Making a single bolt for an FL car

And those drivers are called „paydrivers” because they pay for having the seat to sit in.

There is often a popular resentment of "pay drivers" for not being up to the standards of top driver talent. But the fact is that anything but the top levels of the sport would not exist without their involvement. Motorsports is an incredibly expensive venture.

How do the teams get the truckloads of stuff from race to race, especially internationally? I assume everything connected by land is able to be traversed by road/rail in time to make the next race. Do they put a whole truck on a plane? Do they have trucks on every continent and just move palettes of stuff?

So Clarkson was right when he said that the fastest car in the world is a rental car?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYt9DO5WXr8

The logistics of delivering support for one race car as opposed to three doesn't change too much.

There's a certain set of specialty tools and equipment (also staff) that's required to support one car. Supporting two/three doesn't take too much more.

For quite a few years, my business provided race support for 8-10 kart racers. Space and logistics for transporting things was probably the biggest concern.

Don't leave us hanging like that. Would you mind sharing an example?

Well, I think most bolts don't go through that extensive QA process in general

But yeah I agree this one is your run of the mill engineering, if only done for a part that normally doesn't see such testing (maybe in Aerospace and military applications)

It seems it's part of the suspension so it would be natural to be a part that has tighter tolerances

I'm really curious about the simulators they use for testing, if you know anything about that aspect. It seems like a chicken-and-egg issue: you see how a new part affects the car on the track by using the simulator, but the sinulator has to use parameters/assumptions put in by the engineers about how the part works. Won't it always just validate their assumptions?

I have a bit of a pet hate around the use of words like “insane” to mean “unusual to the general public”. There’s nothing insane about this, they’re applying a tool designed for the job to doing the job. “Insane” would be hiring a team of chimps to slowly whittle away the metal using banana peels.

I like puff pieces in the context of pastries, but this didn't really get down to the nuts and bolts of it

Yeah pretty much disappointed. I was expecting a detailed analysis.

I expected that from the title, but maybe that just means I'm getting cynical about journalism.

Thank you! This version is much better than that Instagram edit.

Yes, I remember this video. At the time I commented on another forum that I was disappointed when they didn’t cross thread it into the block.

Were you really forced to think a particular thing?

Before regulations come into play the added weight and space requirements for the swivel will make your car unusable, the added complexity will make the car unreliable, the weight distribution change will make the car unpredictable.

Then the swivel will likely be illegal because it’ll lacks the integrity necessary to be part of the survival cell unless it’s ridiculous (and paragraph 1 is even worse), and its disintegration would have a very high likelihood of killing the pilot, and harming spectators. If you swivel from the outside of the survival cell you now need even more hardware to swivel the entire cell, which means you need more structure to hold the car together (under up to 9G race loads) around the swivel, thus making paragraph 1 yet again worse, as you’ll have yet more space requirements, and weight distribution changes.

Also it’ll likely fail on back to back turns (e.g. Istanbul’s 12, 13, 14 or Spa’s bus stop chicane).

Why do you presume that would be better? For one, it would make more blood drain from your brain.

The driver is not the limit. The grip + downforce is the limit: if they try to do the worse corner (e.g. Copse-Silverstone ~4G) any faster than they do, the problem won't be the driver fainting (like it could happen in extreme maneuvers at a fighter jet), but the car slidding out of the track.

The required minimum level of athleticism among drivers has only increased over time, but "borderline superhumans" is a weird exaggeration.

> Make cockpits tilt inwards. Sideways-g becomes down-g.

The drivers who experience the greatest effect of g forces, really pushing the limits of what's practical for the human body throughout the duration of a race, are the ones racing on ovals (not F1 drivers). Those tracks are already vectoring the g force downward rather than to the side.

For F1, most of their physical challenges come with the forces they experience during braking, and the effect of those forces on the neck. Doing something weird with the cant of the seat could theoretically change that pulling-the-head forward or to the side force into a pulling-the-head downward force, but if you think about what's really needed to do that (you're going to rotate the seat backwards ninety degrees? so the driver is looking at the sky when he's braking?) you can see the problem.

Sounds like Formula SAE, I was a little bit involved in my schools team back in the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_SAE

> They told him they only wanted the part to last for 2 hours and the one he designed was too heavy. He had to do it again…

As someone in the racing industry, the ideal engine/parts/etc are what will get you across the finish line (and meet the other requirements like how long engine components have to last) as fast as possible, and no more.

There is a lot of money put into the sport, and extracting much of the money comes from the win/place, not whether or not the car will last 40k miles.

If something blows up/breaks after crossing the finish line, it doesn't matter much... just rebuild it for the next race.

Everyone is looking for every advantage they can find.