A typical car steering wheel allows most people to accomplish these functions without taking their hands off the wheel — the same way a Formula One driver races.F1 racing has long been a testing ground for technology that later appears in consumer cars. Even something as simple as the bolted-on rearview mirror can be traced back to Ray Harroun’s race-winning Marmon Wasp in the very first Indianapolis 500 in 1911.
An F1 car doesn’t have to have room for a laptop bag or be sturdy enough to survive wintry roads full of potholes for months like a consumer car must be. Designed to operate for many years, a consumer car must be suitable for a variety of drivers, young and old. “NVH requirements and safety requirements are very specific in road cars,” said Sanderson.It can be hard to trace the lineage of a feature that appears in a consumer car that first existed in an F1 machine.
In 1989, Nigel Mansell won the Brazilian Grand Prix racing in a F1-89, a car equipped with the first electrohydraulic gearshift on the steering wheel. Ten years later, the automotive world was abuzz when the first consumer car with similar technology debuted at the 1997 Frankfurt Motor Show. It was Ferrari’s F355 F1 Berlinetta.
After the MP4/1’s success on the racetrack, McLaren continued using carbon in its racecars and eventually developed a consumer car using the technology, the aptly named McLaren F1 in 1995. Other car manufacturers soon followed. “I think as those technologies continue to improve, they’ll be more valid for the mass market,” said Sanderson. For electric cars weighed down by heavy lithium batteries, mass must be eliminated in other places. “Lightweighting becomes more important, as does safety. Both of those things are delivered really well by carbon.”Unlike paddle shifters and composites, hybrid engines — an electric motor coupled to a gasoline engine to maximize fuel efficiency — were placed in consumer cars first.