What's Inside a Formula 1 Gearbox?

I got to see something really cool I got to open up a modern F1 gearbox and see how it works and these things cost upwards of £250,000 each with the F1 team spending about £7 million a year on them so of course I wanted to see and touch the materials and understand exactly how a Formula 1 car changes gear from when the driver pulls the paddle through to when the gearbox actually selects that gear and how it works is actually pretty simple and Incredibly clever all at the same time so a few weeks ago I was invited to tdf a company that restores old F1 cars for private owners and gives those old F1 cars a new lease of Life they've got loads of cool toys there while I was there I spotted a couple of old BS and 95 Jordan a 98 Williams and a couple of cybers plus they have their own tdf1 where they take an F1 car and add their own engine and gearbox so it doesn't require a huge team to run and I was shown around this gearbox by Dean Chandler the head of car builds at tdf who also used to work in F1 and the first thing you should know is that in a Formula 1 car the gearbox is something called a stressed member in most normal road cars the engine and gearbox are bolted onto the chassis which is the main structure holding everything together the chassis is like the backbone of the car it's what gives it its strength and stability supporting all of the other parts and Formula 1 cars were actually built like this as well until the 1960s when genius engineers then started to use the engine as a structural piece holding the car together hence the name a stressed member and we saw this in cars like the famous Lotus 49 just take a look at this picture the engine is bolted directly onto the back of the monoco where the driver sits there's no frame or chassis around the engine to add strength if the engine wasn't there the car would break in half and that's more or less still how it's done today a modern F1 car has a tub onto which the engine is bolted onto which the gearbox is bolted onto which the re crash structure and the wing is bolted and so the whole reason for me telling you all this is to demonstrate how strong the gearbox casing has to be it's literally holding the car together not to mention having all of the suspension and its load going through it and while it needs to be really strong the biggest thing that stood out to me is just how thin it is strong very thin it that's crazy the casing itself is made out of 3D printed titanium although it has this carbon patch on the top which is for Extra Strength but this carbon patch on the bottom is for lightness the titanium has actually been machined away and a piece of lighter carbon has been glued in just showing the attention to detail in F1 cars these six holes are used to bolt the gearbox onto the back of the engine and these pickup points are used to bolt the suspension onto the gearbox we've got the the wishbones coming off here they kind of weld somewhere around here um then we've got the the push rod coming up here and then there's a there's a a machine maed metal part I suppose here that that takes the load as the car's going over the suspension puts it through a rocker into a torsion bar which is a spring of course and then you've got the damping attached to all of that and there's actually much more in the gearbox casing Beyond just the gears including a clutch the bevel gear the diff gear and the hydraulic diff so what you've essentially got then is the engine set here the drive coming from the engine into the box here through a clutch it gets driven into the into the bottom of the the gearbox casing here goes up through the gears and then back out into the diff out of the drive shafts and then finally through the tire into the racetrack and likee the engine the gearbox needs oil to make sure all the gears are properly lubricated so there's a neat little oil pump at the back so this is the gearbox oil pump um it's driven off of the the lower lay shaft of the gearbox has a little a little gear that's driven inside here essentially it's just a gear gear pump that pumps all the oil it needs around the gearbox so let's move to the front of the gearbox inside the casing to see what's inside you'd have the input shaft which goes into the clutch clutch in this particular car is Tiny you've also got all the Hydraulics which control the gear selection as well as a range of sensors for temperature clutch position um all the hydraulic lines they use this area up here which is all for lightning but they to run all their pipe work up in in through there but the most important part of the gearbox the bit that actually changes gear is all in here this section usually has something on the front called the front cover and we'll see that later which holds the shafts in place and keeps the oil inside so where exactly do the gears sit so on the low right you'll have the lce shaft here which is driven directly by the crank of the engine via the clutch uh this is your pinion shaft which attaches via bevel gears or drop gears uh to the diff and gives you your final drive and what stood out to me when looking inside the gearbox and also later when looking at the gears themselves is that it's actually all pretty simple yes the gears are made from the very best materials and every gram of excess way has been removed but it's not that different from a motorbike or an F1 car from 30 years earlier but one thing that was different about this gearbox in particular was something called seamless shift where there's zero time between gear changes but I'll explain how that works a bit later and if you've ever wondered why F1 drivers sometimes struggle to reverse it's not just because they don't like going backwards reverse gear is actually a separate process for the gearbox and the gears are incredibly thin because hopefully the driver doesn't need to use it and so it doesn't need to be very strong and so can be very light okay so let's get to the good bit the internals of the gearbox and understand how this thing works but first if you'd like to learn more about gears and more brilliant.org is the perfect place to go I've really enjoyed their scientific thinking course where you can engage with key scientific principles and theories from simple machines like gears and pulley to Einstein's special theory of relativity brilliant allows you to build your natural intuition while gaining deep knowledge of scientific principles they have thousands of interactive lessons in maths data analysis programming and AI allowing you to build real knowledge in just minutes per day they're learn by doing lessons are filled with Hands-On problem solving that lets you play with Concepts a method proven to be six times s more effective than watching lecture videos to sign up for brilliant visit brilliant.org driver61 or capture the QR code on screen to enjoy 30 days of free access and a 20% discount on their annual premium subscription okay so how does this thing work as I said before the front cover holds everything together and on the front of this is the clutch and the hydraulic actuators which actually selects the gears but first I wanted to lay out all the internal parts this is every piece that goes inside the gearbox the first Shaft is called the lay shaft it takes drive from the engine via the clutch the first skinny gear you can see is reversed and the next gear which is a part of the shaft itself is first gear then we have a spacer and the rest of the gears are splined onto the shaft so they spin with it so we have third second a spacer fourth fifth a spacer then seventh and finally Sixth and yes they seem like they're in the wrong order but I'll explain why later then onto the second shaft which is is called the main shaft and this shaft is a bit more complicated now the team didn't have the actual main shaft but that's not too important for showing you how this works again the main shaft is splined but this time it's not the gears that are splined onto the shaft but these little things called hubs The Hub then has a dog ring splined onto that and a couple of bearings on the smooth part of the Hub and it's here where the gear sits so when it's all together this is what it looks like so we have the lay shaft and we have the main shaft and when they're all together it looks like this and just remember the drive from the engine comes through here via the clutch into the lay shaft which is always spinning when ever the clutch is released and still connected to the engine which in turn then spins all the gears on the upper main shaft but remember the gears up top are sat on those bearings and when no gear is selected the gears are spinning but the main shaft is not and so the car will not be moving forward so on these hubs they're free spinning so how do we change gear well that's where these come in they're called the selector barrels because they're shaped like a barrel and they select gears so imagine the driver pulls the paddle on the steering wheel to change up from second to third gear the ECU then will see that as once an upshift uh it will then activate the relative moo which are little valve blocks on Hydraulics um and that'll actuate the moo and allow hydraulic pressure to flow through the relevant line uh into the actuator on this front cover here which will then rotate the ACT in the correct direction for the upshift the electrical signal comes to the actuator on the front cover of the gearbox and then due to hydraulic pressure the barrel rotates and the two Barrels have these channels in them as you can see the channel starts off straight but then it shifts across to the right in this instance and sitting inside of these channels is a nodule of the selector for so basically when the selector Barrel rotates to a certain position the selector Fork moves across and you can see how a selector Fork moves across Ross really well in this old video that I made and it goes into first gear so you can see the selector Fork here move across and looking at this same footage you'll see that the selector Fork is attached to a dog ring therefore when the selector Fork moves across the dogs the small lugs on the ring engage with the dogs on the gear so each gear has these dogs on them and on what we call the dog ring here you have the same corresponding dogs so what happens is when it comes together these dogs mesh together perfectly and they're actually got a very slight angle in that locks them in so when it's under load under torque it will lock them together and because the dog ring is splined onto the main shaft and that dog ring is engaged with the gear the main shaft then spins and you have drive from the gear you've just selected when you look at this you can see the attention to detail of everything here to to remove as much weight as possible like the holes are to remove Weight these are a triangle rather than a bit more of a square shape to remove a fraction of weight like the attention to detail I know it's formula one but it still blows my mind but why are there two selector barrels well this was a development in Formula 1 to speed up the already very fast gear shifting with one selector Barrel like on the old 1997 beniton gearbox I took apart years ago the previous gear would have to completely disengaged before the next one could start to be engaged but if you have two selector barrels one barrel can be engaged with second gear and the other can be prepared and ready to select third gear they both rotate at the same time as this one's coming out of second then this one drops in into third gear this video is really cool it's from a channel called indeterminate design who 3D printed a seamless shift gearbox himself so you can see how this works really well and I'll link to the channel below so on our gear box one barrel would look after first third fifth and 7th and the other second fourth and sixth and this really sped up the gear changes in Formula 1 getting them down to between 2 and 4 milliseconds per shift however it is fairly high risk especially when this was a new technology because if two gears engage at the same time the gearbox completely locks and well would explode thank you very much to tdf for allowing me to film this incredible gearbox you can you can check them out on all the social platforms and their website and if you like this content please let me know as I'd love to make more thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Driver61

Views: 122,115

Keywords: Formula 1, Engineering, F1, F1 Gearbox, Gears, F1 Engine, TDF, Gearbox

Id: dIvuZKBDj3E

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024