How Formula 1 has influenced the cars we drive

10 April 2024  By: Bruce Newton

Taking in the sights and sounds of the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix at Albert Park it’s easy to regard the whole thing as a multi-million-dollar extravaganza of little relevance to everyday motoring.

Yes, there are many familiar automotive badges attached to these sleek racing cars - Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Aston Martin and Renault. Ford and General Motors luxury brand Cadillac wants to join in from 2026.

But what can possibly translate from one of these finely tuned 350km/h open wheel missiles that cost around $25 million each to build (according to a 2022 Red Bull F1 estimate)?

RELATED: The things disappearing from our cars »

The answers may surprise you. Through the years F1 and other racing categories have pioneered or rapidly developed technology that has translated to the road cars we drive.

So let’s take a look at some of the innovations that have migrated from racetrack to road.

Incorporating controls on the steering wheel

Remember the good old days when a steering wheel was a rim, three or four spokes and a horn pad? Ah how times changed.

The steering wheel is now a reproduction of your infotainment and car control systems with volume, media source, phone, cruise control, drive assist and voice assistant buttons literally at your fingertips.

F1 played a role in this change because buttons started turning up on steering wheels in the 1970s. It started with a single kill switch and has become so complex today most use a matrix screen so the driver can tune through multifarious menus and functions.

But one F1 steering wheel change that has yet to really catch on is shape. These days, grands prix drivers have two ears to grasp rather than a circle. The Tesla yoke is perhaps the closest passenger cars have come to that.

Active suspension

Active suspension was actually banned from Formula 1 in the early 1990s because it was so expensive, complex and delivered a huge competitive advantage to teams that got it right.

The Williams F14B of 1992 was the ultimate example of the breed. Nigel Mansell scored nine wins on his way to the driver’s championship.

The fundamental idea was straight forward even if executing it properly was not. The aim was to keep the car’s floor as flat and constant in its gap to the road to enhance aerodynamic grip. The less movement, the faster the car could corner.

Active suspension remains very rare to this day. Where most suspension systems could be described as simply being resistive to vertical motion from bumps in the road, active suspension has the ability to motivate the vehicle body up or down.

However, many cars now have adaptive suspension that can change damping force or even spring stiffness as the road changes or with a sport mode switch. These are reactive systems that operate via the adjustment of oil flow through the shock absorbers, the use of air springs or, very rarely, manual adjustment. 

Paddle shifters

Paddle shifters are manual gearchange levers located on the steering wheel or column of cars with an automatic transmission.

They allow the driver to make manual gearchanges by tapping left or right for up or down. This is handy for practical reasons such as towing as well as the simple enjoyment of changing gears.

Some cars also offer manual changes at the gear lever, but that is becoming less common as actual levers are replaced by dials and the like.

The paddle shifter emerged from the swap to semi-automatic ‘clutch-less shifting’ gearboxes in Formula 1, a trend started by Ferrari in 1989. The traditional combination of clutch pedal, manual gearbox and H-pattern change led to too many missed shifts and too much driveline damage.

It was only right the 1995 Ferrari F355 F1 Berlinetta was the first road car with paddle shifters. Now they’re a common feature, reflecting the rise of the automatic transmission and demise of the manual gearbox.

Turbocharged engines and forced induction

A war of forced induction was waging between Mercedes (Germany) and Bentley (Great Britain) well before World War II broke out. For Britain, the lessons learned in Grands Prix cars supercharging assisted with fighter plane development, enabling Spitfire and Hurricane fighters to fly at higher altitudes. Meanwhile, Germany’s Messerschmidt Bf 109 World War II fighters benefitted from fuel injection.

Turbochargers arrived later and have become hugely popular. Where a supercharger uses a mechanical drive to pump more air into an engine, a turbocharger uses exhaust gas pressure to spin up a small turbine that pumps more air into the engine. More air equals more power. Whilst supercharges are used on some high-performance vehicles, turbochargers are more common.

So forced induction was not pioneered by Formula 1, but it gave it a distinct push along. That was in 1977 when the French car manufacturer Renault returned to racing with a 1.5-litre V6 turbocharged engine.

The rules of the time meant it would race against naturally-aspirated 3.0-litre engines, potentially delivering it a power advantage.

And there was no doubt it did. But along with the speed came a lot of reliability issues. As a result, Renault won races but never the world championship with the turbo engine.

But it did flag the potency of the turbo concept. For road cars the appeal of turbocharging goes beyond pure power. It allows downsized engines that provide better fuel economy and reduced emissions – incredibly important in these days of tightening CO2 rules.

Hybrid drivetrains

Formula One actually can’t claim to be the home of hybrid technology because Toyota had its first Prius road car on-sale in 1997.

But since 2014 hybrid powertrains have been mandatory in Formula 1 and at the same time they have become increasingly common tech for road cars.

F1 cars capture kinetic energy from both braking (KERS – kinetic energy recovery system) and turbocharger/exhaust (HERS – heat energy recovery system) and stores them as electricity in a lithium-ion battery.

That powers a 120kW e-motor supplement to the turbo-petrol 1.6-litre V6 racing engine.

Hybridisation takes all sorts of different forms in road cars from mild hybrid, through series and parallel hybrid to plug-in hybrid. But the core idea is the same – use electricity to supplement engine power and torque, save fuel and reduce emissions.

Direct fuel injection

Once upon a time there were these manually adjusted things called carburettors that combined petrol and air in a mixture that fed via a manifold into the combustion chamber of an engine to be burned quite inefficiently.

The carburettor was in turn replaced by mechanical fuel injection, electronic fuel injection and then direct injection.

 

Again, this was not an F1-led innovation, but one that has been intensely refined since becoming mandatory in 2014 with the start of the hybrid era.

DFI allows the high-pressure metering of an exact amount of fuel directly into the combustion chamber where it is mixed with air to be burned most efficiently.

The result is more good stuff – power, torque and drivability – and less bad stuff – fuel thirst and emissions.

Even though experiments in direct fuel injection go back more than 100 years, modern computer systems have made this process economically possible as a feature for mainstream vehicles.

Carbon fibre

In terms of pioneering new tech with road car implications, the McLaren MP4/1, introduced in 1981, is undoubtedly one of the most important Formula 1 cars of all times.

That’s because its monocoque – or chassis – was made from carbon fibre rather than traditional aluminium.

As a composite plastic, carbon-fibre has the advantage of being far stronger and lighter than aluminium.

It has become the default material for construction in F1 and other motorsports around the world.

However, on the road it is expensive and limited mostly to top-end sports cars. Appropriately enough, that includes the McLaren line-up supercars.

It’s worth noting the Lotus 88 F1 car actually debuted the carbon fibre monocoque just before the MP4/1, but it was never allowed to race because of other technical issues.

Aerodynamics

The amount of energy required to push a vehicle through the air is critical to its performance, be that speed or economy. The more resistance generated the slower and thirstier the vehicle will be.

Making race cars slippery through the air while retaining the all-important downforce (or grip) generated by air rushing over, under, through and around the body has been a fixation of all designers and engineers for decades.

In F1 it reached its ultimate expression with outlandish wings, ground effects and active suspensions. Road vehicle designers learn much from this focus. On-road its more about efficiency than performance for most vehicles, hence the introduction of devices such as grille shutters.

In supercar territory aero grip becomes incredibly important. For instance, the amazing McLaren Senna coupe can produce up to 800kg of downforce using active aero blades and wings.

Spin-off road cars

There have long been links between Formula One racing teams and road-going models of the same name. Ferrari is of course the most famous example of that breed. It’s been building road cars since 1947.

But amongst modern F1 teams there are a number of worthy high-performance examples to consider. The McLaren F1 was developed by Gordon Murray, one of the greatest race car designers of all time. A racing version won the Le Mans 24-hour in 1995.

F1’s current design guru, Adrian Newey, was heavily involved in the Aston Martin Valkyrie, an 865kW hypercar with a V12 engine and a 0-100km/h time of just 2.6 seconds.

But the AMG One is surely the ultimate combination of F1 tech and road-going capability, as it essentially uses the Mercedes 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 hybrid powertrain Lewis Hamilton employed to win the 2015 world championship.