And that means over half the energy from their fuel
is turned into power, and that is really freaking good.
Most road cars are around 30%.
Combining efficient combustion engine
with partially renewable fuels in the F1 hybrid system
and F1 cars are cleaner than most road cars.
The current F1 hybrid system started
out as KERS or the kinetic energy recovery system,
a version of the regenerative braking system
you'd find in most hybrid road cars.
One early version of KERS developed by Williams,
stored energy from braking in a rotating flywheel.
That energy could then be fed back into the system,
sending power to the wheels during acceleration.
It was a pretty genius idea
but F1 eventually went in a different direction
opting for battery-based energy storage in step
even though it was developed for racing,
Williams KERS breakthrough was simply
a way to store energy for later.
So they adapted it to deliver electricity to homes
and businesses on two remote Scottish islands,
Isle of Eigg and Fair Island.
I hope I said that right.
Is it Eigg?
The Isle of Eigg and Fair Isle get all of their power
from wind turbines.
When wind it's blowing, there's more energy created
from those turbines than these tiny islands can use,
but the wind isn't constant and ordinary batteries
could only store so much electricity.
That means there wasn't enough electricity to go around
once the winds subsided.
So by storing excess wind energy in spinning flywheel
like the ones developed for Williams F1 cars,
the islands now have stable power grids
that can provide electricity, even when the wind dies down.
Sick dude.
Now of course we can't talk about what trickles down from F1
without saying something about F1 power in road cars.
The latest example is the Mercedes AMG 1,
a road legal hypercar with the same turbo hybrid engine
powering Lewis Hamilton's race car, that's (beep) sick.
Of course they didn't just slap that in any old car, no.
Just like the F1 car, the AMG 1 was designed using CFD
and wind tunnel testing
to maximize downforce and reduce drag.
Also like an F1 car, it's made almost entirely
from carbon fiber.
Now carbon fibers are thin strands,
typically, just five to 10 microns thick
that are used to make carbon fiber reinforced polymer.
The material we typically refer to simply as, carbon fiber.
Now carbon strands are woven together like fabric
and then placed in layers which are joined by plastic resin.
That composite material can then be formed
into various shapes and baked until it hardens.
What you get is a structure that's stronger and lighter
than most metals, which is perfect for race cars.
That's why carbon fiber materials have been used
in Formula One for decades now.
The first carbon fiber chassis was used by Ferrari in 1981,
and F1 has been vital to the development of this material.
Carbon fiber techniques, honed by F1 teams, have been used
to build bicycles, boats and, of course, road cars.
So by using F1's lightweight carbon construction,
the AMG 1 is estimated to weigh just 2,600 pounds.
But Mercedes also wasn't limited by F1's regulations,
so they gave it active arrow
and added two additional electric motors
powering the front wheels.
Each of those makes 160 horsepower
and combined with the F1 power unit,
this gives the AMG 1 over 1,000 horsepower,
a top speed of 217 miles per
and an estimated zero to 60 of just 2.2 seconds.
Still slower than (indistinct).
That's kind of embarrassing.
Those figures are estimated
because the car still hasn't been delivered
to any of the 275 people who will eventually get one.
It was a originally announced back in 2017
and is just now entering production in 2022.
Of course, this is hardly a car of the people.
The lucky few will pay around 2.7 million
for one of the few F1 powered road cars ever made.
The AMG 1 joins a short list that includes legends
like the Ferrari F50, the Porsche Carrera GT
and the ask the Aston Martin Valkyrie.
What Mercedes learned in Formula One
and in developing the AMG 1
is also having an impact on other more affordable cars.
Last year, they announced the E performance range
of hybrid V8's in four cylinders
which will be fitted across their model range.
These will feature batteries with
up to 560 individually cooled cells,
a technology that's been adapted from F1.
Mercedes says that the extra cooling increases
battery power density to 1.7 kilowatts per kilogram
or roughly double what you find
in most hybrid batteries today.
So the four cylinder version will also feature turbos
with an F1-style in MGUH, that is the hybrid electric system
which uses thermal expansion of exhaust gas
to generate electricity.
It uses that electricity to spin up the turbo
when the engine's at low RPMs, preventing turbo lag.
It also harvests extra energy from the spinning turbo
when it's not being used
to recharge the car's main hybrid battery.
According to Mercedes that means they can extract
the same amount of power from a four cylinder hybrid
compared to a non-hybrid V8.
So for F1 teams, racing isn't just about winning.
Formula One is a laboratory where engineers can invent
and refine technologies,
with massive budgets at their disposal.
And that doesn't always lead directly
to better road cars for everyone
but it does push technology forward in surprising ways,
many which go beyond cars.
In fact, there's simply too many technologies
that have been developed through racing
for us to mention all of them in a single video.
So comment below
and tell me what your favorite example is here
that we didn't cover.
That's also a very tricky way
of getting you guys to call out what we missed.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode B2B.
Are you guys excited for the new F1 season?
We had a party here at the office
for the first race in Bahrain.
Maybe we do like a live stream hangout, F1 watch party.
Would you guys be down for that?
If you would leave a comment down below
hit me up on Instagram @jeremiahburton.
Maybe we can live stream a race or do something,
I don't know, or we can chat with you guys
while the race is going on.
That'll be fun.
You can hit me up on Instagram @jeremiahburton.
Follow us on Instagram at donut@donutmedia
and until next week, bye for now.
Thank God I didn't have anything in my teeth right there.
Someone did that to Nolan once.
Nolan ate a salad, had a whole piece of lettuce
stuck in his tooth the entire time.
- That was a-