Formula 1: A Technical Deep Dive Into Building The World's Fastest Cars

Its been more than 60 years since F1 teams have built, developed and tested the fiercest and technologically advanced cars. Due to the massive downforce and strong brakes, these cars can accelerate from 0 to 190 miles per hour in just under 10 seconds and decelerate by 60mph in just 0.7 seconds.

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These wonder cars are built from scratch each year, and the rate of improvement on these cars is remarkably impressive. The cars are built using engineering, materials science, top-notch software, and the cloud. Each team tries to gain a competitive advantage by adding something unique to their car that the other teams don't possess.

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The Downforce

For the initial 30 years, the F1 cars were generally dependent on only the driver, power, and tires. Team Lotus then focused on aerodynamics, and that's when the game changed forever. Downforce keeps the car on the ground by sucking the car into the ground at massive speeds. The Lotus 79 F1 car came with an upside-down airplane wing-like underside that resulted in the car being sucked into the ground due to a pocket of low pressure.

The Lotus 79 became a success, and soon every car-owner decoded this and followed suit. The following years saw F1 cars become faster, especially around the corners.

A Never-Ending Cycle

The FIA has laid down rules, and every team tries to adhere to them. However, teams often push the limits and find loopholes to make their car better in order to win races. This is the reason why FIA changes the rules again. For example, any F1 team can only use 25 teraflops of double-precision power in computing for simulating the car's aerodynamics. This is not a lot of processing power if you understand the overall mechanism.

The F1 rules stipulate that teams can only use CPUs and not GPUs. The teams should also explicitly prove that they are using AVX instructions. Each team has to submit the precise specifications of their compute cluster to FIA at the beginning of the season, and then a log file follows after every eight weeks.

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The Wind Tunnel

The wind tunnel usage is restricted, just like almost every other thing in F1. The teams are allowed wind on time of only 25 hours per week to test the new chassis designs. Earlier, there were no restrictions on teraflops or wind tunnels. Teams started pouring in a lot of money for improving aerodynamics, and the FIA soon started restricting wind tunnel usage and simulation-related compute power.