Red Bull Motorsports
F1
How to Make a Red Bull Racing F1 Car?
How to Make a Red Bull Racing F1 Car?
As the Red Bull F1 Showrun is coming up in Beirut, you must have many questions.
What does it take to make one of the world’s fastest racing cars? How are they so powerful? How much time does it take to build one? How is the perfect design chosen? How many tests before a car is good to go? How many parts does an F1 car need? And how many machines are needed for the whole process?
Here are the answers.
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© Red Bull Content Pool
This is where Formula 1 cars are made.
Here are a few insights on what happens at the Red Bull Racing factory. The making of an F1 car is divided into four parts: design and R&D (Research & Development), composites, manufacturing, and assembly.
Let’s see what goes down during the Design and R&D phase.
Did you know a Formula 1 car typically takes only five months to be designed and developed? It takes over 300 designers, aerodynamicists and machinists to create one RB model. Yes, three-hundred, THREE-hundred! Every model created has a specific purpose.
How to make am F1 2
© Getty Images
The process starts at a conceptual stage with one agent or different designers from the aerodynamic group on the drawing board. Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing designer, is actually one of the last designers who still draws by hand. Once the concepts are created, they have to go through CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) or through the tunnel before they can be moved to full-scale production. Yes, this does sound a bit too scientific, but it just means concepts have to through testing procedures.
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© GEPA Pictures
How to make am F1 4
© GEPA Pictures
Every week, thousands of parts are sent to the wind tunnel (testing aerodynamic forces and other engineering characteristics). Imagine that! The car used in the tunnel is only a 60% scale version of the real F1 car.
Listen to this: From the first race, to the last race in the Formula 1 season, a car undergoes almost 30,000 design changes. That’s on average 1000 design changes per week. Talk about precision!
Test rigs work 15 hours a day to test components. These rigs simulate race situations at a triple or quadruple mileage that a component could see. The sign-off of any component is very vigilant, as many components as possible are tested before they are put into a race. It’s all about deciding what will give the car the best performance!
Now that we’re done with R&D and Design. We move on to Composites.
The main composite of the Formula 1 body is carbon fiber. The latter has been an essential part of F1 car production for approximately 30 years. It is ten times stronger than steel and half the weight. Crazy, isn’t it?
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© Thomas Butler
To create one component of the bodywork, shapes have to be chosen. Patterns are then created to bring the shape to life. Shapes are then layered with carbon fiber; sometimes up to 200 layers are used. After that, they are put into the autoclave (some sort of a pressure cooker) to squeeze the layers together. The temperature goes up to around 180 degrees. Feeling hot already?
Each part spends around two to eight hours in the autoclave. From start to finish, it can take up to three days to make one single component of the bodywork.
What’s even more complicated is that every part of the car – the bodywork, the steering wheel, the chassis, the cockpit – is made to fit the driver’s requirements.
That’s it for the composites. Now comes the interesting part: less theoretical and more physical.
Want to find out how it all builds into one beautiful and powerful racing car? Blog Baladi tells you all about it here.
