Formulation 1 cars, defined for inexperienced persons (with Max Verstappen)

“Speeding and…” [CLAP] “All lined up…” “Brand new season!” “Brand new tour for Formula 1…” I'm looking at the brand new car for thenumber one team for the world's most popular car racing sport, Formula 1, with the currentworld champion driver, Max Verstappen! MAX: “Would you like to come and see the car?ME: “YES” And we're gonna show you what it takesto build and drive some of the fastest and most expensive cars in the world. Because the thing isthese aren't just cars. Think of them instead as.

Epic group science projects where 10 teams allfight to be first and on every team there are hundreds of people spending millions of dollarsall working together to push technology to itslimit. In this video, I'm going to give you rareaccess into a factory in England where they build these cars and into a garagein Bahrainwhere they race them… This is Formula 1 cars, explained. I am on my way to the Red BullFactory. We're going to get into some of the nitty-gritty engineering details butwe're also going to talk about the basics of a Formula 1 car. This is Jack. Jack's going toget us into all of the secret rooms. “I will do my very best!”.

He's doing a finger scan to get us in… “So Cleo, welcome to Red Bull.” Holy…. I don't even know what to say. This isbadass. What should I look at? Everything! That's the purpose of it. The reason whywe havethis here is that when people arrive for work they know what they're here todo which is towin trophies, yeah.” Oh my god… These are all race driven cars from our history in thesport. Starting the left hand side with our first car and then finishing on the right hand sidewiththe RB16B, the 2021 Championship winning car.

The RB7 actually isn't here and the reasonfor that is we do crazy things with the car, so you may have seen it do a donut on the top of theskyscraper. We've done a pit stop in zero gravity… Can I touch it? “You can touch the car, it's fine.” It's so beautiful… “The driver actually has to spend about 3 or 4 hours sat down in the car gettingtheir seat fitted, so we sit them in some clay essentially and they sort of get the seat formedaround them…” A Formula 1 car looks kind of similar to other race cars that you might have seen likethese in IndyCar – single seat, open cockpit – but there's something that makes a Formula 1 carspecial. In IndyCar, all of the cars have to use the same frame or chassis so winning reallydepends on how you race that car. But in Formula1 each team has to design and manufacture theirown cars so winning starts here at the factory.

With how you build your car. But you can't justbuild whatever you want. “We design a car based on the regulations that the FIA and F1 provide us andso that really stipulates how the cars look, what shapes they are.” That's the formula in Formula 1.Teams fight to find the best design within these rules. “The incredible thing with Formula 1 for meis that you have 10 teams that come together to race. They've all designed and built their ownindividual car but you arrive at the track and everybody's within you know a second of eachother over a lap which is quite incredible in itself. But the only way that you gain an advantagein Formula 1 when the margins are so slim is to look at every area that you can possibly can toeek performance.” The rules say that each team can spend $135 million per year minus driver salaries.I know that sounds like a lot but in the race to.

Win it means that every decision needs to get thebest bang for the buck. “The amount of engineering that goes into building these cars is nextlevel. We're using many of the same techniques many of the same technologies that you know NASAor SpaceX would use to design their rockets, we apply them to designing our own rocket that goesaround the racetrack.” So this is the public display room. Now we're going into the secret… what dowe call this room? “The warehouse.” The warehouse… WOAHHHH. Yeah this feels cooler. Who are thesecars? “So these are a variety ofdifferent cars fromthroughout history” “There's some show carsbut also there somerace cars.” Oh my god this is so cool. Can I walk here?.

I have a question, you're gonna say no.Can I sit right there? “Yes!” He didn't say no! “Just be really careful not tonail your headon the banister above as youget up…” Welcome to my crib… Every Formula1 team's goal is to create the two fastest cars possible within the rules so their two drivers canbeat the other team teams around different shaped tracks all around the world racking up points towin the Constructors' Championship. And for the last 2 years the team that has done that is RedBull by a lot. Here are the winners of every race last year. And here's Red Bull. Yeah. So how do theydo it? What makes a winning Formula 1 car?.

This is the car that won all of those races and this isone of the aerodynamicists who helped design it… “So this is RB19. This is last year's car that obviouslywas incredible successful and we're all very proudof” A winning Formula 1 car needs to do two things:make super quick turns and go extremely fast in a straight line. The challenge is that the thingsthat make a car very good at one make it harder to be great at the other. The team that can design thecar that does both the best takes home the trophy. let me explain: First, to make a quick turn, you needa strong grip on the ground. “Going back to pure fundamentals, what we want to do is generate what'scalled downforce.” More downforce means stronger grip which means quicker turns. So how do youcreate more force down? Think of a Formula 1 car like an airplane upside down. On a plane, the airmoving across the wings lifts it up. But here the.

Air across the car forces it down. “So that is wherethe air literally sucks the car into the ground.” To get it to suck, you need higher pressure above thecar and lower pressure below and one way to get lower pressure air is to get it moving really fast.”Low pressure is effectively high velocity air so you want to be able to speed up the air as much asyou possibly can under the floor and effectively slow it down as much as you can on on top of thefloor.” Here's the part I think is really cool: A good way to get fast lower pressure air isn't forit to just shoot under the car in a straight line. It's to create tiny tornadoes under the car. Theydon't say tiny tornado though, they say vortex. “A highly powerful vortex, that in itself generates alot of low pressure because it's a structure that rotates.” High velocity air! “Those structuresthen run down the the length of the floor and they.

Generate low pressure for a very long region.”So they have all these tiny tornadoes that help suck the card toward the ground to give itbetter grip to make faster turns. At top speed a Formula 1 card generates a downforce three or fourtimes the weight of the car meaning this car could theoretically drive on the ceiling. But all of thisdownforce comes at a cost. To go super fast in a straight line you need to knife through the airwith as little drag as possible but as you create more downforce… “it normally comes with added dragwhich is preventing the car moving through the air, so it's a resistive force.” For example, look atthis back wing. It generates downforce on the turns, but it feels like a big parachute slowing the cardown in a straight line which is why Formula 1 teams are allowed to build in a control that thedriver can press to flip part of that wing down.

Allowing the car to zoom down the straightseven faster. This is called the drag reduction system or DRS. Designing a winning Formula 1 carmeans balancing all of these different effects pushing the rules and the limits of physics toget a little more grip and a little more speed. This is a question that I'm sure you're going tosay no to. Is there any chance in hell that I can sit in this car? “I don't think it's up to me. but…”Jack?? …. [MOMENT OF TRUTH] “You can sit in the car.” YESSSSSSSSSSSSS. Thank you! Ah! “I've got something rather special that you canwear whileyou're in the car. Pop that on,.

We'll get you in the car, see howyou look being a Formula One driver!” “So how you feeling in there, Cleo?” This is SO COOL. Let me just describe what this feels like. My legsare above my butt so I'm sitting like that. My legs are like that, and my back is here like that. So Ifeel sort of vulnerable. My entire field of view is what's happening in here. I'm getting more andmore claustrophobic as I talked to you which is interesting. The idea of going 200 mph in thiscar is terrifying and I can't believe people do it. I have a totally new appreciation for whatthis feels like. The butt I have to admit is quite comfortable. This is clearly craftedfor someone's butt. Max Verstappen's butt.

Apparently. That is actually going to come up inmy conversation with Max Verstappen. But more on that in a minute. Eventually, I had to get out ofmy dream car because now that we've learned the design goals of a Formula 1 car, it's time to seehow they actually make it. As every team works on designing their cars they're constantlytesting those designs in computer simulations, in physical rigs that mimic a moving car and in bigwind tunnels. One of my favorite details is because Formula 1 limits how much teams are allowed totest full size cars in a wind tunnel, they build these little 60% scale versions of their carsand test those. One reason that Formula 1 cars are so light and fast and strong is that basicallyevery part of the car that you can see is made of a material 10 times stronger than steel but halfthe weight: carbon fiber. “Would it be good if I had.

A piece?” Yeah do you have a piece of carbon fiber?Woah cool. “This is quite a substantial block Can I hold it? How heavy is this? Oh it's heavierthan I thought! “You can see the structure if you look on the side so that's when it's layed up…”Why is this material used so often throughout the car? “With its strength to weight ratio beingso good it means that you can make it extremely light whilst it retaining a lot of structureand a lot of strength. So if you hold it up you can actually see light through it thereso it does have a sort of fabric quality toit.” Woven carbon! To create the carbon fiber partsthat they need, teams manufacture patterns in the right shapes and then lay down carbon fiber clothsometimes in 100 layers then they suck all the air out and shove them into basically a pressurecooker to squeeze the layers together with.

Resin. Then they cut and measure those carbonfiber pieces and other metal parts with huge programmable machines. It looks like it's gettinga milk bath. “The whiteness is down to the additive that gets added to the water to make sure itdoesn't rust the machine.” I don't know if you can fully appreciate how big this is but there aredozens of these boxes just in this massive room in front of us all of the parts for the RB20, thenew Red Bull car, are being manufactured in this room right now in these white boxes. Pretty cool. Any chance I can look in? “I can imagine so, yes.” “I think it's more about not getting it on camera…”For the metal parts of a car, which kind of metal they use depends on what they need it to do. Okayso this is aluminum or aluminium as he's calling it. So this is a lot of what the car is made outof. “We use aluminium throughout the the build of.

The car for certain parts and components whichis generally light, fairly strong.” “Try that one…” “It is quite…” Holy cow! It's hard to show visuallyhow different these objects are except maybe how how much I'm trying to hold… I could probablydo 20 reps like this until my arm fell off like this is very heavy! So that's densimetwhich is an alloy which we use to add weight to the car. We sometimes add weight into thecar when the driver isn't up to weight. We have to have a minimum weight of the car sowe'll use tiny strips of this throughout the car to bring the car up to weight…” There arethousands of pieces that make up a Formula1 car and after they're designed and moldedand machined, some of them need to get painted… The paint job on a Formula 1 car is a big dealto fans, especially the moment that it's released.

And they see the car for the first time. And teamsspend a lot of effort to design something that's going to look beautiful. But the paint isn't justto be pretty, it's got to go fast. For example a lot of the sponsor logos that you'll see onthese cars aren't stickers because even that tiny little edge would create unwanted drag theypaint the logos on. Watching these cars get built, it's just astonishing to mehow much detailand design and effort goes into thefinishedcar that we see on track. Now we're headed to themost secretroom yet, where this team is building their new engine. “This is one of the world'smost advanced engine development facilities.” “This isn't just an engine, this is a a Formula 1engine.”Right now, Red Bull buys engines for theircars.

From Honda but that's about to change. In2026 Red Bull's cars will use their own custom engines that they're working on right now andwe're about to be one of the first to go see it. “So this building here wasn't here to twoyears ago in June was our first engine and when you see the workshops you'll see what we'vebeen doing it's pretty impressive.” Why does it matter to build a Formula 1 engine yourself?”Control and the tie-in between the chassis and the engine is paramount really. Youhave it better working together, your aerodynamics and everything all that side of it, is theway to win.” This team's big bet is if they invest a ton of money and time into a custom engine theycan eek a little bit more speed and control out of their car and ultimately win more races. Can youhear me? Okay so what's happening right now is.

I'm in the super secret engine room but we can'tactually show anything close to the new engine but I'm standing in front of the real Formula1 engines! I just can't show them to you… “People going to love it.” They're going to hate me! Okay sothis is the engine that I can show you, we can show you and the reason why little bits are coveredup is that those are the secret parts that you're not allowed to see. If I'm working on a Formula 1team working on an engine, what is the goal? Is it maximum power, smallest size? Is it light? “Power. Youwant as much power as possible because the driver will ask for more power. Even if he's got the mostpowerful engine, he will want more.” To understand why this engine is so cool let me explain how theengine in your car works and how it compares. Okay so your car probably has a four stroke internalcombustion engine and a Formula 1 car does.

Too which means there's a cylinder and insidethere's a piston that goes down-up-down-up in four strokes. In the first one, air and fuel rush intothe chamber, then they get compressed and heat up then a spark ignites the mix and it explodesshoving the piston down and turning a set of gears generating mechanical movement that turnsthe wheels of the car. Then the piston lifts back up and pushes the remaining gas out. That wholeprocess happens inside one cylinder and there are six of them in a V shape which is why it'scalled a “V6” engine. Your car might have anywhere from 4 to 8 depending on what you drive. But onebig difference between your car and a Formula 1 car is the maximum number of cycles – that down-updown-up – each engine can complete per minute your car about 6,000 a Formula 1 car over 15,000 thatthat contributes to more power to go faster plus.

These cars combine a bunch of other technologiesto get a little bit more oomph, like a turbocharger which compresses air before it enters the cylinderso it packs more punch when it's then lit on fire 1 car. It's a great example of why Formula 1 carsactually matter for people like you and me. It's not that this tech is brand new. It's that it'scombined and tweaked and perfected by hundreds of smart people with millions of dollars to makeit better and those changes help inspire better car tech for all of us. The engines that they'rebuilding here are based on rules for 2026 which will use less fuel and more electricity andtherefore make a slightly different sound and we got a sneak peak…. Can you hear that? So that'sthe new engine running? “Correct, yeah.” “Are we allowed to be hearing it?””You're allowed to HEAR it, you're not allowed to SEE it.”.

Just running by – Ooo! What did that noise change mean? “So it it really just revved up thespeed basically and it's now going into this automated power curve. You can hear it's comingdown in speed, so with every single speed we take a measurement. Next speed, measurement. Next speed,measurement.” So they're testing it at different speeds, at different, they're running power curvesto see how it performs. “And at that time always wide open throttle which means everything we have.”Now that we've seen how they build these cars it's time to see where they race them.And that means that we need to go to Bahrain. We're here! Here we go… Hi!.

No I'm not allowed to video any of this… “Turn 1 awaits you a couple of kilometers away!”Does thisever get old 20 years in? “No! Every day is a learning day.Every day is different.” I can'tbelieve I'm here.This is the new car, the RB20. And uh you might recognize these guys. Theirjob is to take the incrediblecars that hundredsof people just built and speed them up over 200mph, facing forces sometimes greater than five times normal gravity, fighting off competitorsto bring their team over the finish line first. These drivers are legends. Max Verstappen hasbeen dominating Formula 1 recently…

DUH DUH DUH DUH MAX VERSTAPPEN Remember those Red Bull win records?Here's just Max's wins.Yeah. What does it feel like to drive a Formula 1 car? “Imagine sitting in a roller coasterand it basically just shoots off but then like 5 to 10 times worse, while having a steering wheel inyour hands with all the buttons. Back in the day when my dad was in F1, when I was a little babybasically, I sat in it and you know is very cute the pictures, but the very first time that I satin the car and I was going to drive it myself I was a little bit nervous. Even I to this daysometimes when I do that, I get this like it shoots off, you have this like [WOAH] kindof feeling? I still have that in an F1car sometimes.” And for these cars, sinceno two driversare the same, no two Formula 1 cars.

Are quite the same either, even for the same team.”They have a whole book of measurements for myself, from Max, so they know exactly my seatposition, my pedal position, my sitting position…” “The seat is very important, it's a carbon seat.You're naturally in a very unnatural position…” I actually got to sit in what I think was yourseat in the RB19 in the factory. “Probably a bitwide!” Actually it was kind of a good fit! …. [RECORD SCRATCH]DidI just tell world champion Max Verstappen that our butts are the same size? Anyway, here's whattheir steering wheel looks like and here's one of the engineers who helped design it. Would asteering wheel for each of the different teams look totally different? “Yeah. So they all look verydifferent.” On every team's custom wheel, there are dozens of buttons and knobs and switches allmeant to optimize the engine and the tires.

And the brakes and much more in every possiblescenario all while the driver is driving. “The drivers memorize all the buttons so they cando it without actually looking at the wheel… “Sorry… all right… no, we're good.” He might havetogo do a pit stop at any moment… That was a pit stop. At least once every race,every car needs to exit the track and enter their pit box where roughly 22 members of the pit crewswarm the car to quickly change the tires and other parts. A good pit stop is less than 2 seconds.They give out a trophy for fastest pit stop and when we were at the Red Bull Factory we got to seetheirs. These tires just came off the car and they are hot hot! Like hold on…. now it hurts. That's howhot. I got to try stacking these tires and listen they've got a really hard job. “Couple more tries…” Itdidn't fall! The tire options are the same for.

Each team. For each race, they all get a hard, medium,and soft option or if it's raining two different types of wet tires. Your soft tires have the mostgrip but they wear out the fastest and your hard ones are on the opposite end of that spectrum andmedium is medium. When they say “my tires are done”, what do they mean? “The drivers will feel when whenthe grip is is going off…” Choosing the right tires at the right time is a big partof a team's racestrategy… During a race, you'll hear driverstalking to only one person, their race engineer, but thatrace engineeris also talking to a massive team of strategists, all trying to figure out thebest way to win. Some of those strategists are at the track but most of them are actually backat the factory in a big room like this. Tt looks.

Like NASA! And the people in this room aren't justthinking up plans, they're using supercomputers to run simulations about tons of possible outcomes.”It's millions, even over the course of a race, and we run them on the Oracle cloud.” Millions??”Millions yeah.” Those simulations are taking into account weather and heat of the brakes and tireperformance and everything every other driver is doing and then feeding those simulations backto the track. “The aim is always to try and win a race so that's kind of thinking about what'sthe best thing for you to do but also what might your competitors to and so how might you need totherefore react to that.” This is all real time? “Yes exactly, so we're constantly talking, the intercomon the pit is constantly lighting up, there's always somebody in one of your ears. So actually theheadphones are dual, so you can hear one car in.

One ear, and the other car in the other ear, soyou're always hearing multiple conversations trying to take them all in. It's basically likeplaying a board game, that's how I always thinkof it.” The most complicated board game in the world! Awinning Formula 1 car isn't just about the tech inside that car, it's also about the tech behindevery move that the car makes every lap of the race but the thing I think is so cool is that evenwith all of those strategists and supercomputers and simulations at the end of the day it stillcomes down to human skill. “It's hard sometimes to focus you know because you have always someoneon your ear asking you questions and you are just trying to focus as much as possible but you haveto have that capacity you know…” Everything that we've talked about from design to build to paintto simulation to test… it's not just happening once.

A Formula 1 car is never done. A team is constantlylearning and changing and rebuilding between every single race over and over and over again. In theend, one of the things that strikes me most about Formula 1 and Formula 1 cars is that they'reso much like a Lego set. It really has to be all of the individual perfectly formed pieces comingtogether to make a whole thing. This is a theme I've noticed with a lot of my episodes of Huge If True. Technology has always been a story of human Ingenuity but more and more it's also the storyof human collaboration. I think that's really the story of a Formula 1 car and the story of somuch of the technology that we all enjoy. I think there's something really magical about a teamof engineers and designers and strategists and athletes and all of these people coming togetherto build something that gets better and better.

And better every single time. I find a lot of hopein that. If we can build cars like these… What else can we do? I can't believe this is real life. One ofthe things that I've been keeping mind is that most of the people that work on thesecars won't actually get to go see a race at least not with their team because there's a limitednumber of people that Formula 1 allows each team to bring to each race and I know that the onlyreason that I get to do this is because you watch and subscribe to this show and I just, I'm feelingreally grateful. I hope that these kinds of stories make you a little bit more optimistic about whatwe can build while we work together. So if you're enjoying this video and you want to help us go tomore incredible places subscribe and tell me in.

The comments where we should go. And we have somewild episodes coming up, I can't wait to show you.

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