Why It Costs £14,000,000 to Drive a Formula Car Upside Down

£14 million that's how much project inversion is going to cost it is a huge amount of money and in this video I'm going to share why it costs that much if you're new to this series we're planning to drive a formula car upside down for 5 seconds with aerodynamic Force alone so the main costs as you can imagine are the car building the tunnel and hiring the location and just the size of this project is astonishing 1330 tons of temporary steel Works 131 tons of temporary aluminium Works 49,000 M squared of plywood that's the same as seven football fields and all of that plywood has to be held together with something almost half a million screws it's a whole load of materials but we're using as many standardized off the shelf Parts as possible with our Structural Engineers having planned for as much reuse as we can so let's start breaking down the costs and let's begin with the car we're using the Empire wraith Hill Climb car as the base for project inversion its light has high down for at relatively low speeds to accept the electric motors and batteries I described in the last video and as an added bonus it was designed by our head aerodynamicist Willam toet so he knows the car's design better than anyone as race cars go The Wraith is actually pretty well priced costing £65,000 brand new from Empire as you might have seen in the second video of this series Willam has made significant developments to the car mostly aerodynamic but will'll also need to make changes to the suspension setup and geometry because of the unusual curvature the car will be turning across and the cber required so an estimate of the error mods comes in at around 35,000 but the main cost of the car modifications will be the electric motors and batteries as discussed in the last video we're likely going to be using incredibly small yet powerful motors which fit inside each of the four wheels as you can imagine this type of Technology doesn't come cheap we're actually yet to have a precise cost that we can share but it will certainly be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds to develop so that's the car done but we still need to test that it and the driver work upside down and we also need to check that the downforce numbers that have come out of the computer correlate with the actual downforce the car generates so we'll need to test that as well first up we'll build a mechanical simulator that can flip the car upside down while static here we'll be looking to make sure all of the systems on the car work properly upside down we'll make sure that nothing unusual happen happens to the suspension the motors and the battery all things that have not been designed to run upside down even small things like the seat belts could be an issue normal adjustable race belts have excess belt when you tighten them which usually just sits neatly on the driver's chest but when we're upside down any excess belt would fall in front of my face blocking my view and that's not something we want to discover for the first time when we're doing the stunt and this simulator will help me get accustomed to driving upside down in a race car which while it won't be the first time it will be the first time I actually meant to do it I imagine it's going to feel very unusual hanging upside down and that it will take a bit of getting used to I want to be sure I'm completely comfortable hanging upside down as I'll need 100% of my mental capacity to ensure I drive the car properly and keep an eye on all the Telemetry that I'll be shown so to make a simulator that can replicate loads similar to the event itself and to purchase another chassis to use as we be building the actual project inversion car at the same time we estimate it will cost around £280,000 once we've got the car and the driver comfortable working inverted it's time to make sure all of the arrow work is producing as much downforce as predicted the car will be covered in sensors to ensure everything is working how we expect one of the most important sensors will be strain gauges in the push rods as you might imagine these measure the strain all the load going through the push rods so essentially logging the car's Mass plus downforce the first testing will be done on a normal piece of asphal something like a Runway this is something that F1 used to do a lot to test Arrow High rout a Runway do a straight line test that runs through a range of speeds make an arrow change and do the same again and they do this to get real world data to show how different parts and setting affect the downforce levels F1 doesn't do this anymore but you might see drivers running at set speeds during a Friday practice session when they're doing this they're after the same data then once the structure is built we'll do some extra test in this means we can check the car running in the curve of the tunnel this is going to be critical as the curve of the tunnel is going to negatively affect the amount of downforce we create all in we expect this testing to cost us another £170,000 if everything goes well so that's about it for the car next the real cost the location and the structure now to boil down all of this data and all of these costs we had to use a lot of data analysis and similar to the majority of skills we used on this project you can start learning them yourself with Brilliance today sponsor check this out it's Brilliance course on data analysis fundamentals everything you need to know about averaging relationships in data and understanding uncertainty in data we've had to do a lot of that in this project in understanding aerodynamic data load cases costs tolerances the lot these are all aspects that our team cannot get wrong and it all stems from great understanding of the basics brilliant have thousands of visual lessons from foundational and advanced maths to AI data science real engineering and more with new lessons added monthly to try everything that brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org driver61 or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20% off brilliant's annual premium subscription thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring this video and all of the series about project inversion and with that back to the costs the location for project inversion will likely be driven by the headline sponsor so it's difficult to estimate what that will end up costing it may be a large part of the budget or it may end up costing very little so for the purpose of this video we've left it out the location will also have some effect on the cost of the structure itself building this on a racetrack a car park or a Runway will be cheaper than on less consistent ground and the location temperature and the difference between the minimum and maximum temperatures and things like wind speeds will make a difference to how the final structure will be built and therefore the final cost but the bulk of the cost for project inversion won't change and the bulk of the costs are in the core materials for the structure itself to remind you the tunnel is 700 m or 2,300 ft in length it's 7.5 M or 25 ft in height it's going to use 1500 tons of temporary metal work seven football fields of plywood the raw material cost is massive passive not to mention the huge team required to put it all together and so the following numbers have been put together based on the car with a speed of 44 m/s which is a very conservative 98 mph in fact we're likely able to bring the speed down somewhat below 90 mph once we've confirmed the downforce levels in a real life test therefore we may not quite need the 700 M to enter the tunnel transition to inversion drive upside down for 5 seconds and then transition back down and of course we could reduce the time upside down although I really don't want to do that however this would reduce the cost so here's the shopping list for the project in version tunnel and let's start with the framework first we need 3,000 M of the bio kit main beams seen just here then we need 6,400 M of the trust struts seen here next is500 M of the support beams for the bottom of the curvature just here we'll also need 5,000 m of X beams to support the track surface down its length and will need 9,000 M of scaffold lacing elements to brace the X beams and this all sits on 1,00 supporting sleepers seen just here so that's the framework but now we need something for the car to actually drive on we need the surface the total area of the track is 11,000 M squared but in order to have the strength required and for the curved surface to retain its shape the surface is actually going to be made up of four layers of 12 mm plywood screwed into place 1 after another and that's a lot of plywood in fact it's 1160 sheets of extra extra large 2.4 M by 9.5 M pieces they sheets that are 10 times bigger than what you'd get from your local hardware store and they all need to be fixed in place with almost half a million screws D all if you want to sponsor us we'd be more than happy to talk and with it all being screwed in place we'll be able to reuse a loss of the surface with us Expedition engineering have put a lot of of energy into making this project as sustainable as possible we'll also need to finish the surface and as we don't have any racing regulations to adere to we're aiming for the highest grip possible although we're yet to make our final decision and of course the tunnel itself is a huge advertising board so there'll be some cost involved in printing on the surfaces where necessary although this will be a small percentage in the whole project we'll also need some accelerometer sensors in the structure so we can understand if the structure is moving in the wind or with the car and by how much so they're the raw materials but we also need to have a huge team of people to put the structure together over what is likely a couple of months and surveys to ensure everything is safe before we're given the green light that all said the budget for the structure is massive coming in with some safety margin at almost £14 million which is roughly 30% for the Frameworks 40% for the plywood and another 30% for the assembly that's a massive number on one we need serious backing to make happen now these numbers are quite conservative and have been put together with us buying all of the parts without any Partnerships and with our 5c goal it would be possible to reduce costs somewhat if we rented the Frameworks quite drastically if we partner with suppliers for the framework and the surface this is the final installment for the moment of project inversion if you yet to see the other videos where I outline the project detail the car tunnel and Power train please check out this playlist here thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Driver61

Views: 361,714

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, Scott Mansell, Project Inversion

Id: vwxP6HXkKIY

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 30 2023