Name: 一級方程式賽車中最偉大的創新 (The Greatest Innovations In Formula One)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:35:16.000Z
Duration: 12 min
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There are few things in life as thrilling
a live Formula one race. The speed and roar

程度副詞

of the engines sends adrenaline pumping through
yours veins, but this isn't just mere entertainment.

Racing at the highest level tests engineers
and drivers in ways that normal production

cars do not and forces them to think of clever
and innovative ways to improve performance.

These technologies have on multiple occasions
found their way into our everyday lives. There

are countless examples of this happening since
the birth of competitive racing.

The first reliable steel disk brake was produced
for the Jaguar C-Type in 1953. The exposed

disk brake allows the brake to shed the heat
generated in breaking much more effectively

than the drum brake and allows stopping distances
to decrease. This technology helped the Jaguar

C-Type to reduce wear on the break and reduce
braking distances,allowing it to take 3 of

the 4 top places in the 1953 24 Hour Le Mans
and has since saved thousands of lives in

the real world, due to their superior braking
and reliability. Over the course of the 24

hour race many of their competitors had to
drop out of the race because their brakes

were disintegrating. The improved breaks also
meant that the drivers could break much later

into a turn and thus post much quicker laps.

Racing technologies are always a few steps
ahead of production cars, but these technologies

generally trickle down over time as costs
reduce. Carbon fibre is probably going to

be the next great innovation in car manufacturing.
All F1 cars use carbon reinforced composite

brake disks which save weight and are capable
of operating at higher temperatures than steel

disks, but you will rarely see such high end
materials in normal everyday cars. The material

was first used in the monocoque of F1 cars
in 1981 when McLaren unveiled the MP4/1. The

material had been used for small parts previously,
but some engineers doubted it's ability

to withstand a crash. That all changed when
John Watson crashed his McLaren at the Monza

Grand Prix and came away uninjured. John Watson
himself doubts that he would have been so

lucky if he had been driving in a traditional
aluminium frame.

After that day the other racing teams were
playing catch up and now every F1 car uses

the material. Carbon fibre has slowly found
it's way from high-end racing cars to production

cars thanks to car manufacturers like BMW
who have made huge investments in manufacturing.

Carbon fibre production has typically been
incredibly expensive due to the vast energy

required but BMW invested invest 300 million
into a hydro-powered carbon fibre manufacturing

plant in Moses Lake, Washington with the aim
to produce 9000 tonnes of the material per

year exclusively for their cars. This increase
in production quantity reduced the prices

enough to make it viable for production cars
like the BMW i3 and i8, which have an all

carbon fibre reinforced plastic frame (wrong
word). Carbon fibre is becoming more and more

common and we can expect to see it gradually
replacing metal parts in our transport because

it reduces weight and thus reduces energy
consumption, while also being incredibly strong.

It has even found it's way into our passenger
planes with the Boeing 787 dreamliner and

Airbus A350 XWB being primarily made from
composite materials, but more on that in my

These examples go on and on but today we are
going to focus on the leaps in our understanding

of automotive aerodynamics as a result of
competitive racing. Some of the most talented

aerodynamicists in the world work for modern
day F1 teams and the lessons they learned

through racing has helped improve the efficiency
of our cars immensely. Allowing them to cut

through the air effortlessly, drive faster
and use less fuel, but it wasn't always

this way.
In the early days of competitive racing there

wasn't really any distinction between race
cars and street cars, they only discernible

difference was in the lunatics that were to
driving them. The distance between the left

and right wheels were narrow and the centre
of gravity of the cars were high, making the

cars incredible unstable in turns and susceptible
to roll overs....

Early sports racing cars were typically light
weight front engined vehicles and their designers

understood the basic concept of drag. The
engines at their disposal were relatively

low powered and inefficient and so to counteract
this they made their cars as round and streamlined

as possible to reduce the effects of drag.
Drag is defined by this equation:

Where Rho, which is the greek letter that
looks like a p represents the density of the

fluid the object is moving through, v is the
velocity, C is the coefficient of drag which

is a property defined by the shape of the
object and A is the cross sectional area of

You can see from this equation, that the drag
force increases dramatically as the speed

of the car increases because the velocity
is squared. That is why to gain even a tiny

bit of speed at the higher levels of racing
huge amounts of additional horsepower are

required. This is why these early designers
focused so much on lowering the drag for their

low horsepower vehicles. The coefficient of
drag for a circle is just 0.47, while a square

is 1.05. So by rounding a shape we can reduce
the drag by more than half. And if we decrease

cross-sectional area by half we can reduce
the drag by half again. So it's clear why

the shape effects the performance of the car
so much.

This equation is useful for understanding
how drag works, but the designers were not

getting a full picture of what was happening
to the air around their cars, because they

had essentially just designed aerofoils that
were capable of producing lift. At best this

reduced the car's ability to transfer power
from the tires to the ground at worst it made

the car begin to lift off the ground and crash.
.

One of the first people to realize and attempt
to correct this problem was a young Swiss

engineer and driver called Michael May. He
recognised the potential of using an aerofoil

to create negative lift and thus push the
car down towards the ground, thereby improving

traction, grip and handling of his car. So
he modified his Porsche Type 550 by mounting

this huge inverted wing over the cockpit.
The wing proved so successful that it beat

all other Porches in it's first race in
1956 at the Nürburgring 1000 Kilometre race,

this drew criticism from the Porsche's factory
team and they pressured the race organizers

to ban the wing on the grounds that it blocked
the view of the drivers behind him. This incident

stalled the development of downforce generation,
but the idea was too good to go unnoticed

In 1963 Jim Hall mounted an adjustable wing
onto his Le Mans winning Chaparral 2E. He

understood that downforce was essential to
keep his car glued to the road, but also recognised

that it added drag. So he made this wing controllable,
this way it could be made horizontal to reduce

drag on long straight sections of the track
and lowered when entering turns.This was the

first of it's kind and the idea was quickly
adopted by Formula 1 teams, but these high

mounted movable wings were poorly engineered
and after a series of breakages they were

banned completely. But the automotive world
had hit a tipping point. The idea could no

longer be ignored and manufacturers began
to design entire cars around this concept

rather than just going for the most aerodynamic
shape possible.

There is no better example of this than the
evolution of the Porsche in the late 60s.

Porsche has made a name for itself as a giant
killer with it's sleek, low drag roadsters

that were managing to beat much more powerful
Ferraris and Maseratis, but as the company

grew Porsche decided to design a new high
horsepower racing engine and build an innovative

body around it and thus the iconic Porsche
917 was born.

It's birth was not without it's share
of difficulties. Early on it was plagued with

aerodynamic instability. This new formula
of high power and low drag was a new concept

to Porsche and it took them some time to perfect
it, but they gradually reprofiled the body

work and the 917 began to dominate races in
the early 70s.

This progression hit a boiling point with
the accidental discovery of ground effect

with the Lotus Type 78. During the development
of the Type 78 the head engineer Peter Wright