F1 and engineering: how innovations in the racing sport impact your car

Over the years, elements and features pioneered or fine-tuned by F1 teams have percolated to the design and development of cars driven by the average Joe. He may not be Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, or Lewis Hamilton, but his car could have a bit of their race cars in it.

In every F1 team, scores—including top automobile design, engineering, and technology talent—work relentlessly to build race cars with manufacturers pouring millions of dollars. The F1 ecosystem appears to be a money-making machine but it is not like the teams are raking in massive profits. In fact, some of them actually lose money, while the others manage to break even or pocket a small profit.

Doesn’t make sense? It might when viewed from the perspectives of marketing and engineering.

Having a competitive and strong F1 team generates immense brand value for team owners to sell their regular cars, or whatever it is they sell (energy drinks in the case of Red Bull), globally. If your brand is on the grid, people all over the world are watching you. So even if Ferrari and Mercedes end up losing some money in their F1 teams, they won’t sweat it as they believe it is, in part at least, a high-value investment in their brands that helps them sell more cars.

Coming to engineering, constructing and bettering F1 cars is essentially a continuous and real-time research and development project for car and engine manufacturers, enabling them to import the improvements and features into their offerings to the broader automobile market. Beyond the cars on the grid, technology from F1 has gone into improving car design over the years. Not only that, F1 even has imprints beyond the automobile industry.

Aerodynamics

Efficient automotive aerodynamics—the way air flows around the vehicle’s exterior surface—play a big role in a car’s overall efficiency. The more aerodynamic a car is, the less drag it produces. Lower drag means less effort is needed to push it through the air and good aerodynamics ensure better performance and fuel economy.

Much of this is typically done at the design stage when prototype car models are run through wind tunnel tests to make sure that a car shell meets the operational and class requirements with regard to propulsion, manoeuvring, mooring, and overall stability.

In Formula 1, carmakers get a real-time feel of how aerodynamics work and what can be tweaked or reshaped on the car’s outer body to improve performance. This has led to design development not just for race cars, but for regular cars as well, lending them improved fuel efficiency as well as control at higher speeds. One example of a feature that emerged out of car racing is the spoiler.

Spoilers started to gain traction in the 1960s as manufacturers sought to improve the aerodynamics of race cars and high-performance vehicles. Later, federal fuel economy regulations motivated them to improve the aerodynamics of all rides to generate higher mileage ratings. A vehicle with less wind resistance uses less fuel at high speeds.

Most people would generally associate a spoiler to be a wing-shaped appendage attached to a car’s trunk lid, which can either project out or simply appear as a relatively small bump. Spoilers are much more pronounced in F1 race cars, which travel at extremely high speeds and require extensive aerodynamics. When one drives fast, the problem of ‘lift’ is encountered due to the air rushing through around the body of the car at high speeds and can potentially flip the car. One way to counter that is to increase the weight of the car, but that has a detrimental impact on efficiency.

Most people would generally associate a spoiler to be a wing-shaped appendage attached to a car’s trunk lid, which can either project out or simply appear as a relatively small bump. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The spoiler, on the other hand, creates a downforce to oppose this, essentially pushing the car down and not allowing it to lift from the road. It helps the fast vehicle to corner better but, in turn, creates the drag that reduces speed.

Paddle shifter

On most cars sold in India with automatic gears, paddle shifters are now making an appearance. Paddle shifters are levers attached to the steering wheel or the steering column that allow drivers to manually shift the gears of an automatic transmission vehicle with their thumbs.

While the technology has been around for a while, Ferrari introduced paddle shifters in the 1989 F1 season.

With the paddle shifters, unlike a fully automatic transmission vehicle, the driver retains control over when and where to shift gears. Less than 10 years after the Formula 1 debut, paddle shifters made their way into Ferrari’s road-ready F355. Most automatics sold today have these as standard, including in India.

Steering-mounted controls

In road cars, the steering-mounted controls for adjusting volume, radio stations, activating Bluetooth and setting cruise control all find their origins in F1 technology. In Formula 1 cars, there can be over 20 buttons and switches on the steering wheel for various functions, ranging from brake bias adjustment to activating the Drag Reduction System (DRS), along with the crucial overtaking button that extracts maximum power from the engine and motors.

Hybrids and brake regen

Since the 2007 season, F1 teams have been experimenting with hybrid drivetrain technologies, initially testing kinetic energy recovery systems that capture energy from brake regeneration. This tech was then employed in Mercedes-Benz EQ-Boost mild hybrids, which is now used in practically most car models on the road today, including in India.

By the 2014 season, all Formula 1 cars on the grid were mandated to feature hybrid drivetrains, including tech to recuperate energy from braking and also to harness heat from the turbocharger. This power is then directed towards an energy storage system, typically a lithium-ion battery.

From the 2026 F1 season, teams will have to introduce new engines powered by 100 per cent sustainable fuels. Half of the engine’s power will be from kinetic energy recovery systems.

Future tech

There are also emerging innovations in F1 that might soon find their way into road vehicles. Fuels such as hydrogen, synthetic petrol, and biofuels are currently undergoing testing or are already in use in modern F1 machines.

F1 has committed to achieving net-zero by 2030, and as a step towards that goal, F1 teams will be required to run on 100 per cent sustainable fuels from 2026. F1 cars already use 10 per cent ethanol biofuel in cars currently as part of a broader mandate.

New materials

F1, and more specifically McLaren, must be credited for pioneering popularising the use of lightweight yet strong carbon fibre composites in race cars. The expertise developed by F1 engineers and designers in carbon fibre composites has not just found wider application within the automotive industry, but even beyond, including a few other sports.

Carbon fibre is significantly stronger yet lighter than more conventional materials like aluminium, and is also corrosion-free.

While its adoption in road cars has mostly been limited to top-end cars due to the material’s high cost, it is now gaining popularity in automobile manufacturing. With expectations of lower costs and further innovation in the coming years, it may not be long before parts made of carbon fibre composites see wider application in regular road cars.

Pit stops

Formula 1 and pit stops are clearly linked. But the pit-stop strategy is being applied to other areas far removed from car racing, including toothpaste making and even hospital care.

Doctors from the University Hospital of Wales had visited the Williams F1 team in 2016 to improve their performance in resuscitating newborns, The Guardian reported. The objective was to learn how to better organise their instrument trolley and create a floorplan with places marked for each team member, as well as learning how to use hand signals (F1 teams use it because of the engine noise).

There is also the example of British drug major GSK using McLaren’s pit-stop skills to cut the time it takes to switch toothpaste flavours in one of its production lines from 39 to 15 minutes, allowing it to produce an extra 6.7 million tubes a year.