Obviously no offence to any F1 lovers, just curious.
In: Engineering
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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