Formula 1 cars are prototypes and as such they are constantly changing and being evolved in the pursuit of performance. The first week of testing in Jerez has seen many teams racking up over a thousand kilometres on their new cars, first working on reliability then pushing new development parts onto the car looking for more speed. But what sort of thing are the engineers looking for and how can they see the difference between a new part that is working and one that is not? Here we offer a simple example to help readers get a better understanding. Downforce More…

Sometimes the goal of an innovation in F1 is not the pursuit of better performance, but rather of safety. There have been plenty of examples of that and now the F1 teams and the FIA are fairly urgently and closely working together to come up with a solution to the problem of driver vulnerability in the cockpit. F1 has been lucky in recent years with several accidents which could have harmed or killed the driver due to his exposure in an open cockpit. We had another on Sunday. Fernando Alonso’s point of view as Romain Grosjean’s car smashed across the More…