Formula 1 teams are waging a war with the weight of the cars. Helmut Marko , advisor to Red Bull, has stated that you cannot win a world championship with a car that exceeds the 798 kg limit.
The efforts of the engineers are focused on making the cars lighter, aware that 10 kilos are worth three tenths of a second on a circuit like Barcelona, a value as great as that given by a new and important aerodynamic package.
The cost cap further complicates things for teams, as it sets the maximum budget for the 2022 season at $140 million . The development of the car is also part of this limit, so the world championship could be conditioned by the ability to introduce innovations that improve performance at a sustainable cost.
There are teams that have tried to put their cars on a diet: in a Formula 1 car, removing extra weight is one of the most complicated exercises because to achieve a result you have to intervene in all aspects of the car.
The problem comes when touching the most delicate aspects, such as introducing more exotic materials (always within the list of those allowed), which can affect reliability, durability and even price.
According to a reliable assessment that we collected in the paddock, a reduction of one kilo over the minimum of 798 kg can cost around 250,000 euros. Due to all this, important teams are now considering disassembling parts of their cars in order to reduce a few grams.
These ideas revive what Mercedes already did at the beginning of the century, when Alfred Neubauer , the sports director, decided to remove the white color from the Mercedes-Benz W25 on June 3, 1934, at the ADAC Eifelrennen at Nurburgring, because the car outperformed 1 kg the limit of 750 kg, giving rise to the mythical silver arrows, by exposing the aluminum bodywork.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the single-seaters of the 1930s were lighter than today’s F1 cars, but it’s interesting to note that about a kilo could also be removed from today’s cars, simply by changing the type of paint.
This change would have a maximum cost of 25,000 euros , that is, one tenth of what is needed to lighten the individual parts of the car.
We talked about it with Gian Luca Falleti, owner of Nanoprom , a Sassuolo-based nanotech company that is keen to re-enter F1 with a polysil-based paint.
“First of all, it’s not a paint,” explains Falleti, “but a liquid glass that doesn’t contain plastic. It’s a product that doesn’t burn and therefore improves the safety of single-seaters. It’s applied cold, so that there is no need to cycle in the oven, which also shortens application times.”
If we look at the amounts of paint on the bodies of current single-seaters, the weight saving could be just under a kilo in a car like the Ferrari F1-75 , which has no transparencies, but considerably more in the Red Bull RB18 .
So why is nobody taking advantage of these opportunities offered by the market? The savings in terms of money seem impressive, being in a ratio of one to ten, or perhaps the issue of cost is not as important as they claim?
