Formula 1 Cars is a Fascinating Engineering Problem/Masterpiece
How incredible all the cars on the grid are. Every one of those machines are extreme in a way that it is hard to comprehend unless you work inside a team or unless you physically stand in the fast corner and be really close to it and watching it as it goes to a corner. Because only then you can really, really appreciate how utterly amazing the performace is. — James Allison, Chief Technical Director Mercedes-AMG F1 Team [1]
Formula 1 cars is a fascinating engineering problem because in designing it, the engineers have to think through hundreds of parts from design, testing, race day, to updates phase and make sure that each part can work nicely along the others to achieve the main goal to win championships.
Before going into details, let’s set the context.
Context
Formula 1 cars are the cars used to compete in Formula 1 — the highest class of international single-seater auto racing. [2]
The goal
The ultimate goal in participating in Formula 1 competition is to win the championship. In order to win the championship, the team / driver have to win races. And to win a race, the team / driver have to be the quickest on the grid.
The situation
But however, there are some constraints while producing the quickest car on the grid.
Regulation: Just like other competitions, there are rules to be followed. But in F1, the rules are more complex because it is covering the whole workflow from designing each part, what each part is allowed to do, what are the interfaces the drivers are allowed to use, how to conduct testing, and many more.
Resource: As a business, F1 teams are also constrained by money generated by sponsorship deals, manpower, and time (where testing time is also regulated).
Driver’s preferences: At the race day, the car will be driven by the team’s driver. It is critical to have a car that the driver can use effectively and efficiently.
Track variability: Throughout the season, races will be conducted on different tracks with its own characteristics. Some of the variables here are corner speed, banking degrees, and DRS zones.
Weather variability: Races will be conducted on both dry and wet conditions. This requires the car to be able to perform well in hot and cold conditions & grippy and slippery conditions.
Why
As a software engineer, I like to use distributed systems as an analogy to a F1 car. In distributed systems, we will have multiple small components that communicate to each other. The components will have their own responsibility. Finally when all the components are woven in together nicely, the distributed system is able to solve particular problem or to reach a certain goal.
F1 cars are the same. It also consists of multiple components such as front wing, rear wing, front suspensions, rear suspensions, wheels, barge boards, power unit, gearbox, and more. In order to be the quickest car on the grid, all of these components and the subcomponents inside it should work nicely when assembled to a unit of F1 car. Meaning that when everything is assembled, every component should be adding or multiplying positive value not negative value.
But sometimes not all design will be possible. Tracks will be different. The cars have to be flexible enough to be set up to adapt to the different situations it will face. Tradeoffs (in both design and setup) must be made to optimize all the resource a team had to produce the quickest car possible on every race.
One more analogy between distributed systems and F1 cars is if we’re to build a distributed systems, the knowledge of all the principles of distributed systems and computer science are critical to make correct decision. F1 cars is the same. Having a deep knowledge physics knowledge on how the car behaves is the thing that enables the team to design a quick car and improve it further.
In the next section, I’ll explain in detail of what each major components do and how they interact with each other.
Aspects of Formula 1 Car
Power Unit
Currently, F1 cars use hybrid power unit with 4 stroke internal combustion engine. The power unit will generate power by suck, squeeze, bang, blow phases on the fuel. The fuel will flow from the tank to the engine cylinders in a regulated rate. So no team can cheat by having more fuel per amount of time. The power generated will turn the axle who’s connected to the gearbox. The gearbox’s purpose here is to make sure the engine is operating in the optimal RPM to produce the maximum amount of power.
In the image above, we can see where the power is coming from at any point in the track. This is one of the neutral cases. It will have a different setup for more aggressive or conservative mode.
The power unit is mainly tightly coupled the chassis. First case is given all things equal. If the power unit is able to operate in a higher temperature, the car can have smaller radiator. Smaller radiator means slimmer chassis, and slimmer chassis means less drag. Second case is given all things equal, with more power, the drag force will be higher. As a result of that, the downforce will be higher.
Chassis x Aero
Chassis is the largest part of a F1 car. Chassis determines whether the car can behave as expected or not. For example, with the right combination of drag x downforce x power, the driver can handle the car better and faster through a corner. When something is missing on one of the three sections, the car would be undrivable. Meaning it is not fast, hard to handle, and not behaving as expected. Obviously this can lead to oblivion (position loss, points loss, crashes).
Another important part of the chassis is how does it interact with the wheels. Does the chassis distort the wheel shape? If it does, what shape will the wheels have? Why is this important? If the chassis is not interacting with the wheels positively, the tyre wear will be bad. Meaning the life of a set of tyre will be lower. This will result to more pit stops and having a worse handling on bad tyres.
One interesting point I’d like to point out is the front wing and the barge boards. Front wing is the first place the air make contact with the car. Front wing will redirect the airflow to the wheel. After the air passes the wheel, the bargeboards are there to receive the air and redirect it to the floor to generate more downforce.
You’re hearing a lot of downforce in this section. Downforce is very important to a F1 car because by having higher downforce, F1 car will be able to go to a corner in a higher speed. Imagine there are 18 corners in a track. By having a higher turning speed, the car will have much quicker lap time.
Suspensions [4]
Suspensions are the component that will be setup differently for each track and driver. Why does this happen? Suspension setup is modifying the grip differential between front and rear tyres. By having more front grip, the car will be much easier to oversteer (rear part sliding) whereas by having more rear grip, the car is prone to understeer (hard to turn). Different drivers have different preferences on these part.
Suspensions can vary from hard to soft. Softer suspensions can absorb bumps more effectively, but at the cost of higher tyre wear. Harder suspension absorb less bump, meaning the whole car can be shaking when hitting a bump, but this has lower tyre wear than softer suspensions.
Suspension also affect the ride height or the distance between the road to the floor of the car. Higher ride height will cause higher drag and more downforce whereas lower ride height cause lower drag and less downforce.
Suspension also affect camber and toe. Camber is how the tyre contact the road vertically and toe is how the tyre contact the road horizontally. Adjusting camber can affect tyre wear. So if you got unoptimal camber, tyre wear will be bad. Toe in the other hand effect the turning response of a car. Meaning open toe will have better turning behavior, but more drag in the straight line since the tyre won’t be perfectly perpendicular with the direction.
Wheels
All F1 cars currently have the same set of wheels to choose from (Soft, Medium, Hard, Intermediate, Wet). The challenge here is to make sure that the car can extract all the tyre life given by the tyre. If a car can only work with one type of tyre, then the team is tightly coupled with a race strategy and results an inflexible team.
Conclusion
F1 cars are extremely fascinating and gives the engineer a different set of problem each race, each season. They have to design a thousands of good part, integrate the part to the car, and make sure it has positive impact to the championship. They have to iterate update process after race and make sure that the car is better for the next race. Truly, F1 cars are an engineering masterpiece.
