Formula One …ON THE FUTURE OF… Car tech
F1’s Technical Director tells us about the latest tech in track cars that will trickle down to our own, less-spectacular, road-going vehicles
“We can now transfer data to a vehicle travelling at 350km an hour”
F1 Technical Director Pat Symonds has seen a lot of changes in motor racing during the course of his many years in the business. Safety has been one of the biggest areas of improvement, but as we are often reminded, motor sport is still very dangerous. Accidents can and do happen, although each time something tragic happens there is always something that can be learnt from it. Symonds has also been instrumental in attempting to level the playing field with new regulations and a budget cap on the building of F1 cars due for 2020. Ultimately, though, Symonds thinks there is plenty that has filtered from the wild world of F1 down through to our everyday production cars.
Symonds, now in his sixties, is still hugely passionate about motor racing and the engineering behind it. Having studied at Cranfield University, where he secured a Masters in aerodynamics, it’s the how and why things work part of the equation that fuels his fascination in the sport. That passion has seen him work his way up to Chief Technical Officer at Williams Grand Prix Engineering with stints at Benetton, Renault and Virgin Formula One teams prior to that, before joining F1 in 2016. But despite the high-profile managerial positions, it’s engineering that joins all of those illustrious career-path dots together.
What aspects of F1 have filtered down to production cars over the years?
Lots of things, particularly in the energy recovery field; batteries and battery management systems. Battery management has become a very big topic in hybrids and battery-electric vehicles. When we started working on them in the mid-2000s, Formula One was streets ahead of where the current hybrid cars are. I think we’ve made major contributions there. We look for efficiency. And a lot of that efficiency, we can roll back into many, many industries.
What has motorsport brought to the road car?
People are looking for the components. And yes, there are components. You can go back to radial tyres, all sorts of things, right back through history. But I think what you should be looking at is concept. Let’s take aerodynamics, for example. A Formula One car, a Formula One Renault, does not look like a Renault Clio. They’re worlds apart.
But actually, those air molecules that are trundling around that car, they obey the same laws of physics. Aerodynamics is, of course, an area where Formula One teams, for 40-odd years now, have been major players. It might be that a Formula One car designer is looking for downforce on his car, whereas the road car designer is looking to reduce drag, but the techniques are the same. And a lot of the advances, particularly in road vehicle aerodynamics, have really come out of motorsport.
Which bit of kit used in F1 has made the biggest difference?
People talk about 3D printing as if it’s something new. But we’d been using additive manufacturing in the ’90s at Enstone [where the Renault F1 team is based]. And we weren’t alone. In those days, it was mainly for wind tunnel models and mock-ups and things like that. But we started making a few car components. We rapidly moved on from the sort of plastics into the additive manufacturing of metal components and things like that. I think that’s made a hell of a difference.
People talk about industry 4.0. I would say that Formula One is probably at industry 5.0 now, and it was at 4.0 way before 2011. Productivity, the Internet of Things – we were there. For many, many years, you’ve been able to program a Formula One car that’s sitting in a garage in Australia from your operations room in Enstone. It’s nothing new to us. I find it quite amusing when the rest of the world wakes up to what we’re doing, and gives it a flashy name. We don’t have time for flashy names. We just get on and produce the goods.
In your time within F1, what has been the biggest development in engineering terms?
I have been in motorsport for 43 years, and most of those have been in Formula One. So an awful lot has happened, and an awful lot has changed. The biggest thing, really, was the advent of computers, or the ability to use computers. Of course, computers existed long before then. But I thought back to 1981, when I bought my first desktop computer. It was a Hewlett-Packard HP85. It cost me $3,000. I bought it in America. It had 64K of memory. It was an 8-bit machine, operating at 0.6 MHz. The machines we have on our desks now, they’re half-a-million times faster, and they have half-a-million times more memory. It’s just incredible what we can do. It’s not just computing but computer-aided design, computational fluid dynamics, 3D printing. It’s the ability to programme five-axis machines to produce these absolutely beautiful sculptures that form a Formula One car.
Computers have allowed us not just to turn all of our dreams into reality, but to do it in a really practical way. We now have this incredible reliability in racing cars, which we didn’t have 40 years ago. There’s no doubt that computers are really where it’s all happened, I’d say. Is there anything going on in F1 that could end up in a production car at some point?
IoT and smart cars. Connectivity between cars is something we’re very good at. We know the pitfalls. We can now transfer data to a vehicle travelling at 350km an hour, and with very, very high-bandwidth data. We’ve done an awful lot on safety. We’ve done an awful lot on light-weighting. And there’s no doubt that carbon fibre would not be finding its way into aircraft and road cars if it wasn’t for Formula One pushing it.
But my real passion at the moment is lowcarbon fuels. We will be announcing a road map to a more environmentally sustainable sport. Part of that is to really push the engine manufacturers and fuel companies into, ultimately, ultra-low carbon fuels. Many people will call them zero carbon fuels. As an engineer, I don’t like the word ‘zero’. It has a very specific meaning, so I prefer to call them ultra-low carbon fuels.
Is there anything else that has obvious crossover appeal with the car market?
I believe that the plug-in hybrid is here to stay. Electric vehicles will have their place in time. But no one knows exactly when that time will be. And while the electric vehicle has many merits, and certainly in F1 we don’t decry the electric vehicle, but on longer range transport, the internal combustion engine is still a big player, and will remain a big player long before the 2040 scenario where everyone thinks we’re all going to be driving electric.
You have to remember that there are 1.3 billion cars on the road at the moment. They’re not all going to disappear. We want to introduce low carbon fuels into Formula One and show there is a lot of performance in them, and that they can be made in a sustainable way. At the moment they’re expensive, because they’re new. But we want to promote the low-carbon future.