What makes those damn F1 cars so fricking fast?

Factual Questions
21

Oh, and here’s a possible explanation (not an excuse) for the incident that Joe_Cool witnessed this past weekend.

In Formula 1, there are several competitions going on simultaneously. There is the race, then there is the points race, and then there is the team competition. The ideal finish is a 1-2 team finish, but you want to try to hit all the numbers. The number one Ferrari driver, Michael Schumacher, is closing in on a fifth world title, while Rubens Barrichello is not really in the running, even though his second-place finish puts him fourth in the standings.

Allowing Barrichello to finish first would not have allowed him to close too much on the number three spot in the standings, but those extra four points have moved Schumacher up to exactly double the points of Montoya, the second best points-contender. Ferrari is obviously one of those teams that uses the number two guy as a “mule,” and while it’s distasteful to many, it’s not a new phenomenon nor is it ineffective.

As said, that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Plenty of people are pissed.

22

<hijack>
If all the cars have adhere to a certain specification, what was the deal with that 6 wheel ELF car?
</hijack>

23

Don’t be. That’s the mildest comment I’ve heard so far.
:smiley:

24

A few years back a CART car set the world record for speed on a closed track. It was on an oval and the speed was about 240 MPH. That was the average speed for 1 lap. That was during a qualifying run - they don’t do that speed during races.

25

That was a Tyrrell car. The fact that cars had to have 4 wheels wasn’t spelled out in the formula at the time. The car was fairly successful, it won the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix. The smaller tires in front made for better aerodynamics. Tyrrell eventually dropped the idea because of the added expense of the custom tires. Eventually the rules were changed to enforce a 4 wheel limit. Two more teams tested a six wheel car (4 normal-sized tires in the rear, this time) before the rule was written but none ever ran in a race.

Six wheeled race cars:
http://www.f1nutter.com/tech/6wheels.htm

26

Thanks fiddlesticks, makes sense now. Boy that Tyrell car sure was cool looking.

27

<hijack>
This is what I don’t get. Other than the Utah Mach 1 rocket cars, funny cars are among the fastest, if not the fastest. Why are they called ‘funny’ cars? They are nothing to laugh at.
</hijack>

28

What does this mean?

I’m picturing a car riding on it’s roof, sparks flying everywhere…

29

I believe he means at 190 KM/Hr the car generates more downforce than it’s weight. If the car was flipped over it would have enough lift to ‘fly’.

30

I believe he’s referring to the fact that, at speed, the front and rear airfoils mounted on the car generate downforce (well) in excess of the car’s weight.

If you could solve problems of stuff like inverted fuel delivery*, these cars could, in principle, drive on an upside-down road - aerodynamic downforce would be pushing them “up” into the road more strongly than gravity could pull them down.

This downforce, for those who may not know, is used to basically force extra weight onto the tires’ contact patches with the ground - increasing the amount of grip. This is why F1 cars can take corners pulling upwards of 3 lateral G’s. I don’t know what the hell that feels like, but when I think that a very grippy road car looses traction in the neighborhood of 1 G I get frightened. :slight_smile:

  • And you surely could - aerobatic airplanes have no difficulty with it. However, since race cars aren’t actually called upon to drive on the ceiling, I doubt they have the capacity to do so built in.
31

And a car “loosing” traction is very much like losing traction.

32

F1 cars are not what most outsiders think they are at all.

Each and every car is effectively a prototype built within the regulatory body’s (FIA) specifications.

It would be better to say that teams turn up to an event with a vehicle assembled from a very expensive kit and the components are selected for a particular circuit, so that for the Monaco event Ferrarri has used a differant bodyshell to get a shorter wheelbase.

What each team has is a design package that can be changed in a controlled way to produce predictable performance, as such the teams are less about the cars themselves than a set of numbers to which components can be designed.
To give you an idea about the collective effort involved then look no further than the new Toyota team, it has over 550 staff just involved in design, testing and production and that does not include those involved in tyre manufacture or fuel supply and plenty of others not directly employed by F1 Toyota.

Most teams have their own wind tunnels and aerodynamicists, some have extra teams added to them producing software, engine analysis and stress analysis.

What it all adds up to is that to get on the back of the grid and start a race you need an established team (cost around £30 million)and a minimum of £30millions to run for one season.

If you want to start up a team from nothing at all and if you want to aim for a shot with the front runners it’ll cost £hundreds of millions each year for at least four or five years, and in total this will be not too far short of £1billion, that’s right ! for just five years to go with the big boys.

That kind of money brings massively efficient structural design, other posters have commented that Indycars and CART cars are stronger, but I doubt that there is much differance at all, if a course demands more robust parts such as suspension struts and the like then they would be fitted, if a course demands a slower steering car then a new shell will be produced, but the industry that is each individual F1 team can probably design components as strong as anything in Indy etc but lighter.

I doubt that any Indy team has the budget or capacity to design and build completely one-off computor modelled components in the way that F1 can.

…but if you really want to see true racing on the circuit rather than in the corporate sense then I’d suggest watching bike racing, the onboard camera shots are just breathtaking and there is far more incident and overtaking than F1

33
      • As a sidenote (for purposes of comparison), I turned up a September 2000 issue of Car and Driver, which tested the following:
        Porsche 911Turbo [$118,000 USD] [415 HP/415 Lb-Ft]=192 Mph/limited,
        Ferrari 360 (the “standard” model) [$153,500] [395HP/275Lb-Ft] 175 Mph/limited
        and the Austin-Martin DB7 Vantage [$145,000] [414HP/398Lb-Ft] 182 Mph/unlimited.
        ~
  • There are customizers who will build engines much more powerful than this but from what I’ve read, when pushed hard often the things simply do not hold together very long. Hot-rod style cars often have big-block engines with blowers, but the people who drive them don’t regularly drive them at top speed for extended periods. - DougC
34

Hot Rod style cars are also useful for going in a straight line, and that’s about it.

35

Well, to give you an idea of just how f***ed up US-based open wheeled racing has gotten thanks to the CART/IRL holy war, the only team with this ability, Penske Racing, moved from CART to the IRL this year. The IRL does not allow its team to modify anything on its spec’ed racecars. Last year, Penske took one of CART’s customer chassis and modified just about every piece of it and took the series championship.