- Engineering behind the greatest super car ever!
(upbeat music)
It was a hyper car before hyper cars were even a thing.
The McLaren F1.
It was the fastest production car in the world
for 12 straight years.
That's from kindergarten to the end of high school.
You done graduated,
and the fastest car in the world hasn't changed.
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So today, we're gonna break down the engineering masterpiece
that is the McLaren F1.
We're gonna first find out why it uses
that unique three seater design,
and then we'll look at the first ever
carbon fiber monocoque road going chassis.
Then we'll dive into the 620 horsepower
naturally aspirated V12,
that is still one of the most powerful
naturally aspirated engines 25 years later.
Oh, and how can I forget?
You look at it, and it uses gold in the engine compartment.
And it's not just for show.
It's there for a good reason,
and we're gonna find out why.
I want the gold.
Give me the gold.
(relaxed music)
Now looking at the exterior of the McLaren F1,
compared to today's super car standards,
it looks, dare I say, conservative.
But pop open the dihedral doors and look inside,
and you'll see what really separates this British boy
from any other car out there,
and that is, it's got three seats.
And the main brain behind the F!, Gordon Murray,
he dreamed of a three seater sports car since he was a kid,
and now he had his chance to build one.
So the more important question is,
why a center seat?
Well, Mr Murray went off and drove every super car
he could get his hands on during the early stages
of the F1's design,
and they all shared a common engineering flaw.
Offset pedal box,
meaning the pedals were never directly
in front of the driver's hips.
They were always moved over a little bit,
and for someone who's a perfectionist,
that is a problem,
and an easy way to fix that is to put the pedal box
in the middle, and therefore the seat in the middle.
And with the driver's seat centered between the wheel wells,
he can square his hips
to the car's center line with straight legs.
None of this turning your hips nonsense
while you're driving your super cool sports car.
There are some other benefits to having
a centrally located seat.
One is visibility.
When you're in the center position
and you're pushed forward,
you have a greater view of the road,
and for tall people, like myself, you have more headroom.
That's really nice.
And if we're talking about performance,
we just need to look at
the greatest four wheel machines ever built.
Yep, that's right.
We're talking about go karts.
Again.
Okay, yes, and Formula 1 cars.
(upbeat cheerful music)
Now there's a reason McLaren named this car the F1,
because a lot of the technology in this car
comes from Formula 1,
the seat position being just one aspect.
Now I weigh about 180 pounds soaking wet,
that's 82 kilograms,
and the F1 weighs in about 2,500 pounds.
That means my body weight is about 7% of the total weight
of the car and driver package,
and it's placed directly along the center line,
and if you think about it, unlike most cars,
the weight of the driver has a greater effect
on the weight distribution of a car
that's as light as the F1.
Your fat buns account for more
of that total car-driver combo.
So if three seats is such a good thing,
why don't more cars use them?
Well, airbag system regulations may get much harder
to design a car that can meet those standards.
Not that it would matter,
because the F1 didn't use them anyways.
I mean, this car doesn't have a lot of things
you'd think a super car would have.
There's no traction control, there's no ABS,
no power steering.
There's no electronic aids to help you not crash one.
Now, one of the greatest comedians
to ever grace this planet,
you know who I'm talking about,
you get where I'm going here,
he crashed his twice.
Talking about Mr Bean.
Some people call him Rowan Atkinson,
but for this, I'm sure his real name's Mr Bean.
Now another engineering tidbit is that the seat
is in a permanently fixed position,
as are the pedals, the shifter, and the steering wheel.
Now McLaren would measure you and place those items
in your preferred seating position.
No power seats in the F1.
Those electronic motors used to just power seats,
they just add weight,
which leads me to my next point,
and that is, how did they build a car that was so light?
(relaxed music)
I'm gonna start off with the carbon fiber mono (beep)
because it's the biggest item on this list,
and it's essentially one large body panel
that all your other components attach to,
and more importantly, from a structural standpoint,
both the tensile and compressive forces
are carried through the skin of the monocoque.
So, to show you how strong they are,
come on, let's get in the back of the old jerry bus,
and let's take a trip to my kitchen.
Come on.
(relaxed cheerful music)
I'm Jerry, the guy from before,
and in my hand, I have a monocoque.
I have
(ding)
a little egg,
and this egg is incredibly strong,
given how little material there is in the shell.
So I want you to do something.
I want you to go to your own kitchen,
and ask your mom, say,
"Hey Mom, I need your eggs for science,"
come back here, I'll wait.
(clock ticks)
Okay, you got an egg, great.
I want you to take this egg,
I want you to take your hand,
and I want you to wrap it around the egg like that,
and I want you to squeeze as hard as you can.
You're gonna be thinking,
"Hey Jerry, why would I do that?
"I'm gonna break it.
"I'm gonna get egg all over the place."
I guarantee you, you will not be able to crack it, okay?
So do this, and squeeze.
What's really interesting is that
just like a monocoque chassis,
this egg is extremely strong.
It can take all that compressive forces.
See, when you wrap your hand around it,
all the forces are equally distributed throughout the shell.
Sweating like a pig, too.
It's hot as (beep).
And just like this egg, a monocoque chassis doesn't need
a lot of extra material in order for it
to be able to withstand
all those compressive and tensile forces.
All that pushing and all the weight
and all that stress that it's causing
when you're driving it,
doesn't need a lot of big, bulky parts for it.
It can carry it, just like this egg can carry it.
(chicken squawk)
And with the F1, the entire monocoque
weighs just over 220 pounds.
It's made using 48 individual molds,
with over 5,000 pieces of prepreg carbon fiber
cut using templates, so that each piece
is exactly the same as the last.
Now we talked a lot about prepreg carbon fiber
in a previous episode of B2B,
the SpeedKore Challenger,
go back after this episode and watch it, it's a good one.
But a quick reminder.
Carbon fiber cloth has a high tensile strength,
that's this, really hard to pull apart,
but it's really easy to damage.
Think about it.
You can take a pair of scissors,
you cut right through carbon fiber cloth.
Now polymer resin, on the other hand,
they're weak in tensile strength, but they're really tough,
so when you combine their powers,
yeah, you get carbon planet.
He's our hero.
He's gonna bring weight down to zero.
Carbon planet.
Almost seems like it's bad.
Now the end result is a material
that is twice as strong as steel, but five times lighter.
So you got those specifically cut pieces of carbon fiber,
and they're moved over into a clean room
where they're placed in a mold,
and once they're placed in the mold,
certain parts get an aluminum honeycomb core
added between them,
and this is to increase rigidity
without adding a bunch of weight.
Now depending on what sections
of the monocoque need more strength,
those particular sections of the F1's chassis
are up to 17 layers thick.
Also, throughout the monocoque, inserts are placed
into the carbon fiber to form edges and mount (mumbles).
Remember, stuff has to bolt up to this monocoque chassis,
so you have to have spots that you can run bolts into.
Now the individual pieces are then bagged,
and then they're vacuum sealed,
and the reason they do this is 'cause you want to keep
the carbon fiber pressed up against the mold.
Now this prevents voids in the layer,
and small pinholes on the surface of the carbon fiber.
You'll see in real crappy carbon fiber,
there'll be little dots on the ends.
They didn't want that in the F1.
They were seeking perfection.
So you take these vacuum sealed bagged pieces,
and you put them in
an almost 10 foot wide autoclave to cook,
and that autoclave, it heats up to 125°C,
with 90 PSI pressure,
where it sits there and cooks for three hours,
and that heat and pressure cure the epoxy resin
and turn it from a flexible plastic
into a rock hard plastic.
Using pre-made jigs with holes marked out
where they need to drill, they drill specific holes
while another engineer worker,
they abrase the joints by hand,
and abrase, this is just a fancy word,
it means they just scuff it up,
and when you abrase a surface, what you do is
you're increasing the amount of surface area
so that, when they glue those pieces together,
it forms a solid bond.
That's right.
The McLaren F1's monocoque is glued together.
Even the pattern and how they apply the glue
is specific to give the bond the highest joint strength.
The monocoque is even assembled upside down,
so that gravity, it'll help push all the pieces together,
making sure that glue makes really good contact,
and what's even more impressive is that McLaren
was doing this with their Formula 1 car,
in the MP4-1 in 1981.
Now 10 years later, they were using that tech to build
their first ever road car.
Now one of the more unique parts of the monocoque
is the front crash structure,
and it uses carbon fiber and a material called dyneema,
and it's an ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene,
and this stuff is really, really cool.
Now it's a plastic, and it's spun into a fiber,
and then woven into a cloth
that's combined with sheets of carbon fiber.
Now when they did crash testing,
yes, they had to crash some of them,
they slammed one into a wall at 30 miles per hour,
and it didn't even break the windshield.
And remember, the engine's not in the front of the F1,
it's in the back,
so you don't have the engine "protecting" you
in a front end collision.
Now speaking of engines,
let's talk about natural aspirations.
You're not gonna use that one, I know that.
(engine roars)
(relaxed piano music)
The naturally aspirated 6.1 liter V12 made by BMW
wasn't McLaren's first choice when they were out
shopping for an engine in their F1.
They went to Honda and asked for
a 4.5 liter V10 or V12, gear's choice,
but Honda didn't really follow up, which was weird,
because they were the ones supplying the engines
for the McLaren Formula 1 team at the time.
Now BMW at the time had a five liter V12 in development,
but it was too heavy, and it didn't rev high enough.
Also, Murray, he had a crap ton
of specifications for the engine.
It had to have 100 horsepower per liter,
minimum 550 horsepower,
it couldn't be longer than 600 millimeters,
it had to rev to 7,500 rpm,
it could weight, at max, 500 pounds,
it had to be rigid enough to be
low bearing structural member,
it had to have dry sump oil,
so he could mount the engine lower
and also avoid oil surge during cornering.
And with all that in mind, BMW came up with
quite possibly the most beautiful engine
ever made, the S70/2.
(relaxed cheerful music)
Now the head and block were cast aluminum alloy,
that had double overhead cans
with a version of BMW's variable valve timing
called the Vanos, v-a-n-o-s.
Now it's a hydraulically actuated phasing mechanism
that retards the inlet cam
relative to the exhaust cam at low revs,
and that reduces the valve overlap.
That's when the exhaust valve is closing,
and the intake valve is opening, or vice versa.
Now this gives a car better idle stability,
and increased low speed torque.
Now in the case when the revs get higher,
that's not all that good,
so the valve overlap is actually increased
from 25 degrees to 42 degrees,
and this change in timing increases
the air flow into the cylinders,
which creates better throttle response and more power.
This car gets amazingly good gas mileage, actually.
It's gets down to 22 miles per gallon.
And adding to its throttle response
is that each cylinder gets its own individual throttle body.
12 throttle bodies, 12 butterfly valves,
12 raging stiffies.
Whoo!
Now when you push the peddle down in an engine
with a single throttle body,
that air has to travel further to reach each cylinder,
which slows down the engine's response.
Now with 12 throttle bodies, you get that air
into the cylinder much quicker.
You go into the cylinders,
the bores are coated in nikasil,
and that's an electrodeposited lipophilic
nickel matrix silicon carbide coating.
Okay, let's all say it together.
Okay, nikasil is an electrodeposited lipophilic
nickel matrix silicon carbide coating.
Great.
Now go look up each one of those words.
(beep)
I'm not gonna give you all homework, are you kidding me?
Go take your bicycles out and hop curbs.
Throw water balloons at cars.
Don't do that.
No, no, don't.
Now those are a lot of chemistry related words,
but what you should take away from that
is that it reduces friction on the piston rings,
makes it slippery.
Now even the placement of the cylinders
in the V12 is impressive.
Remember, this engine couldn't be
any longer than 600 millimeters,
so the cylinders themselves were only three millimeters
from each other.
That is super tight in, it's super compact.
Now coming out of the chambers is an exhaust
made of inconel,
and if you've never heard of that,
good, 'cause neither had I.
And why inconel?
Well, under high heat, which is the operating state
of an exhaust system,
it has a high fatigue and tensile strength.
So why would you want an exhaust
to have those strength properties?
Well, in addition to it also having silencers,
it has another reason for being strong,
and that's because it acts as a rear impact absorber.
Your exhaust is basically a strength piece
that prevents someone slamming into you
and damaging a whole bunch of stuff.
That's wild, man.
Now the engine created so much heat
that they had to line the engine bag
with a super efficient heat reflecting material.
You know where I'm getting at.
Gold foil.
(choir hums)
There's roughly 16 grams of gold foil used in this car.
Now the most electronics heavy bit on the McLaren F1
is its diagnostic computer.
This car uses a 14.4k modem,
which you can hook a laptop up to,
and then you can look at all the error codes
that it records to the ECU.
Now, I had a Dreamcast once that had a 56k modem.
Now McLaren and Gordon Murray have since separated,
they've gone their own ways,
but both of them are right now working on
their next-gen three seater super cars.
You got Gordon Murray.
He's got the T.50.
It's gonna be another analog,
naturally aspirated three seater car,
and then you got McLaren,
and they got their Speedtail,
which is gonna be their three seater sports car.
The McLaren was the last great analog super car,
which sounds kind of counterintuitive.
How can a machine with such engineering greatness
that would stand the test of time
be considered analog?
Well, because the engineers
designed the mechanical pieces so well
that they didn't need a bunch of fancy electronics.
McLaren themself, they're a wild company.
Go watch this "Up to Speed" on McLaren.
Also, on behalf of the whole Donut crew,
we want to give a big birthday shout out to SEN Rydra.
It's a 10th birthday.
It's a big one, he's a big fan of ours.
So thank you for watching, SEN.
The world is just at your fingertips, man.
Happy birthday.