F1 tech facts Pt2

1. F1 wheelnuts are designed to come loose while driving

F1 pitstops are really fast. The fastest pitstop this season has so far been Felipe Massa's 1.92 second stop in the European GP. One of the secrets to those fast pitstops is in the wheelnuts. The nuts are tightened and designed in such way that while driving on the track they become loose just as the car stops in pits. This saves fraction of a second of pitstop time because it takes little less time to remove the tire.

2. F1 wheels are super light and act as aerostatic bearings

Basically what this means is that when an F1 car is going really fast the tire rubber expands due to centrifugal forces and heat expansion. This means the rubber will grow and eventually stops touching the wheels. This can be seen in some camera shots where the wheel looks like it is rotating to opposite direction than the tire. It looks like so because it is!

The wheels rotate forwards in slower speeds but at high speeds this rotation is reversed. When this happens there is a small amount of air between the wheel and the tire rubber that acts as an incredibly low friction cushion which allows the car to go faster because there is less friction. This is called an aerostatic bearing - the air between the objects acts as lubrication! This is also the reason why so many teams use black colored wheels. To make it really hard to notice.

Sadly I can not find a good quality video because FOM removes every F1 related from youtube as soon as they find them.

3. Incredible front wing bending

F1 cars try to use very trick in the book to improve the aerodynamic performance of the cars. One key area of designing a fast F1 car is the design of the front wing. As the front wing controls how the air flows over the whole car the front wing is critical piece for the overall performance of the car.

One smart way to improve the front wing is to make it bend just the right way. The newest trick is making the front wing rotate slightly in corners. The rules require that there can be no joints in the structure so all the movement is achieved by shaping the carbon fibre just the right way so it bends as the designer wants.

The F1 sport governing body FIA has tried very hard to clamp down on this issue but teams keep coming with new ways to bend the rules every season. The bending of the front wing has been limited to small amounts vertically but this kind of rotation is not (yet) covered by the rules. (image borrowed from the site that has the watermark on it. I just made slight edit on it.)

4. Extreme lubrication requirements

An F1 car is built to really high tolerances. For example the piston of an F1 engine needs to be perfectly elliptical (not circular) and within just one ten thousandth of millimeter at any point around its circumference. Any more difference in the diameters and lengths can lead to major issues.

To lubricate such engines also requires the best kind of oils. What the teams are using currently is a secret but there is a lot of speculation that the most common oil is substance called ethylene brassilate. This is extremely low weight oil that costs about 5000€ per gram to make. An F1 car consumes about 10 litres of oil per race so the oil change costs alone are sky high.

5.Using vacuum to save weight

An F1 monococque only weighs 35kilograms. F1 teams spend a lot of money trying to make the cars lighter. This may sound odd because there is a minimum weight limit for the cars. But one reason to get below that weight limit is so that you can then have extra weights on the car which you can move in different places on the car to alter its handling. Contrary to common knowledge F1 cars do not use lead as ballast but osmium. Lead density is just 11,34g/cubic centimeter while osmium is 22,59g/cubic centimetre.
Anyways, one way to make the ways to make the F1 car lighter is to make sure any open structures on the car are in vacuum instead of being filled with what air was left inside the structures. Any airpockets in carbon fibre for example are sucked out of air and closed air tight. On the monococque this can give weight savings of 50 to 170 grams out of the 35 kilogram monococque weight!