Formula 1 cars, explained for rookies (with Max Verstappen)
"Speeding and..." [CLAP] "All lined up..." "Brand new season!" "Brand new tour for Formula 1..." I'm looking at the brand new car for the number one team for the world's most popular car racing sport, Formula 1, with the current world champion driver, Max Verstappen! MAX: "Would you like to come and see the car? ME: "YES" And we're gonna show you what it takes to build and drive some of the fastest and most expensive cars in the world. Because the thing is these aren't just cars. Think of them instead as
epic group science projects where 10 teams all fight to be first and on every team there are hundreds of people spending millions of dollars all working together to push technology to its limit. In this video, I'm going to give you rare access into a factory in England where they build these cars and into a garage in Bahrain where they race them... This is Formula 1 cars, explained. I am on my way to the Red Bull Factory. We're going to get into some of the nitty-gritty engineering details but we're also going to talk about the basics of a Formula 1 car. This is Jack. Jack's going to get us into all of the secret rooms.
"I will do my very best!" He's doing a finger scan to get us in... "So Cleo, welcome to Red Bull." Holy....
I don't even know what to say. This is badass. What should I look at? Everything! That's the purpose of it. The reason why we have this here is that when people arrive for work they know what they're here to do which is to win trophies, yeah." Oh my god... These are all race driven cars from our history in the sport. Starting the left hand side with our first
car and then finishing on the right hand side with the RB16B, the 2021 Championship winning car. The RB7 actually isn't here and the reason for that is we do crazy things with the car, so you may have seen it do a donut on the top of the skyscraper. We've done a pit stop in zero gravity... Can I touch it? "You can touch the car, it's fine." It's so beautiful... "The driver actually has to spend
about 3 or 4 hours sat down in the car getting their seat fitted, so we sit them in some clay essentially and they sort of get the seat formed around them..." A Formula 1 car looks kind of similar to other race cars that you might have seen like these in IndyCar - single seat, open cockpit - but there's something that makes a Formula 1 car special. In IndyCar, all of the cars have to use the same frame or chassis so winning really depends on how you race that car. But in Formula 1 each team has to design and manufacture their own cars so winning starts here at the factory with how you build your car. But you can't just build whatever you want. "We design a car based on the regulations that the FIA and F1 provide us and so that really stipulates how the cars look, what shapes they are." That's the formula in Formula 1. Teams fight to find the best design within these
rules. "The incredible thing with Formula 1 for me is that you have 10 teams that come together to race. They've all designed and built their own individual car but you arrive at the track and everybody's within you know a second of each other over a lap which is quite incredible in itself. But the only way that you gain an advantage in Formula 1 when the margins are so slim is to look at every area that you can possibly can to eek performance." The rules say that each team can
spend $135 million per year minus driver salaries. I know that sounds like a lot but in the race to win it means that every decision needs to get the best bang for the buck. "The amount of engineering that goes into building these cars is next level. We're using many of the same techniques many of the same technologies that you know NASA or SpaceX would use to design their rockets, we apply them to designing our own rocket that goes around the racetrack." So this is the public display room. Now we're going into the secret... what do we call this room? "The warehouse." The warehouse...
WOAHHHH. Yeah this feels cooler. Who are these cars? "So these are a variety of different cars from throughout history" "There's some show cars but also there some race cars." Oh my god this is so cool. Can I walk here? I have a question, you're gonna say no. Can I sit right there?
"Yes!" He didn't say no! "Just be really careful not to nail your head on the banister above as you get up..." Welcome to my crib... Every Formula 1 team's goal is to create the two fastest cars possible within the rules so their two drivers can beat the other team teams around different shaped tracks all around the world racking up points to win the Constructors' Championship. And for the last 2 years the team that has done that is Red Bull by a lot. Here are the winners of every race last year. And here's Red Bull. Yeah. So how do they do it? What makes a winning Formula 1 car? This is the car that won all of those races and this is one of the aerodynamicists who helped design it...
"So this is RB19. This is last year's car that obviously was incredible successful and we're all very proud of" A winning Formula 1 car needs to do two things: make super quick turns and go extremely fast in a straight line. The challenge is that the things that make a car very good at one make it harder to be great at the other. The team that can design the car that does both the best takes home the trophy.
let me explain: First, to make a quick turn, you need a strong grip on the ground. "Going back to pure fundamentals, what we want to do is generate what's called downforce." More downforce means stronger grip which means quicker turns. So how do you create more force down? Think of a Formula 1 car like an airplane upside down. On a plane, the air moving across the wings lifts it up. But here the air across the car forces it down. "So that is where the air literally sucks the car into the ground." To
get it to suck, you need higher pressure above the car and lower pressure below and one way to get lower pressure air is to get it moving really fast. "Low pressure is effectively high velocity air so you want to be able to speed up the air as much as you possibly can under the floor and effectively slow it down as much as you can on on top of the floor." Here's the part I think is really cool: A good way to get fast lower pressure air isn't for it to just shoot under the car in a straight line.
It's to create tiny tornadoes under the car. They don't say tiny tornado though, they say vortex. "A highly powerful vortex, that in itself generates a lot of low pressure because it's a structure that rotates." High velocity air! "Those structures then run down the the length of the floor and they generate low pressure for a very long region." So they have all these tiny tornadoes that
help suck the card toward the ground to give it better grip to make faster turns. At top speed a Formula 1 card generates a downforce three or four times the weight of the car meaning this car could theoretically drive on the ceiling. But all of this downforce comes at a cost. To go super fast in a straight line you need to knife through the air with as little drag as possible but as you create more downforce... "it normally comes with added drag which is preventing the car moving through the air, so it's a resistive force." For example, look at this back wing. It generates downforce on the turns, but it feels like a big parachute slowing the car down in a straight line which is why Formula 1 teams are allowed to build in a control that the driver can press to flip part of that wing down allowing the car to zoom down the straights even faster. This is called the drag reduction system or DRS. Designing a winning Formula 1 car means balancing all of these different effects
pushing the rules and the limits of physics to get a little more grip and a little more speed. This is a question that I'm sure you're going to say no to. Is there any chance in hell that I can sit in this car? "I don't think it's up to me. but..." Jack?? .... [MOMENT OF TRUTH]
"You can sit in the car." YESSSSSSSSSSSSS. Thank you! Ah! "I've got something rather special that you can wear while you're in the car. Pop that on, we'll get you in the car, see how you look being a Formula One driver!" "So how you feeling in there, Cleo?" This is SO COOL. Let me just describe what this feels like. My legs are above my butt so I'm sitting like that. My legs are like that, and my back is here like that. So I feel sort of vulnerable. My entire field of view
is what's happening in here. I'm getting more and more claustrophobic as I talked to you which is interesting. The idea of going 200 mph in this car is terrifying and I can't believe people do it. I have a totally new appreciation for what this feels like. The butt I have to admit is quite comfortable. This is clearly crafted for someone's butt. Max Verstappen's butt apparently. That is actually going to come up in my conversation with Max Verstappen. But more on
that in a minute. Eventually, I had to get out of my dream car because now that we've learned the design goals of a Formula 1 car, it's time to see how they actually make it. As every team works on designing their cars they're constantly testing those designs in computer simulations, in physical rigs that mimic a moving car and in big wind tunnels. One of my favorite details is because Formula 1 limits how much teams are allowed to test full size cars in a wind tunnel, they build these little 60% scale versions of their cars and test those. One reason that Formula 1 cars
are so light and fast and strong is that basically every part of the car that you can see is made of a material 10 times stronger than steel but half the weight: carbon fiber. "Would it be good if I had a piece?" Yeah do you have a piece of carbon fiber? Woah cool. "This is quite a substantial block Can I hold it? How heavy is this? Oh it's heavier than I thought! "You can see the structure if you look on the side so that's when it's layed up..." Why is this material used so often throughout the car? "With its strength to weight ratio being so good it means that you can make it extremely light whilst it retaining a lot of structure and a lot of strength. So if you hold it up you can actually see light through it there so it does have a sort of fabric quality to it."
Woven carbon! To create the carbon fiber parts that they need, teams manufacture patterns in the right shapes and then lay down carbon fiber cloth sometimes in 100 layers then they suck all the air out and shove them into basically a pressure cooker to squeeze the layers together with resin. Then they cut and measure those carbon fiber pieces and other metal parts with huge programmable machines. It looks like it's getting a milk bath. "The whiteness is down to the additive that gets added to the water to make sure it doesn't rust the machine." I don't know if you can fully appreciate how big this is but there are dozens of these boxes just in this massive room in front of us all of the parts for the RB20, the new Red Bull car, are being manufactured in this room right now in these white boxes. Pretty cool. Any chance I can look in? "I can imagine so, yes."
"I think it's more about not getting it on camera..." For the metal parts of a car, which kind of metal they use depends on what they need it to do. Okay so this is aluminum or aluminium as he's calling it. So this is a lot of what the car is made out of. "We use aluminium throughout the the build of the car for certain parts and components which is generally light, fairly strong." "Try that one..." "It is quite..." Holy cow! It's hard to show visually how different these objects are except maybe how
how much I'm trying to hold... I could probably do 20 reps like this until my arm fell off like this is very heavy! So that's densimet which is an alloy which we use to add weight to the car. We sometimes add weight into the car when the driver isn't up to weight. We have to have a minimum weight of the car so we'll use tiny strips of this throughout the car to bring the car up to weight..." There are thousands of pieces that make up a Formula 1 car and after they're designed and molded and machined, some of them need to get painted... The paint job on a Formula 1 car is a big deal to fans, especially the moment that it's released and they see the car for the first time. And teams spend a lot of effort to design something that's
going to look beautiful. But the paint isn't just to be pretty, it's got to go fast. For example a lot of the sponsor logos that you'll see on these cars aren't stickers because even that tiny little edge would create unwanted drag they paint the logos on. Watching these cars get built, it's just astonishing to me how much detail and design and effort goes into the finished car that we see on track.
Now we're headed to the most secret room yet, where this team is building their new engine. "This is one of the world's most advanced engine development facilities." "This isn't just an engine, this is a a Formula 1 engine." Right now, Red Bull buys engines for their cars from Honda but that's about to change. In 2026 Red Bull's cars will use their own custom engines that they're working on right now and we're about to be one of the first to go see it. "So this building here wasn't here to two years ago in June was our first engine and when
you see the workshops you'll see what we've been doing it's pretty impressive." Why does it matter to build a Formula 1 engine yourself? "Control and the tie-in between the chassis and the engine is paramount really. You have it better working together, your aerodynamics and everything all that side of it, is the way to win." This team's big bet is if they invest a ton of money and time into a custom engine they can eek a little bit more speed and control out of their car and ultimately win more races. Can you hear me? Okay so what's happening right now is
I'm in the super secret engine room but we can't actually show anything close to the new engine but I'm standing in front of the real Formula 1 engines! I just can't show them to you... "People going to love it." They're going to hate me! Okay so this is the engine that I can show you, we can show you and the reason why little bits are covered up is that those are the secret parts that you're not allowed to see. If I'm working on a Formula 1 team working on an engine, what is the goal? Is it
maximum power, smallest size? Is it light? "Power. You want as much power as possible because the driver will ask for more power. Even if he's got the most powerful engine, he will want more." To understand why this engine is so cool let me explain how the engine in your car works and how it compares. Okay so your car probably has a four stroke internal combustion engine and a Formula 1 car does too which means there's a cylinder and inside there's a piston that goes down-up-down-up in four strokes. In the first one, air and fuel rush into the chamber, then they get compressed and heat up then a spark ignites the mix and it explodes shoving the piston down and turning a set of gears generating mechanical movement that turns the wheels of the car. Then the piston lifts back
up and pushes the remaining gas out. That whole process happens inside one cylinder and there are six of them in a V shape which is why it's called a "V6" engine. Your car might have anywhere from 4 to 8 depending on what you drive. But one big difference between your car and a Formula 1 car is the maximum number of cycles - that down-up down-up - each engine can complete per minute your car about 6,000 a Formula 1 car over 15,000 that that contributes to more power to go faster plus these cars combine a bunch of other technologies to get a little bit more oomph, like a turbocharger which compresses air before it enters the cylinder so it packs more punch when it's then lit on fire 1 car. It's a great example of why Formula 1 cars actually matter for people like you and me. It's not that this tech is brand new. It's that it's combined and tweaked and perfected by hundreds of smart people with millions of dollars to make it better and those changes help inspire better car tech for all of us. The engines that they're building here are based on rules for 2026 which
will use less fuel and more electricity and therefore make a slightly different sound and we got a sneak peak.... Can you hear that? So that's the new engine running? "Correct, yeah." "Are we allowed to be hearing it?" "You're allowed to HEAR it, you're not allowed to SEE it." Just running by - Ooo! What did that noise change mean? "So it it really just revved up the speed basically and it's now going into this automated power curve. You can hear it's coming down in speed, so with every single speed we take
a measurement. Next speed, measurement. Next speed, measurement." So they're testing it at different speeds, at different, they're running power curves to see how it performs. "And at that time always wide open throttle which means everything we have." Now that we've seen how they build these cars it's time to see where they race them. And that means that we need to go to Bahrain.
We're here! Here we go... Hi! No I'm not allowed to video any of this... "Turn 1 awaits you a couple of kilometers away!" Does this ever get old 20 years in? "No! Every day is a learning day. Every day is different." I can't believe I'm here. This is the new car, the RB20.
And uh you might recognize these guys. Their job is to take the incredible cars that hundreds of people just built and speed them up over 200 mph, facing forces sometimes greater than five times normal gravity, fighting off competitors to bring their team over the finish line first. These drivers are legends. Max Verstappen has been dominating Formula 1 recently... DUH DUH DUH DUH MAX VERSTAPPEN Remember those Red Bull win records? Here's just Max's wins.Yeah. What does it feel like to drive a Formula 1 car? "Imagine sitting in a roller coaster and it basically just shoots off but then like 5 to 10 times worse, while having a steering wheel in your hands with all the buttons. Back in the day
when my dad was in F1, when I was a little baby basically, I sat in it and you know is very cute the pictures, but the very first time that I sat in the car and I was going to drive it myself I was a little bit nervous. Even I to this day sometimes when I do that, I get this like it shoots off, you have this like [WOAH] kind of feeling? I still have that in an F1 car sometimes." And for these cars, since no two drivers are the same, no two Formula 1 cars are quite the same either, even for the same team. "They have a whole book of measurements for
myself, from Max, so they know exactly my seat position, my pedal position, my sitting position..." "The seat is very important, it's a carbon seat. You're naturally in a very unnatural position..." I actually got to sit in what I think was your seat in the RB19 in the factory. "Probably a bit wide!" Actually it was kind of a good fit! .... [RECORD SCRATCH] Did I just tell world champion Max Verstappen that
our butts are the same size? Anyway, here's what their steering wheel looks like and here's one of the engineers who helped design it. Would a steering wheel for each of the different teams look totally different? "Yeah. So they all look very different." On every team's custom wheel, there are dozens of buttons and knobs and switches all meant to optimize the engine and the tires and the brakes and much more in every possible scenario all while the driver is driving. "The drivers memorize all the buttons so they can do it without actually looking at the wheel...
"Sorry... all right... no, we're good." He might have to go do a pit stop at any moment... That was a pit stop. At least once every race, every car needs to exit the track and enter their pit box where roughly 22 members of the pit crew swarm the car to quickly change the tires and other parts. A good pit stop is less than 2 seconds. They give out a trophy for fastest pit stop and when we were at the Red Bull Factory we got to see theirs. These tires just came off the car and they are hot hot! Like hold on.... now it hurts. That's how hot. I got to try stacking these tires and listen
they've got a really hard job. "Couple more tries..." It didn't fall! The tire options are the same for each team. For each race, they all get a hard, medium, and soft option or if it's raining two different types of wet tires. Your soft tires have the most grip but they wear out the fastest and your hard ones are on the opposite end of that spectrum and medium is medium. When they say "my tires are done", what do they mean? "The drivers will feel when when the grip is is going off..." Choosing the right tires
at the right time is a big part of a team's race strategy... During a race, you'll hear drivers talking to only one person, their race engineer, but that race engineer is also talking to a massive team of strategists, all trying to figure out the best way to win. Some of those strategists are at the track but most of them are actually back at the factory in a big room like this. Tt looks
like NASA! And the people in this room aren't just thinking up plans, they're using supercomputers to run simulations about tons of possible outcomes. "It's millions, even over the course of a race, and we run them on the Oracle cloud." Millions?? "Millions yeah." Those simulations are taking into account weather and heat of the brakes and tire performance and everything every other driver is doing and then feeding those simulations back to the track. "The aim is always to try and win a race so that's kind of thinking about what's the best thing for you to do but also what might your competitors to and so how might you need to therefore react to that." This is all real time? "Yes exactly, so we're constantly talking, the intercom on the pit is constantly lighting up, there's always somebody in one of your ears. So actually the headphones are dual, so you can hear one car in
one ear, and the other car in the other ear, so you're always hearing multiple conversations trying to take them all in. It's basically like playing a board game, that's how I always think of it." The most complicated board game in the world! A winning Formula 1 car isn't just about the tech inside that car, it's also about the tech behind every move that the car makes every lap of the race but the thing I think is so cool is that even with all of those strategists and supercomputers and simulations at the end of the day it still comes down to human skill. "It's hard sometimes to focus you know because you have always someone on your ear asking you questions and you are just trying to focus as much as possible but you have to have that capacity you know..." Everything that we've talked about from design to build to paint to simulation to test... it's not just happening once. A Formula 1 car is never done. A team is constantly learning and changing and rebuilding between every single race over and over and over again. In the end, one of the things that strikes me most about
Formula 1 and Formula 1 cars is that they're so much like a Lego set. It really has to be all of the individual perfectly formed pieces coming together to make a whole thing. This is a theme I've noticed with a lot of my episodes of Huge If True. Technology has always been a story of human
Ingenuity but more and more it's also the story of human collaboration. I think that's really the story of a Formula 1 car and the story of so much of the technology that we all enjoy. I think there's something really magical about a team of engineers and designers and strategists and athletes and all of these people coming together to build something that gets better and better and better every single time. I find a lot of hope in that. If we can build cars like these...
What else can we do? I can't believe this is real life. One of the things that I've been keeping mind is that most of the people that work on these cars won't actually get to go see a race at least not with their team because there's a limited number of people that Formula 1 allows each team to bring to each race and I know that the only reason that I get to do this is because you watch and subscribe to this show and I just, I'm feeling really grateful. I hope that these kinds of stories make you a little bit more optimistic about what we can build while we work together. So if you're
enjoying this video and you want to help us go to more incredible places subscribe and tell me in the comments where we should go. And we have some wild episodes coming up, I can't wait to show you.
2024-03-31 00:43
