Fast Cars:How Formula One Makes The World A Better Place!

"They're so depressing going round and round. Ooh, they make me dizzy. Oh, fast cars, they run me down. Fast cars, fast cars, fast cars, I hate fast cars" - Fast Cars, Buzzcocks.

I'm a bit more ambiguous in my relationship to fast cars than Pete Shelley, Steve Diggle, and Howard Devoto were back in 1978. Although I've never been fond of boy racers and people who drive on public roads like lunatics and I'm certainly no 'petrol-head', I used to very much enjoy watching motor sport on television.

 

Particularly F1. From the era of James Hunt and Niki Lauda and on to the golden age of Senna, Prost, Piquet, and Mansell. Though my favourite was the incredible Canadian driver Gilles Villeneuve who never won the world championship (but did come second to his Ferrari team mate Jody Scheckter in 1979, his son Jacques did win it eighteen years later) and died, aged 32, in qualifying for the Belgian GP in Zander in May 1982.

Through the years of Schumacher domination I lost a lot of interest in F1, not least because other concerns took over, and, though, I regained it a bit when Lewis Hamilton started to dominate I didn't even know who all the drivers were when my nephew very generously treated me to tickets to the F1 GP at Monza in 2017.

 

My first, and so far last, ever F1 live experience. It was a great day out, and a great holiday, but it never fully rekindled my interest in the sport and when last year's season ended in the complete shitshow of a rule change on the final lap, gifting Max Verstappen the championship, I started to think that me and F1 were through. It had been a hard sport to justify being a fan of anyway. It was bad enough when the cars resembled souped up fag packets but the craven courting of autocratic regimes in Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar left a very bad taste in the mouth.

With the current Russian invasion of  Ukraine we can all see the benefits of 'sportswashing' to these states and it's time a line was drawn under it. Even though we know it won't be. Then there was the pollution. During a time of climate crisis it seemed difficult to justify a sport in which these ludicrous gas guzzlers, and the circus that surrounds them, spews out so much CO2 into the environment.

 

In a Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk that was much more interesting than I'd expected it to be, and one that raised over £400 for Ukraine, I found out I may have been wrong about a lot of these things. Dr Kit Chapman's talk, Racing Green:How Motorsport Science Can Save the World, looked into how the science that drives F1 and other motor sports extends its reach far beyond the track and ripples out into the world in ways that are both unexpected and, often, highly beneficial.

 

His contention was that the only other thing that drives scientific development as rapidly as sport is war and none of us who have watched the news over the past fortnight need reminding which of those is preferable. Even avid, and usually vocal, haters of sport can get on board with that. A category which certainly doesn't include the enthusiastic motor sport fan Dr Chapman, a journalist who was won the Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science books and a lecturer at Falmouth University.

 

 

We began two years back, at the start of the pandemic. There was, as you may recall, a massive shortage of ventilators in London at the time. Professor Rebecca Shipley, a mathematician at UCL (University College London), was approached to help and she identified many problems with ventilators. They were impersonal, they were impractical, and they were extremely costly.

In many scenarios, they were the only possible solution but in many other cases it seemed going down the ventilator route was perhaps not the best course of action. The Prof contacted her colleagues Mervyn Singer (a professor of intensive care medicine) and Tim Baker (professor of mechanical engineering) at UCL and they told her that in Italy and China they were using CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines to keep Covid patients alive.

I'm no doctor, not even close, but Dr Chapman explained that these CPAP machines work, essentially, like a balloon on your lungs. Like blowing up a balloon. It's a crude but effective explanation. Shipley, Baker, and Singer contacted Mercedes AMG HPP which seems, initially, a bizarre choice but Mercedes immediately offered to help and told their three best engineers they had one hour to get to London and get working on a project to build CPAP machines.

 

Which, without so much as a change of clothes, they did. They bought an existing CPAP machine off EBay (!) and borrowed another from the UCL hospital to study and within twenty-six hours they had built a replica. With three days the CPAP machines the Mercedes engineers had built were being used in hospitals and within a month there were 10,000 of them being put to use in NHS hospitals.

An incredible turnaround by anyone's reckoning. The entire Mercedes F1 factory in Brackley, Northamptonshire had been diverted away from making fast cars and was concentrating on CPAP machines. Incredible. Impressive. But it's not the first time that F1 has helped with healthcare. The paediatric unit at Great Ormond Street actually practise F1 style pit stops to ensure that processes are done quickly and effectively.

Although it seems unlikely they work at the speed of the Red Bull engineers who at the 2019 Brazilian GP changed Max Verstappen's tyres in a world record 1.86 seconds. It actually took me ten times as long to watch the adverts before the YouTube clip than it did to watch the pit stop itself! 

 

 

 

Joining Mercedes and Red Bull are Williams who have made a Babypod, a kind of incubator for new born babies that, unlike other much heavier incubators, can be transported easily. Vital for babies who need to be rushed into operating rooms or elsewhere for emergency treatment.

These are recent, modern, innovations but motor sport has been coming up with this stuff for decades and some of the stories that Dr Chapman told bear repeating. Take, for instance, the Belgian Camille Jenatzy who, in January 1899, in north-west France, broke the land speed record and became the first man ever to drive a car at faster than 40mph.

 

Soon, Jenatzy and his rival, the Frenchman Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, were spurring each other on to even greater speeds. In March that same year, de Chasseloup-Laubat broke 50mph for the first time ever and a month later Jenatzy broke 60mph and became the first ever person to drive at more than 100kmh. Other than the speed though, what was the innovation? 

It was that all these records were achieved in electric vehicles. Specially built electric vehicles, designed to beat the land speed record. So electric cars are nothing new and were, in fact, once the fastest cars you could drive. 

In 1913, Jules Goux became the first Frenchman and first European to win the Indy 500 race. Driving a Peugeot, his team had made huge advances in both engine design and in increasing surface area. These were so successful that Goux and his 'riding mechanic' Emil Begin finished the race a whole thirteen minutes ahead of the second place car. A feat made even more impressive, and perhaps downright irresponsible, by the fact that they were getting plastered on champagne as they were driving.

 

Some reports suggest six entire bottles were consumed. A more responsible motorist was Dorothy Levitt, Britain's first female racing driver and once the holder of both the land speed and the water speed world record. In 1909 Levitt released a book, The Woman and the Car:A Chatty Little Handbook for all Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor, which contained tips for fellow women drivers.

Among these tips she advised carrying a Colt pistol in case a man bothers you. Not something that particularly caught on. Although her suggestion that you carry a small mirror so that you can see what's behind you led to the invention of the rear view mirror. Something you'd be alarmed to find any car without these days.

For the final few laps of his talk (see what I did there), Dr Chapman took the modern F1 car and explained to us a few of the ways its design has had impacts on the outside world - as well as telling us a few amusing, and a few not so amusing, stories to back that up.

Starting with the tyres and Charles Goodyear's discovery of vulcanisation (which you can read more about in my account of Laurie Winkless' Skeptics talk about the science of surfaces and stickiness from January this year). Goodyear bankrupted himself and his family for decades trying to find the perfect tyre. He was seen as a bad father who couldn't provide for his family and, for years, he was unable to solve his rubber problem.

 

Some would probably have gone as far as to say his main rubber problem was that he didn't use one in the bedroom. To add insult to injury when he finally made the breakthrough on the tyre front that he'd always believed he would, somebody nicked his name and started a tyre company using it. That's right. The Goodyear tyre company has nothing to do with Charles Goodyear whatsoever except for stealing his name. Charles Goodyear himself died penniless in New York in 1860.

That's not even the most tragic story about tyres and rubber. In the early days, the rubber needed for tyres could only be found in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil but the British cloned it in a greenhouse in Kew Gardens and started plantations growing rubber all around the world. Even today, Thailand is the top global rubber producer.

In the Belgian Congo, Leopold II was notoriously inhumane. He forced Congolese farmers to grow rubber vines and if they missed their annual quota their hands were chopped up off as punishment. Millions of people died as a result of the rubber trade. Truly putting the grand pricks into the Grand Prix.

 

I didn't know you could make tyres from dandelions but it seems that technology has been around quite some time. Even the Nazis made use out of it at an engineering plant on the outskirts of Auschwitz of all places. These days the world's top tyre producer is less hellbent on global domination and fascism. Today the top tyre producer in the world is .... Lego!

As sure as tyres can be made from dandelions, the bodies of F1 cars can now be made of such unlikely materials as flax, linen, hemp, cotton, and bamboo. Many of them are. Though perhaps the most dominant material of the age is graphene which was rediscovered as recently as 2004 at the University of Manchester by the physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov with the help of water, magnets, and, as unlikely as it sounds, a levitating frog.

 

Now we have graphene bicycles and graphene crash helmets and it is widely expected we will soon have graphene F1 cars and graphene F1 circuits. Future F1 cars may even be made by 3D printers. A prototype model of one is already around - though it's dwarfed by a 3D printed submarine.

The technology blows my mind and, even though I already knew it, so does the fact that modern F1 cars are so aerodynamically efficient that they could quite easily be driven upside down along the ceiling of a tunnel without coming unstuck. Dr Chapman told a story about an engineer who not only attached a tyre to the roof of a building, like a balloon after you've rubbed it in on your hair, but even dangled himself from it without either touching the ground.

These developments in aerodynamics and downforce have led to the supermarket Sainsbury's investing in over one million 'F1 fridges'. Used to streamline the flow of air around chilled items. Keeping those items colder and allowing shoppers to stay warmer.

 

Even the engines of F1 cars are not the greedy gas guzzlers I'd previously taken them to be. Unlike in Formula E, they're not fully electric yet but many of them are hybrid and they tend to use lithium ion batteries which is something I don't really understand but is generally believed to be a move in the right direction.

F1 has moved to 10% ethanol biofuel with a plan to phase out all carbon fuel in the next decade. What I came away from this talk with was an idea that F1, and motor sport in general, wasn't all about speed and making money. It IS about those things, certainly, but there's other stuff, kinder, more community minded stuff, going on at the same time and, who knows, it may even tempt me back into the fold.

At least partially. Despite a few technical gremlins to begin with, Dr Chapman's talk, ably compered by Dave Jenkins of the Coventry branch of Skeptics, had been knowledgeable and informative without ever feeling like it was designed purely for petrol-heads and/or scientists. It took in the deaths of Ayrton Senna, Roland Ratzenberger, and Dale Earnhardt and that reminded us that, despite all the high performance machinery, this is, after all, a human sport but it extended that humanity in showing that the huge teams of engineers and mechanics that back up each and every F1 driver all have lives outside the sport and are all part of the world outside of the sport and that, sometimes, the things they learn in their motor sport careers can, and do, benefit that world.

A Q&A session took in David Coulthard's Xbox, Eddie Stobart trucks, off roading in Greenland, the St Helena mail ship, public transport, and the possibility of driverless racing as well as throwing in a quote from Orson Welles in the Third Man. But for me that was merely a victory lap. During the race/talk itself Dr Kit Chapman had proved himself more than capable of handling the subject and avoiding any collisions. Next time he's talking, it's a green light from me.