5 F1 Innovations That Shaped The Cars We All Drive Today

The world knows that Formula One is the pinnacle. It is the crown jewel of motorsport, where every facet is taken to its most extreme form. At any given moment, only 20 people in the world can brag that they compete in it, and only 10 of the wealthiest and most influential corporate teams can land a spot on the grid. The drivers themselves are almost superhuman. They rely on reflexes to make split-second maneuvers that can spell greatness or disaster. They know a track’s route, surface materials, elevation changes, and weather patterns as if it were their childhood home, and they train like fighter pilots to withstand the immense G-forces their cars dole out.

But the other component behind what makes the sport so exciting is the engineering. With their gargantuan budgets, Formula One teams have the freedom to experiment with esoteric and experimental automotive technologies consumer brands wouldn’t dream of touching. This freedom and creativity birth new racing innovations, but it also makes the Formula One track a proving ground. Many of the technologies discovered start with racing applications but are found to be beneficial in consumer cars as well, leading to a trickle-down effect. Many of the features we take for granted, or don’t even notice, in our cars have roots in this motorsport proving ground, and their prevalence becomes more apparent the more you look. Here are five Formula One innovations that shaped the cars we drive today.

The most important aspect of a combustion-powered car behind the engine is its gear system. Transmissions help distribute power effectively, and while many of our gearboxes today are obscenely complicated, they used to be quite simple. As it was with consumer cars for much of their history, Formula One cars relied on manual transmissions for quite a while. The simplicity and communicative nature of a manual was good for both consumers and racing drivers. However, in 1989 the status quo was shaken. John Barnard, who we will revisit quite soon, was with Ferrari at the time, and for the 1989 Ferrari 640 F1 car, he introduced a new gearing system.

The 640’s cockpit traded one pedal and one lever for a pair of paddles designed by ergonomic experts from the University of Delft. The function was stupidly simple: press one paddle to upshift and the other to downshift. This allowed Ferrari drivers to retain the control of a manual without its setbacks. They could keep both hands on the wheel at all times; the shifts were light-years quicker, and these benefits were apparent when the 640 won its first race. Ferrari quickly pulled this tech into their road cars, starting with the F355 in 1997, and other automakers would soon follow suit. The feature started with performance cars, but with the introduction of dual-clutch transmissions in the 2010s, they’ve made their way onto the wheels of cars of all levels.

Nowadays, it seems you can’t talk to an engineer, read a spec sheet, or look at aftermarket parts without seeing the words “carbon fiber.” It’s hard to believe now, but in the not-so-distant past, carbon fiber was seen as a fascinating but impractical material whose potential usage did not stretch far beyond some niche aerospace parts and the pages of a science fiction novel. Remember John Barnard? Before he made Ferrari’s special gearbox, he was one of the few people pushing for the use of carbon fiber in Formula One. Working for McLaren at the time, Barnard had to hunt down a firm willing to manufacture a carbon fiber monocoque.

Barnard landed on American firm Hercules Aerospace, and the MP4/1 was born. Skeptics thought the material would be too brittle, but a crash at the 1981 Monza GP where the chassis saved driver John Watson quickly proved this angle wrong. Lightweight, twice as rigid, and five times stronger than steel, carbon fiber’s value was undeniable, and McLaren soon used it in the F1 road car. For a while, exotics were the only options for consumer cars that utilized the material to its full potential. You could find it on sports cars, but it was often used sparingly—due to cost—and as a cosmetic wrapping for components made of another material. As production methods improved, though, the material became cheaper, and today, just about any sport-related car has some somewhere.

Sometimes in Formula One, a technology is so good it gets banned. When the Williams team was in its prime, it was the maker of one such technology. The FW14B, designed by the legendary Adrian Newey, had a host of amazing features. For one, it was one of the first times a Formula One team realized the potential of modern computing. The FW14B was fitted with a central control unit that featured a Controller Area Network bus system. We could write multiple articles explaining what this means, but the important part is that it meant any electronically connected component could communicate with any other component through a shared central nervous system rather than on delegated individual pathways.

The aero elements of an F1 car have very small fields of effectiveness, and as a car rises and falls and yaws, it can reduce the efficiency of these aero parts, as well as disperse grip force across the tires in an unpredictable manner. Engineers knew an active suspension system could fix this, but the level of communication and data processing to make it work was out of the realm of possibility, except for Williams and their CAN bus control unit. The technology was so effective that Williams cars were finishing almost half a minute before competitors, leading to its banning. That ban is only valid on the track, though, and today, many of us enjoy the smooth rides active suspension brings us.

Hybrid powertrain technology has become the baseline in modern-day Formula One, but back in 2009, the sport was just reaching the tip of the iceberg. The FIA wanted more exciting racing, and that usually translates to more overtaking. To achieve this, the 2009 regulations invited teams to build kinetic energy recovery systems to give drivers extra juice for temporary power boosts. These systems do exactly what the name suggests, but there are some variations in how it’s done. 

Some KERS systems work by harvesting the rotational force under braking with a motor-generator unit, or MGU, mounted to the crankshaft. The MGU converts that kinetic energy to electrical energy, which is then stored in a battery. Mechanical KERS systems use a flywheel that spins a carbon fiber rotor under braking and stores the flywheel’s tensile potential energy, which can be reconnected to the wheels for that power boost at the driver’s whim.

KERS technology is very performance-oriented, but its concepts were quickly recognized for their application in electric and hybrid cars. Most cars with any amount of electric power already have MGUs connected to the wheels to spin them via electric power. However, they can also be used to provide resistance and harvest the kinetic energy under braking. The main difference is that, rather than storing the harvested energy in a separate battery for on-tap power boosts, the energy joins the main supply to increase range in what we now call regenerative braking.

To be transparent, while the other entries on this list are technologies you can find in many modern, entry-level consumer cars, the hot V engine configuration is still relegated to high-end sports cars and supercars like the Ferrari 296. However, its genius still makes it worth mentioning, as it solves a problem that is often thought of as an unfortunate but unavoidable law of turbocharging a car. The issue in question is turbo lag. A turbocharger works by spooling up a turbine with exhaust gases to pressurize the air, then injecting that pressurized air into the engine for more power. The issue is that when you first start on the gas, the turbine takes a moment to spin up to the appropriate RPM, leading to an uncomfortable gap in power delivery.

The Ferrari 126CK Formula One car solved this, though, with what we now call the hot V, where the turbochargers are placed inside the valley of the engine. This does a few things. It allows for a more compact engine profile, but more importantly, it shortens the travel distance the exhaust gases have to go before they reach the turbos. It also keeps the turbos in a warmer part of the engine bay, and the intake manifolds in a cooler part, both of which increase each component’s efficiency. The result is boost on tap and the effective elimination of turbo lag.