Obviously no offence to any F1 lovers, just curious.
In: Engineering
They’re engineered to be as light as possible; the cell that surrounds the driver is ludicrously strong but everything else is as spindly as they can make it to shave weight. There’s also the aspect that if any part of it gets damaged, it’s getting replaced so there’s no point in making it strong enough to take a hit and just keep going; the kind of dent that people might shrug off as just kinda ugly on a road car is devastating to the aerodynamics of a Formula 1 machine.
This would be true even if it were all made of metal, the reason they seem so fragile is because these ultralight composite materials are often very brittle and don’t buckle like metal would before breaking completely. A metal part might not break into a million pieces if you hit it, but as far as F1 is concerned it’s just as broken either way if it’s crumpled up and still attached.
They are extremely light in order to go the extre.ely fast speeds. They are also designed to explode like that to try and take as much force from the impact from the driver as possible.
They’re designed for speed and aerodynamic performance, so they’re constructed of lightweight materials like carbon fiber whenever possible to reduce weight.
Every pound saved is a pound less you have to accelerate to racing speed, and less inertia to deal with when maneuvering.
All other things being equal, an F1 car (like an airplane) works best when it’s as light as it can get. As a result, they go for the absolute minimum amount of structure (weight) they can get away with. They’re also incredibly sensitive to very small aerodynamic changes. As a result, it is faster to build “fragile” and try not to hit anything than to build so durable that you can survive the hit without damage (the latter will guarantee that you finish every race…last).
F1 cars are *extremely* strong in the directions that matter to handle driving loads, but not in directions that don’t. This is one of the reasons they use carbon fiber, not metal, for most components.
They’re made to be extremely lightweight, so I suppose the bodies are plastic, carbon fiber, stuff like that. They’re also going absurdly fast so some of those touches aren’t as little as they might look.
An F1 car is designed for one very specific purpose – to go round a track with other F1 cars as fast as physically possible.
To get all of the advantages they can, the cars are fine tuned to an incredible degree – for example this means that the designers will note the fact that F1 is a non-contact sport, so the cars will be designed to assume no contact whatsoever, and will use this to make everything as lightweight as possible.
What this means is that in the event there is some contact, the various parts of the car will be struck in ways they are not designed to withstand, and we’ll break apart much more easily than you might expect.
The alternative would be something like the normal family car – these are designed to be practical, to be able to drive over varied terrain, and to be hardy enough to survive children sitting in the back and slamming the doors, the occasional bump from another vehicle on the road, and to work reliably for years at a time with virtually no maintenance. To do this the parts are made to be far more rugged and heavy duty – something that won’t matter in a low performance practical vehicle that isn’t winning races by a margin of tenths of a second.
Another thing that is worth noting is also the incredible speed that F1 cars actually travel at. When the cars are traveling slowly down the pit lane during a race for example, the speed limit is actually 100 kph – highway speeds. Out on the racetrack itself they can be cornering at well over 200+ kph – faster than a lot of road cars can go flat out in a straight line, round a corner. So what looks like a low speed bump on TV is most likely the exact opposite – a crash at pretty scary speeds that would destroy a normal car.
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