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.
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