Red Bull Motorsports
F1
Here's how to build an F1 car by Toro Rosso
Go behind the scenes with James Key, Scuderia Toro Rosso's Technical Director, to discover the secrets of an F1 car from the computer screens to the track.
What separates Formula One from other racing championships? Plenty of theories on that. Is it having the fastest cars? Or, perhaps the best drivers? Lots of people would subscribe to those theories – though there'll be dissent also. There are faster racing machines (though not around a road circuit), and to say F1 drivers are the undisputed champions of motorsport is to discount the achievements of Sébastien Loeb, Marc Márquez or Valentino Rossi, among others.
James Key guides us on this special Scuderia Toro Rosso factory tour to discover how an F1 car comes from the computer screens to the track. Check it out in the video below:
3 min
How to make an F1 car
Toro Rosso shows us how an F1 team is in a constant development cycle.
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Where F1 absolutely has no peer, however, is in the realm of development. From design through to manufacturing, an F1 team is in a constant development cycle, employing hundreds of people (450 in the case of Toro Rosso in Faenza, more in the case of most others) in an operation that works flat-out year round to deliver improvement. The tool it uses to do this is the factory – though ‘factory’ really doesn’t do it justice. Really, it’s a machine built around the singular purpose of continually building faster racing cars.
Design
The process starts, as it must, with design – though that term covers a multitude of activities, spread across hundreds of staff in the technical office. It begins with first principles: decisions taken by the senior staff outlining the fundamentals around which the new car will constructed: what sort of suspension will it use? How long will the wheelbase be? From here, the path diverges, with teams working on composites, suspension, hydraulics, transmission and systems. Teams within teams test (virtually and physically) designs, which go around a refinement loop until signed-off. Meanwhile, further engineers work on integrating and packaging the various design elements. All of this fits inside bodywork designed by an aerodynamics department – with the former generally dictating the latter.
CAD/CAM
Design of an F1 car
© GramaFilm/RBMH
While there are plenty of eccentrics (usually in very senior positions) who still prefer to work with a mechanical pencil and a drawing board, almost all design work is carried out on Computer-Aided Design (CAD) stations. Once those CAD models are signed off, the drawings can be converted into Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) instructions for the machine tools that will do the actual cutting and milling.
If an F1 team can use an off-the-shelf component, it will – but most of the time it can’t. The sport is very much a bespoke activity with a focus on lightweight, high-strength components not naturally-occurring in the outside world. Thus, the CNC lathes and five-axis machining centres are whirring non-stop in the factory’s manufacturing halls.
Every team in F1 is a two-car operation but they will aim to construct four, perhaps five chassis to see them through the year. In the past it was more – teams might build as many as 10 cars – but with a limit on the amount of testing they can do, four is generally considered enough to get through a season now. That number, however, belies the size of the manufacturing operation. An F1 car never races in the same configuration twice – in fact only very rarely does it remain unchanged day-to-day. There is a constant stream of new parts arriving, as the team continually refines its design, making parts lighter, stronger or more useful to the aerodynamics of the car. One senior engineer recently estimated his team would make roughly 20,000 design changes in between the launch of the car in February and its final race in November. That means the machining hall is never silent.
Carbon fibre
Carbon fibre
© GramaFilms/RBMH
The companion piece to the machine hall is the carbon composite workshop. F1 started using carbon fibre parts in the 1970s for bodywork and wings. It adopted the material wholesale in the 1980s when super-strong carbon fibre monocoques (now called ‘survival cells’ by the FIA, and ‘tubs’ by everyone else) were adopted. While carbon composites have since been adopted by road cars and passenger jets, the material still remains synonymous with Formula One: the combination of high strength at low weight makes it perfect for the sport.
Its use in F1 is part craft, part industrial process. Many parts are still laid up by hand, before being cured – essentially cooked by heat and pressure so that the layers of resin and carbon fibre bond correctly – in an autoclave. James Key estimates his team made 77,000 carbon composite parts during the 2016 season.
This isn’t the glamorous end of the F1 operation – but it wins races as surely as a committed qualifying lap or a rapid pitstop. While inspiration has its place, once the cars are launched, it becomes a sport based around iteration.
Pierre Gasly
© Getty Images/Red Bull Content Pool
Teams are constantly refining their designs, and the more refinements they can make, the faster the car will be – but designing a better car in CAD/CAM is no use without having the manufacturing capacity to turn those designs into reality. While most design changes are designed to improve the car to the tune of a couple of thousands of a second, a major upgrade can gain whole tenths. Something like a new front wing (an assembly the team may upgrade three or four times over the course of a season) will contain hundreds of parts, and take weeks to build. The team that can build that faster, and maybe get it onto the car a race before schedule, it always going to have an advantage.
Quality control
Quality control
© GramaFilms/RBMH
Building a fast car is largely pointless if that car isn’t capable of getting to the chequered flag – thus the F1 factory commits a lot of resources to quality control. Every part is inspected before making its way onto the car or into the stores, and most parts are inspected between races, if time allows for the car to be stripped and rebuilt. The type of testing depends on the part: coordinate measuring machines accurate to microns (a millionth of a metre) measuring dimensions, while a variety of non-destructive testing (NDT) methods, such as X-rays or dye-penetrant inspection are used to look at the internal structures of parts.
Assembly
After parts are designed, manufactured and tested, they get to the stage of the operation guests generally want to see: the race bays. Formula One cars are assembled outwards from the centre. The core of the car is the monocoque. The engine is bolted to the back of the monocoque and then the gearbox is bolted to the back of the engine. Everything else is fitted around this central core.
The first build process with a new car will take weeks – but gradually the mechanics will hone the process (perhaps with the aid of designers tweaking their designs to work better in the real world) to the point where building and stripping the car becomes second nature. Car crews at the larger teams have the luxury of second teams that receive the cars in the race bays and strip them down, allowing the car crews a day or two off between races. For smaller teams like Toro Rosso, the guys that race it at the track, are generally the same ones that strip and rebuild it in the factory.
