Modern F1 cars are a world away from our everyday road cars, but Grand Prix manufacturers like Mercedes and Ferrari increasingly use race technology to enhance production car innovation.
Five automotive brands are currently involved in F1 as team
owners or engine suppliers: supercar constructors Ferrari and McLaren
(the latter increasingly prolific despite being only recently born from
its racing team) and mainstream brands Mercedes, Renault and Honda.
Increasingly it is becoming a two-way conversation between those in racing and their counterparts on the road.
Paddy Lowe, Executive Director at the championship winning
Mercedes F1 team, explained: “Is there technology transfer between race
and road car engineering? Resoundingly ‘yes’ but it’s subtler than
bolting bits from one car onto another.
“There are examples of direct transfer but there is also
indirect transfer, where F1 serves as a research laboratory for
developing new solutions and showing the world what is possible.”
For the Ferrari F1 team, this crossover is the sole reason for
their existence. Always has been. And the F1 and GT (road car) sectors
of the company are literally intertwined, ensuring the racing blood goes
into the road car technology.
“We move people from one side to the other, and there is an
information exchange,” Ferrari’s technology transfer manager Amedeo
Visconti said in an interview with Professional Motorsport. “Sometimes
it is planned, sometimes it just happens by chance. With people you
transfer knowledge, mentality, and relationships.”
The problem of feeding racing technology to the road is that the
F1 check book is pretty open whereas road cars, whether it’s a Renault
Clio or a LaFerrari, must make commercial sense.
So even if a race team derived solution seems sensible to
transfer to the road, it must be adapted to make it affordable. And that
is where the crossover of knowledge is most crucial.
“People who move from the race team have the know-how but have
to adapt to industrial ways, even at Ferrari, which produces
comparatively few cars a day,” explained Visconti. “The designer has to
keep in mind the sort of facilities and processes that are available to
produce what he designs.”
This process is typically more successful in smaller teams,
where the structure and the bureaucracy is not so big. That said, it is
also working well at Mercedes, a company that sold over 1.7m cars in
2014.
Mercedes are also focusing on cross pollination, with engineers
from their road car division taking up long-term placements in the F1
team, as much to learn about the philosophy and pace of design as the
concepts being developed.
“If you are a (good) engineer (at Mercedes road cars) you have
the ability of diving into the F1 world for a year,” explains Wolff. “F1
is a much smaller organisation and less hierarchical. It gives you a
different edge when you dive back into the big corporate world.”
Alongside direct personnel embedding, the Mercedes road and race
teams are in constant contact on developments like Hybrid technology –
and that it is a two-way street, with as much knowledge on energy
recovery in the R&D department as in the F1 design office.
They are now even taking advantage of the mid-season
restrictions on F1 engine development to get their High Performance
Powertrains team, who make the F1 engines in Brixworth UK, to put their
minds to road car products. That has already been responsible for
powertrain development on the Mercedes-Benz AMG SLS Electric Drive.
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