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The Technology Behind Formula One
axlrosen writes "An article in the NY Times about the technology behind Formula One. The wealthiest teams arm themselves with powerful advantages, almost entirely centering on computing controls in the cars and computer simulation in design. Car data is sent in multi-megabyte wireless bursts each time the team's cars flash past the pits, often in excess of 200 miles an hour. It is simultaneously sent over the Internet to a larger data center in Maranello, Italy, where more complex analysis is done. AMD is expected to supply a supercomputer roughly as fast as the world's 10th most powerful machine to the Swiss-based Sauber Petronas racing team... I love the crazy steering wheel - anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?"
HowStuffWorks has got an interesting article on CART (not F1, but similar) cars at here. It mentions some of the sensing, telemetry, and computing technology used. There's even an explanation of the controls on that crazy steering wheel.
brings war driving to a whole new level
The McLaren website has an interesting flash doo-dad that explains the steering wheel. Go here and click on "interactive steering wheel.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Having bought one of the top flight cycling computers, which came with software far more sophisticated than I need. I could go totally overboard on my power to mass, VO2 Max, heartrate training, etc. For what? To beat guys on my weekend rides? If I were a Pro I would need to have not just a coach, now, but a team behind me to monitor my fitness, nutrition, energy levels, and a slew of other data, where once I'd pretty much only need a coach. The bar is being raised and without money or sponsorship where does this leave the talented natural who can't meet the bar?
There's considerable complaining about how uneven F1 is, with Ferrari's huge budget. It's hitting all sports. Spend to win and use money and technology to remove so much doubt the mystery of the game is ultimately solved.
It was good to watch the Pistons dismantle the Lakers, but how less often are we to see upsets anymore?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The blue one labled AC is kinda obvious - all expensive cars come with air.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
...to help a team beat Michael Schumacher. The guy is ridiculously good, and he's paired with a great car. F1 basically is a contest to see who will finish 2nd.
Tiger Woods in golf, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, Michael Jordan in basketball -- all three of these guys dominated their respective sports at one time or another. But I don't think anyone has ever dominated a sport as much as Schumacher has in the past few years. Its getting so bad that F1 is actively NOT promoting Schumacher, as people are losing interest...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
"I love the crazy steering wheel - anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?" "
I'm pretty sure I saw buttons for Ctrl-Alt-Delete on there.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Control the car... (duh!!)
I think the buttons and knobs control things like the oilslick and exhaust cloud. :)
anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?
Well, the one with little scissors on it means "cut". The one with two pages means "copy". The little clipboard and piece of paper means "paste".
Oh and that great big knob? That's the radio.
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The buttons have a couple of uses. Usually 3-4 are for fuel mixture, how much fuel the engine is given. This determines HP and mileage. Then there is usually a rev limiter button for pit speeds. Other things on the steering wheel can include shifters or kill switches.
Hoyty
If you've watched the IMAX film "Super Speedway", you'll see how they build a CART racer from scratch. It doesn't focus a lot on applied computer technology in this field, but it's still informative.
Such as this tidbit: modern brakes on CART (and F1) racers can bring the vehicle to a total stop from 200mph in 1.6 seconds. Imagine the g-forces.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
When I switch on Speedvision at my friend's house to watch Formula One, what amazes me most about these cars is not just their speed but their ability to turn left (of course) but also to the right. As a NASCAR fan, this "bidirectional steering" thing the Europeans are doing is truly amazing. Maybe someday it will come to the states.
Wonder how long it takes before they start either jamming each other's transmissions or playing man-in-the-middle and injecting false data...?
on the helmet is the AMD logo ;-) and they say it is essentially a computer nope it probably is a computer
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
And how about speed holes and racing stripes?
Gosh, I hate Formula 1 racing, they are NASCAR rednecks, with more money in other countries.
New regulations are being ushered through to eliminate a lot of the computerized systems in F1 cars. No more fancy traction control, the engines are going to be smaller, and there might even be an honest manual gearbox in future seasons. I doubt this will effect the telemetry advances, you still need all that data. What it will do is eliminate the edge Ferrari and BMW Williams have over everyone...
Go out and look for articles on the changes. I read a great piece in Autoweek a month or two ago.
McLaren
Formula 1 is Grand Prix racing, similar to Indycars but I believe the speed is slightly slower, tracks are more varied than the ovals that you're used to, and it's the major motorsport that the rest of the world watches. There is also competition between various teams who construct the cars rather than all of them being built by one or two manufacturers as (I think) it is in Indycars. Most of the constructors are British-based with the obvious exception of Ferrari.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
N is the Nuetral button to kick the transmission into N. E is the cockpit extinguisher. L is probably the pit lane speed Limiter. Others control brake bias, fuel mixture, radio communications, the wheel's screen (pi display), and other handling stuff. The steering wheel alone is about $50-100k. (a Champcar figure but should be close).
That is amazing that there is that amount of data streaming down the pipelines, however, does this help the driver in the actual race? If so, is there regulation for that? I understand that the data can be later analyzed and then used for tuning, but the data should also be able to recognize if there is an engine error and the car is going to instantly explode.
GroupShares
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artlu.net
race when the NASCAR cars turn right.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
On a F1 car a car's front-to-rear brake balance can only be adjusted with an analog lever or knob. If you watch Michael Schumacher go down a long straight, you will see him reach with his right hand to adjust the brake balance. Interestingly, the Ferrari has a shifter interface on the left hand that allows both up and down shifts but only downs on the right (I think). When he adjusts the brakes he can continue to shift with his left hand. Also, because the cars use compressed air to shift and are always in gear (essentially) there is a lockout button (N) for stewards to put the machine in neutral on top of the bonnet. So an F1 car is not all high-tech, but a mix. I wish it were more like the the 60s though. Rolling death rides. Those guys had to be brave, talented AND FUCKING NUTS.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I've always wondered this. Is it like Formula 409? Or Heinz 57? Does it just sound cool like MacOSX.
"What formula do you use to win?"
"The simplest formula of all. FORMULA ONE!"
Seriously, anyone know?
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However, the championship do not allow wireless data xfer anymore and only unencrypted voice is allowed to communicate with the driver. There is a sturdy DIN style plug that one of the engineers plugs a laptop into and downloads the data from the car when it is in the pits. A 20 minute race typically will see about 30Mb of data being retrieved. The organisers TOCA stopped wireless xfer because team managers were able to change the cars characteristics mid race and then reset them back before the scruitineers got a look in!
Most of the teams use windows xp on sturdy laptops with more powerful computing back at base - I guess because most of the software is off the shelf.
Formula1 is another ballgame...
Years ago, when a driver crashed, you would see him get out and throw his steering wheel against something. That doesn't happen any more because those steering wheels cost $50,000.
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
I think they should remove most of the technology to level the playing field for the smaller teams. F1 should be a bit more in the spirit of man and machine racing each other, not man determines direction computer controlled racing machine is pointing in.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
CART / IRL is to F1 what a Cessna is to a F22 Raptor.
Let's not all suck at the same time please
There are a lot of rule changes in the talks. One of them is to have a "standard FIA ECU for the engines". The ECU is the electronics that control the engines. The problem with changes like this is that F1 is supposed to push technology to the limits, but when you let the teams do all kinds of high tech stuff it gets too expensive and you have too much of a divide between the best and worst teams. We'll see if the changes cut costs or make the races more exciting...I just hope that the FIA doesn't forget that F1 should be expenisive and high tech.
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
Unsuprisingly when compared to yesterdays sports and technology story they dont use linux. Guess your penguins only for flashy scoreboards for now, huh?
Article on the steering where here that describes hat each button does. I think this one is from the 2002 season but most things are the same.
Who cares about the technology of Formula 1? It took them another 408 attempts to get it right!
(its a joke people)
The
That movie's the next best thing to experiencing the joys of 250mph+ car racing, and an absolute must if you're into car racing games (TD, NFS, etc). I also learnt a couple of neat facts like driving in quick succession (about 5ft apart) helps the successive cars to avoid drag, and the air flow from the following car helps push the leading car along.
Anyway, enough ranting...here's hoping for a 3-D car racing game for the PC.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
the price of all this equipment is always coming down. I remember when my mates and I were all using toeclips and we had to look on jealously at the pros using Look pedals, nowadays everybody has the Looks. It wasn't so long ago that a wrist/handlebar mounted heart monitor with a radio telemetry strap was out of range of mere mortals, now you can pick them up for less than $70 and with a boatload of functions.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This is a great site for a lot of the technical aspects of F1.
:)
http://www.f1technical.net/
I found it funny that the NYT waited until the Ferrari was in Canada so they could shoot pictures of it without the Marlboro ads the car typically has painted on while racing outside North America.
The buttons control all sorts of aspects of the car. Brake bias, sway bar settings, fuel mixture and horsepower, pit speed rev limiter, etc.
Now the really AMAZING part is that if you watch the races, you can usually see Schumacher fiddling with these settings during a race and often in a turn or at well over 100 MPH.
I race myself in an open wheel car, and I do OK, but my concentration is usually at close to 100% all of the time, so seeing Schumi adjusting things in a turn just blows me away every time.
Eschew Obfuscation
While the driver has a lot of cool buttons and features, at 200 MPH, does he really have the time to worry about the things? I mean lets face it, a slight (and i mean SLIGHT) jerk of the stearing wheel at 200 MPH generally means flying to one's death....
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
The steering wheels are all proprietary items for each team, so I can't tell you exactly what Ferrari's does.
But-
- Behind the wheel are two paddles. Pull one and you get an upshift on the computer controlled sequential gearbox, pull the other for a downshift. The cars have what are essentially normal manual transmissions, but instead of the driver controlling the clutch and shift forks, computer controlled hydraulics do the job and produce perfect shifts. Typically, pulling both paddles will put the car in neutral (allowing drivers to get out of a spin if possible)
- On the upper right and left, the + and - buttons are probably backup shift buttons. For the team I worked with, the paddles behind the wheel could sometimes be problematic, so they had backups in the same place as the wheel in the picture.
- The yellow "N" switch is "Set Neutral." Press it once and the car stays in Neutral even if the steering wheel is removed. Drivers are required to, upon exiting the race due to a mechanical failure or crash, replace the steering wheel (which they need to remove to get out of the car) and place the vehicle in neutral so crews can remove it. If they don't, they are fined an obscene amount of money.
- The red "L" switch is the pit lane speed limiter switch. In F1, the pit lanes have a very rigorously enforced speed limit. Hitting that button causes the computer to limit the car's speed to whatever the track pit speed limit is.
- The LED display can show a whole bunch of data. From moving track maps to onboard telemetry, timing, gear status, Gran Turismo...
I don't know exactly what the rotary switches do on that car, but I have seen them for:
- Brake bias; controls the front and rear split of pressure on the brakes allowing the driver to set the car up based on tyre wear and fuel weight (in F1, fuel is measured by weight, not by volume).
- Engine fuel mapping; drivers can conserve fuel at the expense of raw power or gain raw power at the expense of fuel depending on the tactical situation.
- Oil/Water cooling; they can control how much water and oil is flowing through the coolers. In wet races or if your trapped behind the slipstream of another vehicle, it becomes important to control these things. F1 car engines require heat for all the components to work properly, but too much heat of course, kills them. It is a constant game of keeping these things in balance. Usually, engineers in the pit lane will inform the driver of exactly what changes to make (by the rules, they cannot simply have radio commands control the vehicle).
Of course, the rest of the buttons are for the radio, drinking water pump, the fuel filler flap, rear caution light and those sorts of gizmos.
A few of the buttons are also like the water/oil cooler controls in that they only exist for the driver to press when the engineers tell him to.
All of that for around US$30K per steering wheel...
The steering wheel controls, as a couple posters above have said, are used to change fuel mixture, rev limiters for pit speeds, as well as adjusting launch and traction control systems. What they DONT tell you in the article is one of the things that makes Schumacher so good is how he utilizes that wheel during a race, aside from steering the car :) He adjusts his mixture, TCS systems and gearbox on the fly during the race, sometimes in the middle of one corner anticipating the needs of the next corner (!) This adjustability and all the testing he does is one reason he dominates the competition. Schumi's wheel has even more controlls than the wheel they pictured in the article, which belongs to Barachello.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
Here is the link.
-EB
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
and more money.
And diamonds!
Whoops!
You know what?
F1 Steering Wheel
Formula 1, if you didn't know, is the premiere motorsport in the world. Every rule about car design in F1 falls into one of two categories. Rules that prevent the egineer from killing the driver and rules that say the car must not fall apart. The result is the most technologically advanced cars in the entire world. These are the fastest four wheeled motor vehicles on earth that can make both left and right turns. Every race car driver falls into 3 categories. Driving F1, wanting to drive F1 and too afraid to drive F1. If you think Nascar is dumb because they go around in circles, F1 is for you. I've heard it described as driving a go-kart with a jet engine. (it's really just a V10).
Oh, and some other information. Michael Schumacher is the greatest driver in F1 today, he has won the championship the last 6 times. He is the highest paid athlete in the entire world. He drives a ferrari, the best car there is. It looks like he is going to win again this year, he has lost only one race so far. And while it seems boring to watch the same guy win every time it shows you why F1 is so great. The best driver wins every time. And this guy is the undisputed greatest driver of cars to ever live.
The US grand prix in Indianapolis is this sunday at 1pm. It is the only race in the US this year. If you haven't seen an F1 race I highly reccomend you check it out. Imagine Nascar, with right turns and no rednecks. It doesn't suck.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The actual meaning and the layout of the buttons on the wheel is secret and varies by driver, but usually there are buttons for setting the balance and torque of the brakes, the pitstop speed limiter, the differential, the ratio of fuel and air, and probably much more.
One of the wonderful things about the Giro this year is that Damiano Cunego won it and was not even his team's man to do it (Gilberto Simoni was the leader). How did he do it? Old Skool. Riding with flair and bravery. With poetry! I like Lance Armstrong as much as the next USian (he's a great story and a stand-up guy, but not my favorite rider), but the guy is a machine. He knows to the gram of carbs he has ingested and that he needs X more carbs to go at 44.3456 kph which will put him in the lead with 100 meters to go on a stage that averages 3.3% gradient.
Back in the day, cats like Eddy Merckx would just check out on the peloton. He would ride with one hand on the back shifter, daring any punk to try to ride with him. No nutrition experts. Nothing. Uphill. Downhill. Flats. It didn't matter. And he was the greatest ever on steel frame bikes built in a barn by a friend, not 11000USD 6.8kg space machines like you have today.
Watch and learn on the Tour this year. Tyler Hamilton or some other 'hard' man will win it.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I think on an episode of Windtunnel with Dave Despain someone said that the teams said they wanted to keep the current technology of gearboxes because it wasn't all that new and fancy anymore since it had been around for ten years already. Although I think it might be cool to see these guys trying to bang through the gears with an H-pattern shifter and a real foot clutch, I also believe it might not save much money for the smaller teams to have to redevelop a lot of parts to to fall in line with new rules.
About Mach 2, depending on how you hit. Let's ask Dale Earnhardt.
I accidentally moderated a perfectly good post down so I am posting real quick to kill my moderation in this forum
ummmm.... actually NASCAR does go turn both directions. There are round courses where they only turn left, but there are also "road tracks" where they turn both ways. An example is the Infineon Raceway in Sonoma. Click on the map on the right side of the page to see what it looks like.
Everytime some engineer dreams up a killer piece of technology, it gets banned. Figured out an effective shape that generates downforce? Get banned. Figure out how to recofigure ur car on the fly? Get banned.
And what about traction control? Adaptive suspension? not to mention 1001 other things that make a car go faster and safer, and turn better.
I hate it the way they keep banning technology. It used to be that F1 was the pinnicle of automative technology. Not anymore. Now you can buy a road car with more technology in it then an F1 car.
Sheesh.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Yeah, you are right. I think they experimented with compressed air at one time. I think the hydraulics are easier to balance on weight, but are just as heavy as a compressed air system.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Just my opinion, for the most part (based on facts, sadly)...
He does play by team rules, that's partly the problem.
Who doesn't remember Barricello being in #1 position in front of M. Schumacher on #2 being ordered by the Ferrari team to let M. Schumacher win ?
Those kinds of tactics are exactly what are hurting Formula 1 as a whole, and not just the Ferrari/M. Schumacher image.
Mind you, any team M. Schumacher has been in has also always been cutting-edge to the point of risking safety. This ranges from cars being sprayed with fuel in the pit lane due to cutting corners to make tanking faster to crewmen getting hurt by driving into them.
Not taking away that M. Schumacher is a great driver, mind you, but so were Aeyrton Senna and Nigel Mansell - but those loved the sport. M. Schumacher, I'm afraid, tends to love mostly himself and will do anything to further his image.
Monaco 2002, David Coulthard's McLaren suffers major engine disruption. Technicians in the pit spend several laps (might even have been over a dozen) trying to get the car to stop smoking so horribly. They finally got the car fixed, David went on to win the race, and the FIA banned two-way telemetry soon thereafter.
when i first read the title i thought 'what's an article about dog food doing on /.?'
-ninjaneer
I see a NY Times link without the standard apologies and it doesn't redirect me to a subscription page.
What the hell is going on? Is this really slashdot?
This is not my sig.
The program was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the monitor; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the data.
And God said, "Let there be FORTRAN" and there was FORTRAN. And God saw that the language was good; and God separated the code from the binaries. God called the code ASCII and the binaries he called Compiled. And there was evening and there was morning on the first day.
For those that don't follow F1 racing...
;) Yes, encryption was part of it. Remember, these are probably _the_ smartest people running these teams (well, not Jordan or Minardi) that you could find.
The article hints (slightly) at the wireless telemetry, but does not expand on how important it is. Each F1 car has hundreds of sensors, most of which are monitoring temperatures of various parts. At any givin time, Ferrari (by far the leader in F1 for both technology and strategy) knows the exact temperature of each tire, brake pad, rotor, exhaust header, oil, fuel, brake fluid, other hydraulic fluids, etc. Not to mention the custom EFI maps that vary based on fuel load (as weight drops, less power is required to maintain same lap time), aggressiveness of the driver (playing catch up versus safely out front), outside temp, fuel temp (as it relates to density), humidity, etc. The list just goes on and on. There are at least 100 seperate processors on any F1 car, all of which have physical back-ups (F1 car is a hot, violent, vibration filled environment).
There are new rules that do not allow for 2-way telemetry. Ferrari was working on (and others presumably) adjusting the car beyond the onboard capabilities of the car, on the fly! That's right, the engineers could see the data coming off the car, analyze, and then send "fixes" back to the car, without it ever coming in for a pit stop. Of course, that would be very pricey, and every tech nerd out there would have been scanning the airwaves trying to figure out how to pirate a signal and replace it with something less than optimal. Not that any team would ever do such a thing...
The cars are just amazingly cool. They are works of art and science. Sadly, the racing on the track leaves a lot to desire (Michael Schumacher went from 6th to 1st without passing a single car for position on the track last week in Canada).
I know /.ers love tech gadgets, but if you want
to see the drivers compete - NASCAR.
They do not allow squat of computing on board
during the race.
Science Blog has a related item today about scientists 'selectively breeding' winning Formula One cars.
The most expensive part of the steering wheel is, by far, the custom connectors.
The steering wheel body is all carbon fiber and all the teams can do composite work like that in their sleep (I have some cool CF toys that a couple of the composite shop guys made for me, they are scary good artists with the stuff).
The buttons are all hardcore off the shelf units from the aerospace industry.
The computing components are all well inside the body work, usually up in the nose or above the driver's legs.
The god damn connector though! It was something like 30 pins and they absolutely need to be hardcore because the wheels get taken on and off the car over and over again. They need to also twist with the wheel and lock up tighter then a bankvault without any extra levers or other things to fiddle with. When I was working with the team, I was shocked at how much effort it took to make those damn things...
"The driver presses this to deliver a drink to his helmet via a tube".
come to think of it, where's the "Pee" button? I could use that too *sigh*.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Which button controls Internet Explorer?
Nothing like a little in-race pr0n to get the motor running.
It seems like some buttons are missing. Proposed new controls:
DOS
EMP
NOS
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Well, it looks like one of the buttons on the bottom left is the CNN logo. I guess this is for the straightaways. Maybe the driver doesn't want to miss Larry King Live.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
FWIW, Neil Konzen (one of the original authors of Windows 1.0) retired from Microsoft several years ago. He was a big Ferrari fan. The last I heard, he was working for Ferrari writing control firmware for their F1 engines.
This is the only thing you need to know about F1...
Participants have too much vested interest in the race to ruin it playing with things like this.
Spectators, on the other hand, may have bets on the outcome - in which caes foul play is much more profitable per the risk.
gpl_dan@yahoo.com. I will be in section C, way up high in row HH. Drop me a line if you will be there. Halfway between S/F line and T1. I'm hoping for Renault to do one of those crazy "we don't have launch control - wink wink" starts from row 3. :-)
A few years ago, F1 used to have two-way telemetry to the car. Computers were adjusting brake-bias settings on the fly on a TURN by TURN basis. Cars were dynamically adjusting settings to optimize for all kinds of things. Really, it was getting silly.
Eccelstone, the guru who presides over Formula 1 and looks like a cross between an evil elf from LOTR and Andy Warhol, had to make changes. He banned that. before last year's season, he reduced qualifying to a one lap shot instead of your best lap over time, and he created the parke-ferme, a parking garage that cars had to roll into after they pulled off the qualifying lap. Teams were (are) not allowed to touch the cars between the end of qualifying and the race start. At all.
this created goofy things, such as last week's Canadian race where Schumi qualified back because his brother Ralf (we call him Little Ralfy) and the BMW-Williams just decided to go totally lite on fuel for the purpose of getting the pole. He had to pit 12 laps into the race, but it was part of the strategy. michael went for a 2-lap strategy and won.
So, now - the rule changes have created a more boring sport. Unless you are some hard charger with brass ones (hello Montoya and Sato) you rarely risk passing for position, except at the start. It's just not worth the risk, wait for the pit strategy to kick in. It also promotes blocking. Rubens blocks for Michael and executes Team ferrari strategy, that's his role in life.
The technology is shattering the smaller clubs. Arrows is gone, Minardi will probably be gone, Eddie Jordan is constantly broke and needs Ford engines to run. Now the dollars are cutting into teams that are bigger. Jaguar may pull out of F1 if they lose Webber, a promising driver. Honda was thinking of dropping BAR, after they dropped Jordan and leaving altogether, knowing they could not match the spending that Toyota was going to do. Toyota is something like 5x the size and wealth of Honda, something I didn't know until I started wacthing F1.
Drivers are no longer valued for just driving prowess, but the engineers they can bring WITH them, and their leadership abilities within the organization. Michael Schumacher is part CEO, part engineer, part driver and basically gets what he gets because he is a large reason that Ferrari executed the plan it had. He brought Ross Brawn with him from Bennetton Ford.
There are the big six in F1 right now - Honda, Toyota, Renault, Mercedes, BMW and Ferrari. Everyone else is an also-ran. Sauber uses 2 year old Ferrari engines, I think this year they upgraded to 1-year old engines. And to emphasize how big of a disadvantage that is - this year at Canada, the times were approaching 3 SECONDS faster than last year. The difference between a 1:12 and a 1:15 per lap is so large, old tech will leave you in the dust.
In contrast, if you attend Champ Car (formerly CART) it's like going to a damn vintage race. Spec chassis with spec Ford engines, standard turbo, no traction control, no ABS, manual gearboxes. It's like watching F1 in 1989. And IRL is KILLING it, this is almost certainly the last year. Nobody wants to see those tanks doing makeshift street courses. Americans like ovals, and speed speed speed.
F1 is brilliant, but they know they can't keep going as is. You hear crazy rumors all the time. One is that the V12s will get chucked, and everyone has to go to V8s. The spectacle and sound of a V12 revving at 19k RPM is amazing. THe cars will deafen you from 100 yards away. the carbon fiber chassis and cutting edge brake tech is stunning to see in person. Seeing a car brake from 200mph to 40mph in 200 feet really can't be described until you see it happen.
Maybe Ferrari gets help from certain Italian intelligence service people who help Ferrari to do some shit with the radio-tuned settings of other cars.
You can read about it here, here, and here.
Same for the Rangers, who also boast a fairly high rate of team spending.
I have a friend who insists that Jeff Gordon would win easily at F1. But he doesn't. Why? Because he isn't man enough to try it. This could be the only reason. The money is WAAAAAY better than NASCAR. The exposure and fame are exponentially greater as well. Why doesn't he try F1? He's scared. I have been to an F1 race as well as many NASCAR races (I grew up in a small VA town with a NASCAR Nextel CUP track). The cars are so incredibly fast in F1. NASCAR pales in comparison both as a motorsport and as a product, especially in terms of popularity. F1 is to NASCAR as World Cup Soccer is to the NFL.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
when are you guys going to realize that *BSD is is dead?
naeem
" "I love the crazy steering wheel - anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?" "
I'm pretty sure I saw buttons for Ctrl-Alt-Delete on there."
Were's the one for the ejection seat?
---
"Sorry, but according to our tests, you are trying to post from [a F1 cockpit. YOU ROCK DUDE!]"
"Please [crash the car] or ask your [competition, or lazy pit crew to help you] to do so, because [F1 cockpits] are used to spam web boards like this one."
There are of course cases where mispending does occur and conversely teams get good players on the cheap. This is a combination of mis-management and luck. The bottom line is that having money to spend on players, or in this case technology will help. Overspending on mediocre players or overspending on mediocre technology will hurt.
This goes against /. canon. See, if X is better because it is more popular, more techie, not the "norm," etc. then it is what should be done. He may be a multimillionare but he's no Schumacher millionaire. MS pulls down $50 million just to sit in the car. Gordon and NASCAR guys make nowhere near this amount of money to just drive the vehicle. Scumacher's Omega watch endorsement money exceeds Gordon's base salary.
Boring: granted. But if Ferrari doesn't win. no one will watch. It is hard to understate how popular Ferrari is and how rabid the tifosi are.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Homer: Eenie, Meanie, Minie - Mo!
The Champ car machines are all standardised. They use the same Lola/Reynard chassis and Ford V8 engine. They're more like Formula 3000.
An F1 car costs an order of magnitude more than a champ car, prototype chassis, prototype engines, prototype electronics all the manufacturers make their own and that order of magnitude more spent doesn't even buy you a winner. Not that the hundreds of millions spent on the cars gives you interesting racing.
MotoGP and WSB are far more interesting.
There are usually 2 reasons for a technology to get banned in F1. The first is that it makes things too easy. They want to make the drivers have to work for the victory. That's why they removed launch control - launching the car takes skill (since you have way more power than traction). The other reason is to slow the cars down. The safety technology has trouble keeping up with speeds the cars are capable of, especially in the corners (where an accident is most likely). That's why the tyres have grooves, for example. They need to go slower. And this safety focus has helped - just look at 10 years ago when we lost 2 drivers in one weekend (including the great Senna) and nearly lost Rubens...
I consider myself a Tifosi but when Schumi is walking over everyone it's no fun. And then he loses but wins by default...I'd rather see some variety on the podium so that the end of the year is exciting. As it is I'm cheering for Jenson since I think he's doing great this season.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
I thought each car used to direct their data
towards a satellite (always overhead) and the
satellite would send it back down to the pit.
In this way the data is always current and
not subject to the delay of retrieving the data
every lap.
Button A deploys the powerful jacks. This can make the car jump.
Button B changes the tires into special tires for rough terrain.
Button C makes two circular saw blades come out of the front of the car. This lets you drive through a forest; it'll just cut down the trees as you drive through them.
Button D makes the windshield bulletproof and the cockpit crashproof.
Button E turns on the high-beams.
Button G releases the homing robot. It can fly back home and carry messages to your girlfriend or mechanic.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There are hundreds of example of drivers recovering from tire blowouts and suspension failures at that speed. (usually on a straightaway, though). I've done it myself at ~150 mph.
The effects of a tire blowout at that speed are intense, but within the capabilities of even the top end street-legal sports cars, a $10 M formula 1 racing system.
driven by alert and experienced drivers.
There are also plenty of examples of fatal crashes at 55 mph, so i don't know what to make of that.
But the point remains: if you can react against a damn blowout at 200mph, you can definately snake your thumb over to click a button on the steering wheel.
Thing is, F1 is about putting cars out with the absolute hottest technology possible on board. The current regulations ban so many cool things that would give the less spendy teams a bit more of a chance.
B - special tyres for rough terrain
C - sawblades at the front of the car for cutting through anything in his way
D - bullet proof windshield
E - super bright headlights
F - for driving underwater, equipped with an oxygen supply and periscope
G - robot bird released as a messenger pigeon
Pretty cool, huh?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Articles on other technical aspects of F1.
I think last spring F1 became the biggest sport in the world according to TV viewing numbers (excepting the Wolrd Cup finals).
Americans are retards when it comes to racing. Which is a shame because F1 was thriving in America in the 60s and 70s and we actually had some Americans drivers.
If I was a billionaire I'd upgrade Watkins Glen, kickout the proffitable but contemptable Wiston Cup jerks, and try to get F1 back on the best road coarse in the country.
Given the technology that F1 uses, it's no surprise that the top team happens to have the largest budget. Unfortunately the difference between the top team's budget and the bottom team's budget is desparingly huge! This causes a problem in the competitiveness of the sport, which makes for boring races of follow the leader. You could essentially switch the top 10 drivers' rides and the race order would be still ranked by manufacturer as opposed to driver talent, give or take one position.
There is a couple of problems with F1 today. Not enough teams have the money to compete at such a level, yet at the same time, you can't cap the budget. F1 is supposed to be the TOP OF THE LINE technology, bleeding edge stuff. When you restrict things like that, are you really getting "Formula One" anymore? More like "Formula 1.36".
What's going to wake up F1 is when you get CART cars which have rules governing the make up of the cars going just as fast as F1 cars. CART = F1 = no more F1. (yeah, I know, bad math)
I don't have a solution to this, other than having the top team release its research at the end of the season to the lower teams. How else can you even out the competition without capping budgets, or restricting advances in technology?
Live forever, or die trying.
Is that Formula 1 is one of the only motorsports where the technology developed for the race cars Actually makes it into future production vehicles. Technology for Anti-lock brakes, Clutchless manual transmissions, Hydrolic valves, tire technology, Fule injection, the list goes on and on. Some of the tech they have has not made it or is still to expensive for mas production. Nothing new has come out of NASCAR for 50 years. Still pushrod V8's with large displacements to produce power. Still carborated, all very mechanical. Low tech at it's best. Heck, F1 cars now use tires with TREAD. They had to do something to SLOW them down. Everything about an F1 car is High Tech. From what I understand they can actively change the suspension setup from the pits for every single corner on the track. NASCAR's answer to that is Staggerd tires. The rest of the world is blowing past the US in terms of technology and improvements for cars and almost all of those improvements come from Racing. F1 is the proving ground for Engine, Transmission, and all other automotive technology in the Future. NASCAR is the proving ground for all the Technology of the Past.
How much money do you think pours through this industry?
Adding computers to control every aspect, regulated or no, is just diluting the entertainment.
I just can't see how we are improving our world with such a flagrant waste of resources to watch cars run around a track over and over again until someone wins by 1/1000 of a second.
Now if they can create rules such that the cars must be made from recycled materials, (computers et al), then maybe we can see some benefits.
very informative, cheers
Why don't they just install a racing chip and be done with it?
Why bother.
Non Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks :)
Some factoids ripped from the NHRA site:
nitromethane-powered engines of NHRA Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars produce approximately 8,000 horsepower
Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars use between 10 and 12 gallons of fuel for a complete pass, including the burnout, backup to the starting line, and quarter-mile run
the fuel-line pressure for NHRA Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars is between 400 and 500 pounds which translates into 65 gallons of fuel per minute
it takes just 15/100ths of a second for all 8,000 horsepower of an NHRA Top Fuel dragster engine to reach the rear wheels
Not from that site, but I recall an factoid that a top fueler pumps enough air on a single 1/4 mile run to inflate the Goodyear Blimp.
The cars are different because the history of racing is different in the US and Europe. In Europe, racing originated as a rich man's amusement, where the emphasis was on the competitors themselves and tracks in the 10-20 mile lap lengths (out of town, down to the village, over the hill and home). In the US, early races were staged as spectator events, largely on county fair horse tracks. This led to the predominance of oval track racing here, and road course racing in Europe. The cars were bred in different environments and thus evolved differently.
If I remember right, there was a standing prize offered for a number of years for anyoune who could win the Indy 500 with a Formula 1 car. This was never claimed largely because the races in Formula 1 are considerable shorter, and thus the cars are built less durably to save weight.
... I love the crazy steering wheel - anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?"
More importantly, how long before we can get steering wheel controllers with all those buttons for our favourite console systems?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That racer's helmet looks slightly Tron-esque. Just saying...
It's been all downhill since they got rid of that guy hand-cranking the engine to start it. Fucking ignition motors.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
- current F1 engines hit nearly 19,000 RPM. that's 3x the speed of a typical car engine, and 1.5x the speed of a fast motorcycle engine.
- at 19,000 RPM, the pistons in the engine experience 10,000 g of acceleration/deceleration as they move up and down
- the pistons reach a maximum vertical-axis speed of 132 feet per second, or 90 MPH
- the cars IDLE at 4,000 RPM, near the maximum speed of many automobile engines
- the cars generate enough downforce (roughly 1300 lbs) at 90MPH to *drive upside down*
- at a maximum of 200-210MPH, the car is exerting nearly 5,000 lbs of pressure onto the ground, thanks to its aerodymic profile
- the faster the car goes, the faster it can go around a turn (see above)
SIGUSR1
http://www.usgpindy.com/news/2004/images/williamsg raphic
The 2J was as radical as the 2E and 2H had been. Maybe more so. The car looked like a white brick. A very fast white brick. The car carried two motors. A 465 cubic inch Chevy V8 powered the rear wheels and a 274 cc Rockwell snowmobile engine powered a pair of "sucker" fans in the rear bodywork. The fans sucked air out from under the car, creating a vacuum that held the 2J on the track. Sliding Lexan skirts were placed around the bottom edge of the body to seal the "plenum" area under the car. Enough suction could be generated to hold the car upside down on the ceiling of a room! Where a wing generates downforce (good) it also generates drag (bad). The suction device generated downforce with no drag loss.
Reigning F1 World Driving Champion Jackie Stewart qualified the 2J third at Watkins Glen and drove the race's fastest lap, but his race was cut short by brake problems. The Chaparral team missed the next three races but returned to competition in September at Road Atlanta. They also brought a new driver with them, Vic Elford. Elford drove the 2J in three of the remaining four races. (The team would miss one more race.)
Elford was fastest qualifier in all three of those races but he only finished one (sixth at Road Atlanta). Something always broke. But the competition felt that, with a year of experience under their belt, the Chaparral team would bury them in 1971. Competitors were always lobbying the SCCA to ban the 2J. At the end of the season it was. The sliding Lexan skirts were said to have violated the "moveable aerodynamic device" ban. With that, Jim Hall closed up shop. An era in international autoracing had come to a close.
Also, there is another type of racing that approaches the excitement and sheer driving skill of F1, and that would be Rally. The control those guys evince under such conditions is truly mind-boggling. Beyond that, for pure joy of automotive race, it's hard to beat the beauty of GT. The cars, the tracks. Not the same rush as F1, but for a car lover it's heaven.
The technology is great an all, but you really need to have the music to understand Formula One; but only if you have at least 5.1 DTS on your tele.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Can anyone explain the restriction in F1? Was it getting too dangerous?
I just hope that the pilot fascent his seatbelt before pressing the "ludicrous speed" button...
The leading supplier of software to Ferrari is apparently UK based Ricardo (http://software.ricardo.com). Free licences may be available to engineering students apparently. The software F1 teams use usually includes Computational Fluid Dynamics (for external aerodynamics for internal gas flow), Finite Element Analysis (for temperatures, and mechanical stresses), valve train analysis etc.
Multi processor systems are the norm in this game. The system requirement for computational fluid dynamics software are astronomical (less than 4Gb RAM is on the low side for FEA in particular), and many of the systems that are used for this purpose are multi CPU or clustered with proprietrary networks like Myrinet. (http://www.myrinet.com/)
Nastran (NASA developed orignally) is a more general CFD solver for those who are interested. Expensive though.
This software is pretty much available for the customers platform of choice, providing it runs X11 or Windows. AMD64 is proving a popular choice for this type of application, as is Intels Itanium II.
..in slot car racing! Companies like Carrera,Scalextric are doing cool things. We haven't gotten that far in our St Louis club yet...
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Even us poor little bastards use it.
See http://farnorthracing.com for more info. I've got some data from the car on the site.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I used to work for the Benetton F1 team when Schumacher was around. I joined in 94 as their sole software engineer tasked with writing data analysis, strategy and telemetry sw. 94 & 95 were great years - we won around 60% of that year's GP's and the bonus was $$$$ :-)
In those days the on-board data loggers contained 4mb(now 128Mb) and the real-time telemetry was a pitiful 9600 baud, which didn't work 100% on every track (e.g. Hockenheim and Monaco).
I found Schumacher to be a good egg, fairly quiet, polite and interested in your work.
Happy days.
wrt the super computer etc, I'd take that with a slight pinch of salt. F1 teams are prone to exagerate slightly. PC's are adequate for most of their tasks excepting cfd and design work which is usually done on unix boxes.
F1 uses electronically-controlled differentials, which also has its own map. At least one of the rotary controls is a diff map selector.
;)
Another one is probably a TC agressiveness control.
And on Michael's wheel, one is a knob limiting the maximum engine RPM on Rueban's car.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Well, where have you been...
Ferrari has 13 constructor championship titles and 9 Ferrari driving pilots won the drivers championship...
While it's true that the only World Rally Championship event in North America is in Mexico, you can see rally events in the US with the SCCA Pro Rally series. If I remember correctly the past season saw the tragic death of a driver and co-driver from a Subaru team in this series.
The picture on the front page is of Michael Schumacher's Momo steering wheel (www.momo.it).
The buttons and nobs control howthe car behaves.
the "N" button is a Neutral button for the gearbox.
Other buttons do things like turn on and off traction control, activate the fire supression system, control pit requests and communications (pus h to talk and so forth), control transmission behavior, etc.
The nobs control things like break bias (Front vs. rear and left vs. right), break pressure, torque vs. horsepower settings, and stuff like that.
There are also LED's at the top of the steering wheel to indicate engine speed and a light to tell the driver the ideal time to shift. The screen above the Momo label can be customized (by buttons and/or nobs) to show things like transmission, oil, engine, and coolant temperatures, etc.. Also, there are paddles behind the steering wheel (one on each side) to control the sequential manual gearbox. The car does have a clutch, but it is not used during the race. The sequential transmissions can shift in a few miliseconds...more than sixteen times faster than the fastest driver in a normal road car. So fast, taht an F1 or rally driver (Rally cars use very similar transmissions) can shift from Neutral up to sixth (or seventh) and back down to neutral in the time it takes to make ONE shift with a traidional manual transmission.
(sorry, i'm kinda a car freak)
All of this, the driver has to be able to control and manipulate at or over 200 MPH.
Actually that not a fair assessment. CART was first with HANS (head and neck restraints), pit lane speed limits, wheel tethers, monocock crash test requirements. Before the money disappeared, CART had a huge budget for safety R&D. They were the model in the racing industry for proactive safety programs.
F1 still doesn't have a traveling trauma team or safety team. They rely on local authorities for medical response. If CART had run that way, Alex Zanardi would be dead today.
F1's biggest advantage in safety is improved track design to prevent the deadly crashes to start with - run off areas, etc. That's great, and Champ cars are catching up by wisely abandoning oval tracks.
If the car is running Windows I know what CTL-ALT-DEL is for!
Which button is it for "engine blow up" - this seems to be the McLaren way this season :)
ACey
Not that I'm complaining - the Maccas are at least a distraction from the pretty poor showing of my favoured team, BMW/Williams.
Who'da thunk it? I still thought they just crammed a note into a beer can and tossed it to the pit. That's what I do when I'm in a rush to work down at the con-stru-shun site but need to leave a note for the lil lady about what I want for dinner. She cooks it up real nayce - we don't need no fancy shmancy computer bursts.
(Yes, this really is how some of us down in Georgia talk - ESPECIALLY about racing.)
The article states: "The seesaw battle around the role of computing in Formula One began in earnest in 1992 when the federation eliminated turbocharged engines in an effort to control race car speeds."
Turbo engines were banned earlier than that.
I do recall reading that Gerhard Berger qualified for the German Grand Prix in the late 80's with a 1.5 liter turbo qualifying (grenade) engine that produced 1500 bhp. Those engines were designed to last less than 10 laps of the track.
A couple of years ago, Wired had an amazing article about F1 racing, particularly in terms of how it evolved yearly from the technological arms race. A team would develop something astounding, and others might copy it, and by the next year it would be outlawed. Innovation after innovation came and went like this, with few of them being allowed to remain. What I most liked about the article was the picture of a Mercedes-Benz F1 motor mounted to the dyno, looking utterly gorgeous (spotlessly clean, I should add) with its huge shiny exhaust pipes glowing cherry red. :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Quite true. I'm pretty sure the data travels at about 186,000 miles per second.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
It is Auto Jacks, Grip Tires, Rotary Saws, Cockpit cover, Special illumniation, Underwater mode, and homing robot bird.
Fight Spammers!
I think I'm hooked. It was just last year I started taking Nascar seriously, and now I'm finding some great stuff on the Speed channel. I used to watch Nascar back when I was a kid (70's and early 80's) just because I liked the "fast cars". Now it's more about the physics and math involved. I was really hooked on LeMans and to a lesser extent on the Indy race a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm saving up $100k for a new Audi.
There is a great book about the technical details of Formula 1 cars (it even explains the meaning of all the buttons on the steering whell :)
It written by the RAI's (Italian TV) technical commentator for the F1 championship.
I can only suggest it for the people interested in all the technological details about the F1 cars: it sports lot of beautiful color drawings and diagrams, showing really every small part of the cars.
Title: Formula One 2001: Technical Analysis
by Giorgio Piola
Indeed, AMD, the Avis of the PC business to Intel's Hertz...
Anyone care to explain what the heck this metaphor means?This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
The web log:6
http://saltire.weblogger.com/2003/09/17#a77
has a fairly authoritative background on the functions on the F1 steering wheel.
I work for Easy Racers, we race streamlined bicycles. In 2001 Reynard, a renowned racing car chassis builder, tried to compete. They had Sydney Olympic Gold Medallist Jason Queally and a $250,000 budget. The result? They failed to go as fast as our record set 15 years ago in our Gold Rush streamliner.
No doubt that if more companies jumped in and threw money at it a similar effect to the F1 cars would occur. But for now, money means nothing...
Gabe
I played racing game alot,and feeling that the oval track is most boring one... any comments?
The US Grand Prix at Indianapolis is on this weekend! SPEED Channel is having live coverage all weekend, with the big race on Sunday.
If you're a race fan of any kind, or just curious about the technology, it's definitely worth checking out!!!
--D
You overlooked the comma. I didn't say they had a 12 min. lead 10 K from the line, but would have a 12 min. lead somewhere prior to that point, like at 80 K to go then get caught near the finish. Typically sprinters teams reel in the breaks on flat courses, climbers reel 'em in on the mountain courses.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You forgot Rubens Barichello. The guy's a pretty good driver in his own right and is usually finishing right behind MS.
Of course it helps that Ferrari doesn't have an engine blow on them every race. Guys like Coulthard and Sato could be much farther up in the points if they weren't running with POS engines.
At least the WRC is on too.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Drive an Audi Quattro, Subaru ( especially WRX STi ) or
Mitsubishi Evo.
Try to pick a day with rain or snow.
They will leave a lasting impression on you, trust me.
CART's assets were bought by OWRS as a means to continue to the "Bridgestone Presents The Champ Cap World Series Powered By Ford". Many 'CART' teams have gone to the IRL - started by the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - the cause of the current schism in American Open-wheel racing.
The Champ Car series is still commonly called CART, but that is waning.
Well, back in the "Old" days, I'd say the other 2 types of racing that were exciting as F1 were CanAm and the same eras GT/LeMans type cars - the Era of the Porsche 917, for Ford GT40, etc - Each of those cars (along with Ferrari) had a small period where they totally dominated the field.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Have been placed on high preformance machinery that has lusers for along time. They do actually nothing. They are there to make the lusers feel like they have some sort of control . . .
It's true that Mansell won the CART championship as a rookie and Michael Andretti washed out of F1. But the reasons were more about commitment than the quality of CART's talent pool.
Mansell moved across the pond to Florida. Andretti tried to commute to Europe from Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, he did earn some kind words of respect from the late great Ayrton Senna, and did finally manage a podium finish before his premature departure from F1.
However, as an epilogue, it should be noted that upon returning to CART, Michael Andretti won the very first race against Mansell and the rest of the field. In fact, in his second season, Mansell wasn't able to accomplish much at all against the CART field.
Since that time, CART has had two drivers graduate quickly to F1 success and two who haven't been that impressive.
My God, man. You're watching history being made. Enjoy it.
If incredibly dominant teams damaged the sport, it would have already been terminally ill after the McLaren/Proust/Senna years when other teams were lucky to finish on the same lap with the leaders.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
To make a small fortune in racing, you have to start with a large one!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Some sports do this to great effect. Here in Australia we play our own version of football and each team is strictly limited in how much money can be spent on player salaries each year. This means teams can either have lots of reasonably good players, some great players and some bad players, or lots of great players if they are prepared to get paid a bit less (which they are, in many cases). It is very effective in evening out the sport, though - while there are some perennial power teams and strugglers, most teams can turn their fortunes around in a few seasons. We also have a preferential draft system that gives priority to the teams that come last - not the American way, for sure, but effective nonetheless.
Regarding F1, I think there should be a hard limit on spending, not on drivers but on technology. It would still be a technology competition - but part of the restriction would be 'who can build the best car for 100 million a year?'
Even though, as Toyota is ably demonstrating, money does not guarantee success, a lack of money certainly guarantees failure. Look at Jordan - a few years ago they were in a position of potentially winning races and getting on the podium regularly, and now they are pathetically trailing behind as the big teams engage in a technological arms race. As many people have opined this past two years, it's not that the Williams is getting worse, it's more that the Ferrari is that much better than it was. You only need to look at the laptimes year by year to see that - for example, last race the records were blown away despite the FIA's numerous speed-reduction rules. Sauber is another good example. They basically drive a cut down, out of date Ferrari - and they get whipped by the current Ferrari.
Read Pynchon.
If Schumi had an actual driver as a team mate then he might not be able to dominate the sport, which neither he, nor Ferrari, nor most of the nations of Italy and Germany want to see. It is widely rumoured/reported that Schumacher's contract used to actually stipulate that the second driver not compete with him. He's not going to 'put his foot down' any time soon. Plus, if he cared what others thought of him he wouldn (a) have crashed into Hill in a championship decider, (b) have crashed into Villeneuve in a championship decider, or (c) be upholding the EU mandated standards for stereotypical teutonic arrogance.
Of course, almost all other F1 fans would love to see Villeneuve or Montoya or Button driving the other Ferrari... it would almost bring back the glory days of two brilliant maniacs driving each other off the road week after week, a la Mansell, Prost, Senna and co.
Read Pynchon.
Hey, that's easy...
The green switch activates the nitro
The blue switch activates OnStar
The White switch engages stealth mode
The Yellow switch shoots rockets out the front
The Red switch is the ejection seat
The Purple switch releases the oil slick
The big black button in the center is the horn
The white button with the ferrari logo is the "Win Race" button.
The screen in the center is a built in game boy and the remainder of the buttons make up the controls for the game. Of course it comes pre-installed with a race car game.
Ferrari was the last team to use a V12, and they phased that out quite some time ago (just before they became totally dominant, strangely enough). All the top teams now use V10s, I remember some talk of the lower end teams using V8s but I don't know if any of them actually do at the moment.
None of the other teams has used a V12 for even longer. You used to be able to tell the Ferraris just by the sound because they were so much higher pitched that the rest of the cars. They sounded great, but unfortunately they broke constantly and weren't all that fast compared to the awesome Williams, McLarens and Bennetons of the 1990s.
Read Pynchon.
The World Rally Championship is also very cool.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This is the steering wheel of world champion Mika Häkkinen: http://www.avaruusmies.com/jokes-files/img/135.jpg
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
Interesting article, if you are new to formula one, otherwise old news. However, they give too much credit to technology for Michael Schumacher's success and not enough to the man himself. He's literally the most dominant driver of his era and is probably as good as or better than most of the all-time greats as well (though making comparisons across eras given the huge changes in cars is difficult). I'm not really much of a Schumacher fan but to see him as anything other than one of the all time great racing drivers is absurd. He would win with or without his fancy steering wheel and telemetry. Give him four wheels and a gas pedal hooked up to something with at least one piston and he's good to go.
the cars are always lighter than the 650kg that's the minimum weight for racing - so they're ballasted down with lead or titanium plates - as low as possible for better weight distribution. the crank's pretty low in the car - hence you can make it *really heavy* and not penalise yourself. you'll just need less ballast for FIA regulation.
one of the things max moseley's new regs brought in two years ago, along with banning 2-way telemetry, was banning encrypted comms between pit and car. it's back to the days when you *can* pick it up with a scanner. i'll be doing this next month at silverstone.
You make a small fortune in Formula 1? Start with a large one.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
> I love the crazy steering wheel - anyone know what all those buttons and knobs do?
Apparently, one of them is the "drink" button. Awesome!
Must-not-watch TV!
I was working at LDRA when the FIA hired us to examine the source code for Benetton and Mclaren. Let me just summarise by saying Schumacher is a good driver but the B194 certainly took advantage of the driver aid bans intorduced that year. Secret engine management traction control and the launch control program found under a secret munu option #13.
Schumacher wouldn't have had a hope of winning if his car was legal and the result would have been similar to 1993 but with Senna winning quite comfortably in the legal Williams.