How Much 'Progress' is Actually Marked By Formula 1
You don't need to be a connoisseur of motorsport's pinnacle to know about Formula 1. Surely you've heard about it from somewhere or some junkie like me who gets up at ungodly hours to watch the races. In this week's post, I'm taking a step away from media proper to talk about some myths of technological progress surrounding the sport.
Formula 1 is a sanctioned racing discipline and cited as the pinnacle of motorsport for good reason. They are cars designed to race around paved asphalt tracks and governed by a dense book of rules. The rule book for car designs are in excess of a thousand pages and regulate the dimensions up to the millimetre. Most notably, they are characterized by being the quickest, but not the fastest cars; that is, there are cars that can go faster in a straight line, but the closest comparable cars are over 10 percent slower than F1 cars. This is because of the R & D costs involved with the sport. A top ranking team will employ a workforce of over 200 designers and will have an annual expenditure in excess of US $300 million per year!
So what does this have to do with the myth of progress? We would like to think that that much investment per year means that the cars will go faster around the tracks each successive season. This isn't true. In fact, the current roster of cars will be slower than the cast this time last year. Why is that? Formula 1 above all has a priority with safety. There's nothing safe about driving at 300kph, but mandates over the past three decades have minimized accident related injuries so much that there hasn't been a death since the tragic demise of Ayrton Senna in 1994. As a result, rule changes have been implemented to slow cars down to a safer speed. Also, the aerodynamic downforce of cars has been reduced to make cars able to actually race against one another.
As a result, the technological progress in Formula 1 is not simply a linear process of improving upon car designs by year, but working to find clever loopholes in the rules to make them quick around the track. So the cars of 2012 are not direct descendents of the cars from 1992. Quite the contrary, their designs are innovative reactions to rules that have sought to slow them down.Let's look at a few examples.
This is a car from 1985. It had a turbocharged engine that produced over 1000 horsepower. Deemed too fast, turbo boost was restricted until turbos were banned entirely after 1988.
This is the championship winning car of 1993. It was loaded with a number of electronic gadgets including ABS brakes, an automatic gearbox and active suspension. The latter 'driver aid' replaced typical passive springs and dampers in the car's suspension with a computer-tuned hydraulic system. No matter what speed it was traveling at, or how tight the corner, all four corners of the car were kept at an ideal height above the tarmac that ensured optimal aerodynamic performance. If you watch old videos of this car, it looks like a hovercraft with wheels. This technology was subsequently banned after 1993 after being deemed to take away from drivers' skill, of course, with disastrous effects. The rule changes meant many cars designed around active suspension had to employ a passive system for 1994, which made them frightfully unstable at speed. This may have something to do with the number of injuries sustained by drivers that season.
In a bid to slow the cars down in 1995, rule changes mandated the front and rear wings to be smaller. Clever designers began opting for a raised nose design; the front of the car had more of a pointy, cone shape, which helped channel more airflow under the car towards an aerodynamic device called a diffuser. Really, the cars were getting quicker.
At the end of 1997 the rules were drastically changed once again. This time the width of the cars was reduced and grooved tires were implemented to try and slow them down. In the picture below you can see the differences between the '97 and '98 Ferraris. Large aerodynamic devices called 'tower wings' were installed on many of the '98 cars to improve their downforce, all of which were subsequently banned.
The designers had to get even more innovative. Aerodynamics were reworked and engine power increased, and F1 cars were at their quickest between 2002 to 2004. The governing body began regulating the amount of down force cars could produce to slow them down further. To help reduce costs, engine regulations changed from 3.0l V10s, producing about 900 horsepower to 2.4l V8s, producing about 750 horsepower. More small aerodynamic devices were installed on cars to help channel air flow more efficiently, to the point that cars were extremely difficult to chase through corners. Allegedly this severely compromised the racing spectacle, so for 2009, the rules were drastically changed once again. Most of these 'winglets' were banned, rear wings were made taller and narrower, and front wings were made lower to the tarmac and wider. See comparison below.
But this didn't stop designers, they had a few tricks up their sleeve. Moving to the rear of the car, the diffuser, which is a device that accelerates air from under the car, thus reducing pressure and sucking the car to the track, may have been reduced in size, but designers found ways to add to their intricacy. The infamous 'double-decker diffuser' gave several cars an advantage on track, forcing other teams to mimic the design. By the end of 2009 they were banned. In 2010 some cars were fitted with an f-duct, which was a clever design that channeled a pipeline of air to the rear wing to effectively eliminate its aerodynamic drag when activated, this increasing the car's speed on straights. Banned. In 2011 a much hyped exhaust blown diffuser (EBD) was created. This pointed the engine's exhaust pipes towards the diffuser, increasing airflow and thus effect. While going through corners, the car's computer would keep the engine revving to help add downforce while cornering. Banned.
Main: The F-Duct design. Inset: Double-Decker Diffuser
For 2012, in a bid to improve a potential safety issue, the rules required that the nose of F1 cars be lower. To avoid compromising airflow to the rear of the cars, we're seeing some strange 'platypus' designs like this.
In the end, the technological ingenuity in F1 keeps increasing, but to say they are the top of technological design is more of a myth. The 1992-1993 cars probably were the most technologically advanced, while the cars of about 8 years ago were more or less the quickest. What does an archaeological sign through the sport's perpetually changing designs tell us? Well, one car is going to say very little to the untrained eye, other than us questioning why they appear the way they do. But the archaeological approach helps us look at each component of a car, understanding them as an innovation, a reaction, a trial approach. You may not think F1 cars are aesthetically beautiful, but these limited examples I've provided help prove that their beauty is well below the service; in their history.
Enjoy!




