Toto Wolff once called his Mercedes Formula 1 cars the "fastest laboratory in the world". While this may be a cliché that makes our eyes roll faster than a Pirelli, it's undeniable.
When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on shaving tenths off lap times, creating something that could change the world is inevitable. And this isn't just a hybrid engine for your daily driver, I'm talking about technology that saves lives at hospitals.
Here's the best trickle-down technology we can thank the grid for.
Road Car Technology
While there's so much more to this story than just tech on wheels, we'll start with what we know.
- Paddle Shifters: In the years leading up to 1989, F1 drivers were forced to wrestle with a stick shift and a clutch in their cramped cockpits. But as the 1990s approached, John Barnard's Ferrari 640 was equipped with a semi-automatic gearbox with paddle shifters. On its release, it wasn't overly reliable. But the time saved between shifts was welcomed by drivers Nigel Mansell and Gerhard Berger. The technology quickly spread across the grid. By 1997, this gearbox could be found in the F355 F1 road car.
- The Modern Hybrid: The 2009 F1 season saw the introduction of the Kinetic Energy Recovery System. It came in the shape of a heavy push-to-pass system that used electrical energy to up the output of the already punchy power units. Now, these systems have been heavily optimized and can be found in some of the fastest cars on the planet, including the Mercedes-AMG One and the Ferrari F80.
Off The Road Technology
This is where things get weird. Technology built for—and that has built—some of the fastest race cars in the world can be found almost everywhere. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that you bump into something inspired by F1 nearly every week.
- The Aerofoil Fridge: Williams Advanced Engineering designed an aerofoil for open fridges found in supermarkets. These machines would leak cooled air into the aisles, costing companies millions each year. Using computational fluid dynamics, the same software used to develop the Williams cars, they designed something that could be easily fitted to a fridge to funnel the air back into the fridge, reducing wastage.
- Taking Telemetry into Hospitals: McLaren Applied Technologies, like every other team, constantly analyzes its pit stops, with millions of data points run through machine learning and, more recently, artificial intelligence. But upon having a deeper look at this information in 2012, the organization realized that the processes behind a pit stop could be adapted to hospitals. Partnering with Birmingham Children's Hospital for the RAPID project, they installed telemetry to monitor babies. Thanks to this technology, a patient's vitals can be measured continuously and remotely.
- Upgrades to the London Bus: Once again, we land in the Grove headquarters of the Williams F1 team, where it once designed a flywheel-based system for the KERS in its race cars. This system would theoretically spin a rotor at substantial speeds to store kinetic energy. Unfortunately, it didn't work for the car, but the technology could be used in London buses that use a stop-start system. Ian Foley, managing director of Williams Hybrid Power, said the fuel savings could be as high as 30 percent when the technology was released in 2012.
There's something ironic about how one of the most glamorous sports in the world is responsible for making some of the most interesting under-the-radar technology. Perhaps we shouldn't roll our eyes. Wolff is right.
