The Secret Evolution of F1 Cockpits

the cockpit is the inner sanctum of an f1 car and somewhere fans rarely get to see steering wheels now offer drivers the information they need and the ability to make changes at the flick of a switch but things haven't always been so advanced we invite you into the secret world of f1 cockpits and show you the amazing systems and technology f1 teams tried to hide one look into the cockpit and it's obvious that today's Grand Prix car is rammed full of clever technology so when we look at the cars from the 50s we can see things were much more straightforward the engines were big four and a half liter units running on alcohol and they ran big carburetors and had to be bumped started there were no clever electronic control management systems in terms of switches there'll be a couple for things like the ignition and the fuel pumps drivers got the information as to the condition of the engine via instrument dials on the dashboard and threesies listening out for any changes in the engine tone the dials were basic that included the essentials engine revs oil pressure battery voltage and water temperature it would have to know from experience what all these dials should be reading and if you spotted a problem you'd make a judgment call to come back into the pits or to carry on compared to today the steering wheels tended to be fairly large this was because they needed the leverage a big wheel offers due to there being no power steering that also defined how the driver sat in the car they'll be upright and able to hold the wheel through directional changes pedals were fairly straight forwards with the conventional accelerator brake and clutch but due to the cars being front-engined at this time the drivetrain ran between the drivers and legs so you'd be straddling the tunnel containing the prop shaft his feet would sit either side of the bell housing this meant his left foot was on the clutch and totally separate from the brake and throttle that was until 1957 when cooper introduced the t43 the first mid-engined f1 car not having to sit on top of the prop shaft and leave the driver to be much lower in the car and his feet were now closer together also must have been fairly comforting for him not to have a solid rotating metal shaft spinning at many thousand rpm right between his legs changing gear would be fairly familiar with h-pattern gearboxes but that had to be done carefully as those gearboxes were particularly fragile at this time into the 1960s and the cars have become smaller and more streamlined meaning cockpits were much less spacious than the cars in the previous decade in the 50s the drivers sat upright and on the car in the 1960s the driver sat in the car you surrounded by the framework of the chassis with panels covering the tubes which created a bucket seat profile the driver was much more reclined lowering the car center of gravity with being so low small curved arrow screens were made from clear perspex instead of the larger glass screens from before but the controls and dials all stayed pretty much the same the only slight change being the addition of an engine warning light these would light up if there was a problem with the oil pressure and alert the driver straight away towards the end of the 60s regulations were brought in to help with safety so seat belts of fire extinguishers were made mandatory in the 1970s most cars were running the Cosworth DFV engine they were relatively simple and there were no clever electronics to play with just yet but one big change was that the cars were no longer built using tubular spaceframe chassis they weren't stayed made from aluminium honeycomb forming a monocot tub these tubs are stronger and formed even more of a natural seat shape resulting in simple padded panels to get the driver comfortable policies were improving now being fixed to the car in six places more attention was being paid on what the driver is wearing as well we've done a video about the evolution helmets so check that out in the link well they're the new type of tab walls stronger its main function was to improve handling there was still no real consideration using the structure to protect the driver in the crash the tub came up to just above the drivers waist with their arms and shoulders being totally exposed protected only by flimsy bodywork the steering wheel was now much smaller than it was before with most having the addition of an emergency ignition switch so the driver could kill the engine should the throttle stick wide open towards the end of the 70s there were some very clever designs which saw speeds increased both from engine performance but also from grip the cars all ran skirts or vertical planks that have formed a seal from the bottom of the cars side pod to the track surface creating what is known as the ground effects this gave huge boost to aerodynamic grip by literally sucking the car to the floor with cornering speeds rocketing up at the starts at the 80s the governing body the FAA brought in new rules to rein it all in they raised the minimum ride height to 60 millimeters which lifted the skirt up off the floor and completely stopped ground effects this is where some very clever solutions were introduced by the teams to get around the rules cars had to pass a minimum ride height test when it came back into the pits so some teams installed a lever in the cockpit which was connected to the suspension and driving at the pits the driver could lower the chassis so the skirts touched the floor then they would raise the chassis ensuring they passed the rider test as they came back into the pits more features started to be introduced into the cockpit for on the flight weeks including roll bar adjustment allowing the driver to move the handling bounce to the car through the race as the fuel and tires changed also brake balance dials would be found somewhere close to hand for the driver to make fine adjustments on the brake loading moving it forwards or backwards as the cars grip and balance changed as well aluminium was the main material still being used to constrict the chassis but in the mid 80s carbon-fiber started to become more common this light and strong material meant a chassis could be made even smaller reducing further the space for the driver and the controls still with no bodywork on the car you can just see how open the cockpits are turbo is now featured in most cars so beast gauge along with the rev counter became the most prominent dials but they were still the traditional analogue style in truth a driver doesn't need to know exactly what the old pressure or the battery voltage is during a race just as long as they are within to create limits that's fine so with space being a premium those gauges started to be replaced with a series of warning lights a warning light comes on you can make the call as to whether to carry on or pull straight over and retire in the late 1980s the ability for the driver to talk to the team via the race radio started becoming commonplace so button was installed within easy reach on the wheel and gearbox he's now featured up to six speeds all changed with the short stubby lever despite the highly advanced materials now being used elsewhere some drivers still favored a crafted wooden gear knob at racks like Monaco a driver would be changing gear around 2730 times over the course race a fair amount that race would be spent with one hand on the wheel drivers often to all the hands to shreds and would take them up like a boxer inside the gloves during the era of digital watches in the Sinclair spectrum the 1980s saw pitting edges start to fill up with banks of computers data logging had arrived McLaren were at the forefront of this technology their mp4 to be ran a digital fuel readout that calculated how much fuel was left in the tank Pross used this to great effect pacing his Drive in 1985 San Marino Grand Prix as others ahead ran out of fuel frost across the line in first with just enough fuel to make it back to the pits although he was later excluded for being underweight in 1989 a revolution took place with the Ferrari 640 designed by John Barnard which transformed the way we change gears and racing and road cars to this day the 640 featured a unique paddle shift gearbox system paddle set behind the steering wheel with an easy reach of the drivers fingers mean these hands never had to leave the steering wheel it made for lightning-fast gear changes and completely removed driver error from the electronically managed gearshift process interesting me though one of the main driving forces for Barnard to develop the system wasn't to make the drivers life any easier by getting rid of the gear leaver on the right hand side of the driver the turbo could be bent narrower and it helped a lot with aerodynamics it promptly warned on its debut in Brazil with Nigel Mansell driving but thereafter the car proved to be hugely unreliable both cars and Mansell and Gerhard Berger only finishing eight more with the 31 races they entered between them but when it did finish it was fast and it led the way for others to follow in the future the last fully manual gearbox being seen in the uncompetitive 40 FG zero one in 1995 as cornering loads increased the physical demands and the body rose two seats became shaped to the individual driver ensuring a snug fit in general the seats were made by taking a mold of the driver sitting in the car using expanding foam this was then used to exactly replicate the drivers shape in a carbon fiber shell along with some padding for comfort so aside from the outlier of the Ferrari 640 from the first race cars in the 50s up until the end of the 80s pretty much the only change in the Capri have the driver was positioned and how much space they had around them all of the controls were totally recognizable to the driver of any generation then the 90s happened a cosmic explosion of technology meant f1 car started their evolution into the 220 miles per hour technology labs that we know today electronics got smaller and designers were now able to cram more and more tech into their cars telemetry systems could now send real-time data straight back to the pits as the car was laughing that development allowed the team to direct the driver to make changes to the car by an ever-increasing array of switches and dials one of the main dials a driver would use would be for adjusting the engine map altering settings in the car such as fuel injection revs and the profile of the throttle curve it's exactly the same features you can find in some Road cars today by the sport button the king of cars in this era was the FW 14 B which is even to this day considered one of the most advanced f1 cars of all time not only did the driver have to cope with adjusting the variable traction control and abs they also had to deal with the mind-bendingly complex active suspension system too they were now an ever growing number of buttons and dials all of which battle for space in ever-shrinking cockpit environments necessity is a great driving force of progress and the fact that the engines would now rev through over 20,000 rpm meant the needle on the rev counter just simply couldn't keep up these free revving engines buzz through their range so quickly even digital LCD screens would be blur of changing numbers so a simple system of shift lights was introduced a driver doesn't need to know the exact number of revs the engine is doing they just need to know when the optimum time is to shift the simple solution is to have a number of shift lights timed in stages to let the driver know when they approaching the shift point and the exact moment to pull the right-hand pedal to change it with cockpits becoming so small there was less and less space to put dial switches in the information displays they started to migrate onto the wheel this was beneficial to the driver because as his workload increased it meant both hands could be kept firmly planted on the wheel the wheel also became less wheel shaped in a race car you're always trying to keep your hands in the same place typically in the quarter to 3 position unless your name is John Lacey the steering lock of an f1 car is so small you'd rarely ever have to take of the wheel so the need for a top and the bottom of the wheel became less important up to the mid 90s the driver's head was still exposed and if they were tall driver like Damon Hill you could still see their shoulders too it's changed in 95 when the sides of the cockpits were raised starting the trend of building more car and more impact absorbing materials of RAM the driver in the late 90s most cars now ran a clutch leaver on the wheel instead of a pedal by removing the pedal in the footwell this meant that designers could narrow the front of the car even further helping with aerodynamics it also reduced weight by getting rid of a whole pedal mechanism in 1997 however the car appeared on the grid which were voted back to a three pedal layout the third pedal though was not a clutch it was a second brake the McLaren mp4 12 feet of additional pedal which only works in the rear brakes known as a fiddle brake it was operated by the driver as they accelerated out of corners helping to eliminate understeer and turn the car into high-speed bends similar to how tanks work it was banned the following year into the 2000s and he would now find around 20 buttons and dials on the wheel with thatíll clutch & gear changes controlled by electronics these are all open to manipulation throughout the race distance one of the key areas for adjustment would be to change the differential and how it delivered its torque which had a big impact on the cars handling 2010 and again McLaren came up with a very clever trick to give themselves more straight-line speed by diverting some airflow through a snorkel on top of the table in front of the driver five cinch handling and onto the rear wing they're able to stall the rear wing drastically reducing drag ingeniously this was all achieved with no mechanical movement which would have been illegal but simply by the driver moving their left leg to cover a hole in the tub every team chased to catch up and made their own but they couldn't put holes in the tubs as they'd already malla gated them so they had to make do with systems using air holes closer to the open cockpit this resulted in drivers taking a hand off the wheel when going down straight and sometimes both if they had to make another adjustment at the same time kurz all kinetic engine recovery system was introduced in 2009 which added another layer of complexity to the cars and the drivers workload with more settings to change in adapt - through the course of the race then in 2011 we saw DRS or drag reduction system be introduced to try and encourage overtaking when activated the rear wing moved into a flatter plane so reducing the drag this of course could only be using the car was in a straight line and it was activated by the driver pushing a button on the wheel when they're within one second of the car in front but it was 2014 when the workload really escalated for the driver huge regulation changes brought in much smaller 1.6 turbocharged combustion engines combined with a complex engine recovery system enormous immense parameters could be changed as the race progressed steering wheels now featured over 25 individual buttons dials and scroll wheels some of which of numerous positions or dual functions tactics are key to winning a race so teams routinely use coded radio messages to tell the driver what setting to select and in yet another layer of complexity to meet the process it's very hard to put an actual price on one of these steering wheels any part of an f1 car is totally bespoke but it's fair to say when you include all of the R&D we could definitely buy a very nice sports car for the same money the safety of drivers has become a key factor in the sport single-seaters have always been open cockpit it's part of their DNA it's undoubtedly part of the thrill of driving them and it's also part of the thrill of watching them to see your driver working at the controls and to see the helmet flash by reminds the fans that it truly is more than just the machine trying to go through a Rouge without lifting off the throttle however this layout was always carried its risks and in recent years a number of instances forced the sport's governing body to search for a solution there have been anti-intrusion panels made from Xylon added to the side of the tub the most prominent change to the safety regulations though is a somewhat controversial halo it's there to stop large objects contacting with the drivers helmet such as wheels or indeed other cars since its introduction there have been a number of crashes where the halo has played its part and despite concerns drivers say once you've driven it a few times you don't notice it and it just becomes part of the car a 50s racer would most likely feel very confined and cramped in the narrow tub and the reduction in vision of the high cockpit asides will definitely be off-putting conversely put a modern f1 driver into a 50s car and given the fact they could actually see the floor plus the lack of seatbelts or any real safety gear that would leave them feeling hugely exposed and most would refuse to drive it at speed let alone go wheel to wheel with other drivers there is nothing like driving an open-top car and hopefully any improvements in safety over the coming years will still allow the fans and the drivers to keep this unique experience if you enjoyed this go check out our other videos on the evolution of the f1 pitstop and f1 helmets

Channel: Driver61

Views: 1,143,130

Rating: 4.937005 out of 5

Keywords: f1, driver61, scott mansell, formula 1, formula one, f1 steering wheel, f1 wheel, f1 seat, f1 cockpits, evolution of f1, inside f1 cockpit

Id: jGHqxKC-hAM

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020