Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? You know, folks? I had planned to have a brand new episode come out today, but technical issues got in the way. And yes, I am aware of the irony, and it's one of those irritating things where I haven't yet tracked down the actual source of the problem. So that has taken up a lot of my time today and it means that I did not get a new episode recorded. However, I would never want to leave you without an episode of tech Stuff. So here's one that was recorded a few years ago. On August two thousand nineteen, we published it. It's about Formula one racing. It's called Formula one one oh one. And on this episode, I had the amazing guest of Scott Benjamin on the show. Mr Scott, hope you are well and uh yeah, I thought we could go back and listen to this so that we could go fast. Even while we're sitting still today we are tackling a listener request. Michael Peach asked me ages ago if I could talk about Formula one race, cars, Formula one racing, what's it all about? How does that work? And I thought, you know, I'm not really a car guy, like I've done car topics before, but it requires an enormous amount of research on my part because I don't I don't really know cars. So it it's it's like it's extra work for me. Not that I don't, you know, mind doing some extra work, but that's asking a lot. And then I thought, wait a minute, there's a dude who literally sits on the other side of the table from me at our workstations. His name is Scott Benjamin and he's not doing anything. So I'm just gonna grab him and pull him into the studio. Scott, welcome to the show. Did you just say not doing anything? Okay, that's totally at Scott's doing a lot of stuff. I'm doing some stuff over yeah. Now and then, so Scott, first of all, tell our listeners what you have been doing, because they may not be aware of the shows you're working. Well, First, thank you for having me on your show. I really appreciate it. Every time I'm here, I have a good time, So let's keep that up. Okay, absolutely, And uh, I've been working on some other stuff. I've been cash for a couple of years. I've been doing some true crime stuff. Yeah, you might. You might recognize Scott's voice if you've listened to a Monster for example. Yeah, Voice of the Zodiac. Yeah. And I've got my own show, which is called Insomniac. I've been doing that and that's kind of wrapping up right around now. And I've got a couple of a couple of car shows that are coming up soon and one has already been released. The other one we're kind of holding off on. But um, it's no secret. I don't think, I mean we are. We're going to re release car stuff. I'm gonna come back on the show just me, just myself. Ben will not be with me, and I'll explain all of that at the beginning of the of the series. And there's no big fight or anything like that, but just Ben and I are always in a big fight. But you've been you're you're you're still you're still close. No, no, so yeah, we're still tight and everything. He's just got a lot going on, more than more than a lot of us do. So there's that, and then I also have another show called The Fast Track, and The Fast Track is a lot like car stuff, only it's it's more focused on things that go fast, people to go fast, ways that we go fast. Um, just components, you know, race series, anything about speed and going quickly and how we can get there faster, and that's that's what it's all about. Awesome, So you are clearly the go to guy if we're gonna talk about Formula one and Uh, in the interest of full disclosure, guys, I was not joking when I say I'm not a car guy, and I'm certainly not a race car guy. I've I've never really watched racing. I'm aware of it from the sort of the cultural touchstones that are out there, and uh, you know, I'm aware that there are different kinds of racing. You know, there's the Formula one, there's stock car racing. You know, there's there's NASCAR, which is sort of an offshoot of the stock car racing. But beyond that, I wouldn't have necessarily been able to differentiate them. And I didn't really know much about Formula one before looking back into this, apart from you know, seeing it in movies and stuff. Uh. And I remember joking with you Scott this morning, I said, well, to me, the history of race car, uh, driving, race cars and and and races in general kind of boil back to the day the second car rolled off the manufacturing plant and people started wondering, I wonder which of these two can go faster. It's essentially true, and it really did happen that way. I mean, that's that's what it was. As soon as there were enough cars to get together, they started a race or so you would get to a certain point faster. Yeah. And a lot of those early races it wasn't even just about speed. It was because cars were so new, it was literally seeing which one of these connects make that trip. There were reliability tests, right, like like will this car actually make this this trip from it was almost always Paris to something else, like the French were gaga that's French for walsa for for car racing. Uh. And in fact, the the history of Formula one, if you look at it, really has its roots in an earlier part of racing, the whole grand pre concept, right absolutely, yeah, yeah, So we're talking about you know, turn of the century, turn of the twentieth century, and more than the early early dawn of automobiles is when we're talking about you know, the racing beginning, like you were talking about, you know, when there's just more than a few in a field and they're trying to get somewhere or trying to you know, prove their endurance by by you know, racing twenty six miles or whatever it was. You know, it took some all day. Yeah, because there's their top speed might be like fifteen kilometers an hour, yeah, exactly, And and the roads and the conditions and the vehicles themselves, and it's just there's so many factors that go into why these races were just, um, it's brutal on the person that was you know, the in the driver's seat, were in the passenger seat, and mechanics seed or however you want to put it. Um a lot of times, you know, it came down to what the driver could stand. There was these are open cockpit cars and they were they were really really punishing on the person that was driving. The wheels were not inflatable tire wheels because the rope first of all, those had not really been invented yet. Also, the roads certainly were not uh in good enough shape to allow that kind of wheel to last for very long. No, these are wagon trails. Yeah, so you're talking about like hard rubber wheels or sometimes like metal wheels on these things. You know, so you can imagine if you've ever been in a bumpy car ride, that's not even coming close to what this experience was. Yeah, exactly. You know, the tires were not pneumatic tires or binding means, so a lot of times they were really really rough ride. But you know, the racing did begin early, early in the night rather the twentieth century, and by the time you get to round you know, the nineteen thirties, things have gotten a lot better. I mean a lot better. We're gon we're talking some enormous engines, maybe not the highest horsepower output, but they are strong. I mean, they're putting aircraft engine in cars at this point in race cars, i should say, because you know they're obviously they're not a street car. There, there's something a little bit more than that. They're they're throwing you know, V sixteen engines into cars, and you know, the manufacturers are starting to get into it, and they're realizing that people are you know, taking note of the manufacturers that win the race or you know, they're they're proving that reliability, they're proving their speed, they're proving you know, just what that they're they're backing their product, they're they're throwing it out there for everybody to see. And of course that translates to sales, and racing has always translated to sales for for automakers, and that's exactly why they get into it. And you know, early on, you know, we're we're here to talk about Formula one, and uh, early on in the days that we're talking about, thirties, there was no Formula one, right right, at this point, you had some formula in this sense refers to us out of rules, right, so you would have different sets of rules for different races, but they changed all the time. In fact, Formula one rules have changed significantly since they were introduced. They changed weekly. It's yeah, to the point where you're like, why are you calling it a formula. It's kind of like the flavor of the week at this point, changing formula, But exactly it's it's it's no coke classic. But the the formulas are. The rules were usually things like they would govern how heavy your vehicle could be, and then generally the capacity of the engine, and there were some stretches where even that was thrown out the window. There were the so called Formula libre years, where that means formula free, right, so you didn't have those restrictions. That really was around when that happened. And this was also around the same time where to build these race cars it was a really expensive endeavor. And we'll get into costs like modern day costs later on, because while it was expensive back then, it was peanuts compared to what it is today. Mind boggling, isn't it. I mean, you've only shared with me a couple of figures. I wanted to save the best for the show because I think you'll hear my jaw hitting the desk multiple times. But the car manufacturers started to pull out around the late twenties early thirties, UH, in order to focus on building out their their consumer cars, because that's really when consumer vehicles were starting to take off, and you started seeing the rise of these specialty manufacturers, the Ferraris, the Bugattis, the Maserati's. And here there's a couple of interesting things I want to point out about that about those those manufacturers that are stepping in because um, you know, and we should say this too that you know, up until this point it's been called Grand Prix racing. Yes, grand Prix motor racing, I think, is how they actually said it. In Grand pre of course means I think that means like great prize in French. Right, So big old, big old honk and prize. Yeah, yeah, that's right, big trophy, right, that's that's what you win. And uh and so you know, early days of this type of racing, it was called Grand Prix racing. There was no Formula one up until a point that we're gonna get to in just a moment here, but manufacturers were starting to step in there like um um. Like Ferrari and f is a great example is because he really just wanted to go racing. That's all I wanted to do. He didn't want he didn't want a road car, and he had to build a certain number of road cars at a certain point in order to fund his racing program. That's what he did. So he started to build a company to fuel his racing ad exactly. Yeah, So Ferrari, the birth of Ferrari is really because of his desire to go racing. He wanted to, you know, the best racing machine, but he had to build and sell cars to the to the public in order to fund that program. And it kind of became this, uh, I don't know what you call it, the way it's kind of this back and forth where you know, it's like a balancing act like if I if I build Okay, if I build twenty cars this year, I can afford to race one more season. If I build eight cars next year, I'll be able to afford another race car and do it for two more seasons or three more seasons or whatever. And it just became this thing that grew and grew and grew, and the team's got bigger, the cars got more expensive and faster, and he was more competitive on the track, and he had to build more rate more street cars, which he didn't really enjoy at first. He didn't want to do that. He just just wanted the racing programs. And I know, and it's it's crazy, isn't it. That Like now when you look at Ferrari, there were a fantastic road card. Of course they've got a great racing program still, of course, I mean that's what the whole company is based on. But you know, they do build some incredible and just incredible street machines as well, and you know they always were great, just he was just more doing it, I guess, just out of his own own selfish needs really and you know, early on the initial days. Well, and this also kind of ties in, and we're talking a lot about the pre Formula one day, because it's really important to understand why Formula one came around when it did in those pre days. So in the very early years you had sort of French domination in in these in these races of France was uh, first of all, France was hosting most of the Grand Prix races and also was fielding at least half the vehicles in most of these races as well, so clearly they were going to dominate. After that, you started to see the rise of the Italian vehicles with the Ferraris coming in and really starting to challenge that. And then following that you started to see Germany really push hard to get into this space too with German engineering, and this became not just a sports thing but a political thing because it's if you're paying attention, this is the same as the rise of Hitler and Hitler was very much determined to have Germany's profile raised in all fields of engineering and science, largely as a sort of a domination play. And you know, we also saw this in the Olympics. We saw it in also any place where Germany was going to have a place on the world stage. Hitler wanted Germany to be at the very top of that. And so you saw a lot of pressure a lot of state sponsored programs in Germany to try and and boost their own performance in the UH in the racing world. Although I should also add that even state sponsored only covered part of the cost of developing these vehicles, because that's how expensive they were. You couldn't even have an entire country behind you instill compete. You hadn't have more money than that, sure, and that's why we see teams often come and go in the series, and even now, a lot of teams just simply can't afford to compete. And we're talking about major, major manufacturers. They just don't see enough return on investment and a lot of times and or they may have come into it with only the plan to operate in there for a few years, learn what they can and then get out. Yep. So through all this we get to World War Two, and of course, during World War Two, the Grand Prix stop. I mean, obviously there were more important things going on at that point. But as soon as World War Two was over, the world started to return to to normal, and even before World War two had completely ended in all theaters that it ended in Europe, they were already starting to plan the next round of Grand Prix, which would take place. By nineteen forty six they started holding these races again. Yes, nineteen forty six and nineteen forty six is an important year because I think that was when they held the very first official Formula one race. And the thing is it wasn't um It wasn't actually formalized until one year later, I believe, until nineteen forty seven. And then the first official I guess if you want to go with like the absolute official world class you know race, world class Formula one race, the World Championship race, was held in nineteen fifty and this wasn't at Silverstone in the United Kingdom. Yeah, So these were all sort of the these stepping stones to establishing what truly would be Formula one, which again we're gonna go more into in our our next section. After we come back from the break, we're going to talk more about what the Formula one rules were when they were originally put in place. That would obviously change a lot. And I also have some questions for Scott because the rules indicate things like like engine volume, and I need to understand more about what that means. And that's why I have him here. I'll do what I can. Yeah. No, I un fortunately I know a little bit about it, so we can talk about kind of what these are. But these are things that these are terms that would pop up around around racing that because I was not in that world. To me, we're just it was like Greek, completely understand, just totally a mystery to me. So yeah, now we finally get up to where you have this organization in UH in Europe that has formalized the set of rules. Yeah, yeah, and so they got this set. Now. By the way, if you're wondering, are there other Formula races, Yes, there's Formula two, there's Formula three, there's Formula four. There's also Formula E, which is for electric vehicles. Um, and we'll talk a little bit about the differences largely between Formula one and Formula two, just on a very brief level in our next segment. But before we get into that, we're going to really dive into some some engine stuff in a minute, and uh, I'm gonna need to take a quick break to steal myself for this experience. So when we come back more about Formula one. Okay, So we get to the point where Formula one rules are set, and here's how I understand the rules to be based on my research. And Scott, if I if I go way wrong, just you know, not to use a pun, but steer me back on track. Okay. One thing, one thing I didn't mention earlier was one of the big differences between Formula one racing and say your your typical like your NASCAR races, is that the circuits on Formula one involve lots of different turns left and right right. That it's not like a big oval like you would see in a lot of race car races. Now, these are road courses, so there's elevation changes, there are left and right turns. As you said, Um, it's not the high banked ovals like we're talking about in in NASCAR or you know, some other forms of racing. It's this is a it's a challenging race. I mean they're all challenging, but this becomes a sport where the person behind the wheel really does need to be an athlete. And if you don't believe me, try We talked about this off air, but try going go karting at an indoor track for maybe ten fifteen minutes at a time. You're exhausted. When you're done, Yeah, you'll make And that's just go karting. And that's and that's just for ten or fifteen minutes. The Formula one race, by the way, has a time limit of two hours on a regular race, assuming no red flag conditions pop up. Yes, so you know, no doubt about it. These guys are athletes. Yeah, and and you could experience uh forces up to five G in strength, five times the the force of gravity on you in some of these turns. And they're taking, like I said, turns left and right. Um, so it is it Also Formula one cars, today's modern ones, which we'll get to a little bit later, go a little faster than the fastest NASCAR cars, like by five miles per hour. It's like two is the top for NASCAR generally speaking. In two oh five for Formula One, but it's also a very different experience. It is. Yeah, and we're talking about average speeds where you know, going in a circle. You know, I hate to use that because a lot of people say that's nothing, but going in a circle and turn and left, it's not. It's not that easy for NASCAR. It's also incredibly brutal. It is difficult. Yes, it's it's more difficult than you would think. But uh but but honestly, like, um, you know, when we're talking about average speeds, I mean, these guys the cars will rate a lot faster, lot quicker than a NASCAR would and they can break a lot harder than a NASCAR car would. And so when you talk about average speeds, you're talking about over the course of a road course versus a an oval. It's a significant difference the type of racing that it is. So some of the basic rules for Formula One when it was first coming out was that originally there was no weight limit on vehicles. You did have different um uh, engine volumes that were allowed. If you were using a turbo charger or super charger, then you are limited to c C, which Scott kindly informed me does not mean carbon copy in this case, but cubic centimeter. We'll get into that in a second. And then the the I think that you could have up to three thousand cc for an naturally aspirated engine, sure, which means it doesn't have a supercharger, doesn't have a turbo or anything like that. It's just it's breathing. It's breathing Air's so so this was something that I actually had to look up because again not a car guy, but naturally aspirated means that it's using just the natural atmospheric pressure to feed oxygen into the uh, the engine. That's what I mean. It's not forced induction when I say it's breathing air. Of course every engine breathe air. This one is simply just you're right taking this taking the atmospheric um pressure. Yeah pressure, yea atmospheric air. I guess you gotta put that way. But a turbocharger or a supercharger, it's pushing air into the engine. It's forced air induction, is what that is. Yeah, you're using your you're forcing air into the engine. You're creating additional horsepower by by running, by ramming more air through there and fuel. Right, So that means that you're you're able to uh to get fuel to the the cylinders faster, and that's the cylinders are what we're referring to when we're talking about like CC, what you're really talking about is the volume that the cylinders can hold based on the full stroke of the piston. It's the displacement of the engine. So what you're looking at is the the the amount of space. I guess I'm gonna put this in the simplest way without really getting too much. When the pistons travel up and down, if it's all the way at the bottom, there's a there's a you know, in the cylinder itself, where the piston travels up and down, there's there's a volume of air there and that error is then you know, compressed and it's filled with fuel and that's where the explosion happens and proper us some piston down, et cetera. We we don't need to go into like the whole combustion cycle and everything right now, but um, that's the volume of displacement of the engine. In the United States, we typically use a different measurement. We use cubic inch displacement CD because we're all about imperialism, yes, but if you want to think of of c C there an easy the easiest way to think of like a cc displacement. Um, you've heard the term like you know, two leader car, three leader engine, four leader engine whatever. Um, it's typically about a thousand ccs per leader. So one thousand cc engine is like a one leader engine. And if you want to put it that way, So like the old Mustang GTS that had a five leader engine, roughly about five thousand ccs is what the displaced more would be. And and to correct myself from earlier, I had said that I thought that the for a naturally aspirate it was like three thousand cc. It's actually four thousand, five hundred cc. For that first race it was the four thousand, five hundred cc limit on on engine volume. And this changes all the time, all the time, which is why I why I I was fumbling because it changes like year to year. I think I have a real quick rundown of the changes, if you like real quick, I would love to hear this super quick. Um. So so maybe we should talk about the current engine last. But pre nineteen nine it was unlimited cylinders. You could have as many cylinders, you want sixteen cylinders, twelve cylinders, whatever, doesn't um. In the nineteen nineties they switched this to twelve cylinders, and and then in the early two thousand's they went to V tens. Then up until about two thousand eight they use V eights, and they have recently this is in nineteen right now. What they're using is a very specific it's one point six leader four stroke turbocharged V six. So you know, those incredible cars and the incredible speeds and sounds that we hear are coming from a turbocharged V six that's relatively small. And they've been doing this since again, just a one point six leader engine. So, um gosh, I that's CS I guess you want to put it that way. Yeah, And so this is this is also fascinating is that you sit there and you look at this and you think, you know these what does this actually translate to? Right, you're talking about engine volume is not necessarily equivalent to more ccs means more speed. It's it's all about other elements as well, and engineering as a whole takes a very important part in this. Uh So that was another thing that was confusing to me because all right as a kid, I'm gonna I'm gonna really reveal my ignorance here as a kid. To me, the exposure of the concept of ccs for engines was limited to games that involved uh go kart racing video games because they would have the different you know, you have a fifty C C or one C C or on c C. So to me, it was just like bigger just means faster, you know, that's typically the way it is, really, I mean, but somewhere along the way, you know, engineering got a whole lot better, and they're able to get so much more power out of a smaller engine. And that's what we're seeing here. I mean, we've gone from unlimited cylinders and you know, the sixteen cylinder engines in these in these F one cars down to you know, turbo charged V six is and I you know, I don't know for sure, but I would say that they're going to continue to shrink in size. I just have a gut feeling they're going to just continue to get smaller and smaller. It's also interesting because just the where where we've seen the changes in the limitations for how big the engine is allowed to be, and then we've gotten to the point now where it's even uh, it's uniform, that's saying, well, they all have to be specifically this particular engine volume. The other element that has changed quite a bit has been whether or not you could even have a turbocharged engine in your vehicle. Some years it was yes, you could either have a turbo engine of this capacity or naturally aspirated of this capacity. You could have like just for an example, you could have a turbocharge V six or you could have a naturally aspirated V eight. Yeah, and then they there were some years where they said, okay, well now you can't have turbo charged at all. Uh. There was there was a time just really in the late sixties early seventies where that became a thing where they said, all right, we're gonna remove turbo charged, largely because there there seemed to be an unfair advantage of some of the vehicles that were engineered with turbo charged. They were giving the natural aspirated engines a chance to catch up in a way. This is something that we see from the governing body that I think they're constantly tweaking these rules in part because they want to have the what they considered to be the most entertaining result, right, the most entertaining, most most competitive race, because if it's not competitive, people start to lose interest. You know that. You've got to remember that the Formula one World Championship is actually a series of races. It's not one race winner. Take hall now it's twenty or I think it's races in two thousand nineteen. So the and they're all over the world. Yeah, in fact, the United States only recently started to host them again. Uh. And it's in Austin, Texas. That where it takes place. And um, that the reason why the United States this is a whole different discussion, but it's largely because Formula one racing just never got super popular in the US, which you know, it was always seen as more of a European pursuit than an American one. Stock car racing was much more pop are here. You know, when I first moved to Detroit. This is back in the nineteen eighties. This has been like eight four eighty five somewhere around there. Uh. They ran a Formula one race in downtown Detroit on the streets of Detroit. It was a road course that was on the streets of Detroit. And it was in such condition at the time that it was able they were able to do that, and later they moved it out to uh, you know, bell Aisle and they're still doing that now. But it's you know, the Car to Indy Car series. It's a different series. It's not the F one guys like like it was in the past. But I found that pretty fast and it didn't last too long when I was there. I mean, I don't know how many years they ran there. I can't remember, but um, I don't know. It's just it's it's fascinating to me that, you know, F one just continually a justice and I know it. It's maddening to the fans because they're always changing something around, making something different, and they're always trying to kind of level, like you said, level that plane field a little bit. And I know it's it's it's angering to us, you know, as fans to watch this and kind of you know, try to keep up with the rule changes and what's happening in the series. I can imagine. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a team owner that has to adhere to the help to pay for all the changes and everything. But you know. One other thing that this does is that it can lead to incredibly boring racing if you get it to level, if you get everything to level. And and that was a critique of F one for a long long time, and it's not this way anymore. It's it's different now. I've been watching this past season even the season before, and it's quite a bit different now because of a lot of what we're going to talk about. You know that some of the new technologies. But um, there was no passing. You know, you you'd start the race and whatever order they would end up in, you know, after turn one, turn two, that was that's how they finished. And it was so boring for a long long time. Really, all what mattered was how you qualified, because your order of qualification dependent determines your order in the uh, in the starting for the race, and and if you weren't in that, you know, first place and after the second or third turn, well you know what place you're gonna get. A road course is very difficult to pass on. There's very few passing zones, you know, for you to use to to manipulate and and uh, you know, it's gotten a lot better if you haven't watched Formula One, and that was your argument against it. It's it's a lot different now if you watch and and that is in uh, in relation to some of the technologies that we can we can talk about a little bit later, because there are some advancements that have made they're racing a lot more exciting for the fans to watch and a lot more exciting for the drivers. I'm sure it's not it's not you know, you don't you don't finish in the order that you started exactly. Yeah, it's it's just it's a it's a much better race now. Yeah. And and so at the end of the series of races, what they do is they have points given out to the top ten finishers of each Grand Prix of each race, and then at the end of the season, those points are totaled up, and whoever has the most is the Grand Champion driver. But then you also have the winner teams instructor championship constructor championships. Yeah, and then when you get to that point, if you're the company that is making the vehicle, that is like sometimes you see like one company just dominating the top sometimes top ten teams. Then that is where the value comes from that that company. So for example, Mercedes has been doing quite well, um in the last few years, and that ends up being a really valuable tool for them because, as we've said before, this really does help sell cars if you're able to say, listen, we make the cars where the elite drivers, not just elite drivers who come from the same country that made the cars, but other elite drivers who they want to play, they want to drive for a winning team, they come to us. That's a powerful advertising tool. Oh sure is yeah. And you know what, as you mentioned Mercedes right now, they are currently as we're recording this, they're they're number one in the Constructor's Championship and uh their driver, the driver is Lewis Hamilton. He's number one in the Driver's Championship as well, obviously, I mean he's a brit to Mercedes. Yeah, he is a brit and um he I think he's on his fifth title at this point even and Mercedes is also on their fifth title. They they're they're very successful in the series, very successful and as is you know, you'll find that Ferrari and McLaren, you know, they're they're all they all have their moments, you know, they all have. It's kind of this updown thing, you like, where one team does dominate the series and and you'll find that this switches around routinely, not not not necessarily throughout the season because once you once you do find that, you know someone is dominating the season, like I would bet that Lewis Hamilton's gonna win his fair share of the next ten races or however many or left as well, and Mercedes along with him, of course, and it'll probably just go the way you think it's gonna go. But next year, who knows. From season to season, you've got because you have so many people that are focusing on ringing out every single little drop of performance you can get out of these vehicles. And then on top of that, you're pairing them with the best drivers in the world who can endure the incredible amount of punishment they're going to have dealt upon them. I mean, if you look back at the history of Formula one racing and you want to look at stories of drivers who have gone through incredible trials and tribulations in the process of racing, there's no shortage of those stories. I remember coming across one of there was a a driver I want to say he was something like five ft three inches tall. This from the classic days of of racing. Who uh was so determined to race? Ferrari was actually begging him to withdraw from a race because the car itself was starting to fall apart, and it was one of these road races from one say to another, and they were begging him to to stop racing. He was racing on behalf of Ferrari, and he said no, no, no, is Ferra said, I was absolutely certain that his determination was to die behind the wheel doing what he loved. Turned out, he ended up having to eventually withdraw from the race simply because the car couldn't perform anymore. Yeah, he was, according to the stories call thing up blood, but still wanted to race. And he died. He died in bed five years later, So it wasn't like he passed away immediately thereafter. But he was in failing health and was still determined, and he was still winning too. He was twenty nine minutes ahead of the next fastest car, significant distance. Yes, so also shows you a lot of difference between this and and say NASCAR racing. And again we're not we're not trying to say one is better than the other. Obviously, I don't know we keep saying that, but it's been just to point out how different they are. Now. One of the things I wanted to talk about before we go to break is that the Formula one form factor is very distinctive, very different from the look of stock cars and other types of race cars. It's very low to the ground as almost sort of this very wing kind of design. And uh, the interesting thing to me is that it's it's a wing, but it's a wing that's meant to do the opposite of what an aircraft wing doing. Everything is about down force. You want the car to stick to the ground, so the faster you go, the more it adheres to the ground. And of course the tires are gonna work with this as well. Um, the whole car is really a giant wing, you right, that that provides down force instead of instead of lift. And if you turn around, if you're going backwards in this thing, that's the unfortunate thing. You get into a turn and you turn, you spin around, and you're going just as fast backwards. The problem is it becomes the opposite problem to lift the car off. Yes, it happens in Uh, it happens in a lot of forms of racing. You'll find that, you know, as soon as the car spins around, the back end wants to come straight up in the air on you. And that's that's an issue with with any of these cars that you know, down forces a major part of the design. But yeah, you're right, it is it's open, it's open wheel, it's open cockpit. Um, that's changed just a tiny little bit, and I think they're gonna go maybe even a little bit further with this idea. But um, that's the whole halo thing that we can talk about when we talk about technology. Um, it's it's it's an itesting looking car for sure. I mean it's it's definitely it looks like a spaceship really, And they're getting to the point where there are so many facets and uh you know, um surfaces and every single bit of that car is engineered for speed and for its ability to cut through the air and to again provide down force. We're talking about the tiniest little components behind the wheels, We're talking about the side pods that are next to the driver. I mean, every little bit of this thing is is just tuned to perfection for for it to be slippery through the air, to conserve fuel, to go fast, to be lightweight. You know, it's all these things and every single factor is the thought of and everything is um you know, scrutinized to the point where if it doesn't belong, if it if it has no purpose, of course, it's not going to be on the car. If it has um. If it does have a purpose, it's going to be made lighter somehow, it's going to be made more efficient. Somehow, it's gonna be made of a stronger material, but a lighter material. It's gonna be um, you know, slippery through the air. As we said, you know, every every little thing is just is to the the tiniest, tiniest little minute detail is scrutinized by every single person on that team and and it makes for a fantastic vehicle and and it gets better and better every year. The problem is then, you know, f one will come back and say like, we're gonna make some changes, and they change it. Now your now your strategy is no longer applicable. No, and you do have to change. And that change is something that has a domino effect. You change something at the front of the car. It not only affects that one little piece at the front of the car, it has this domino effect on the aerodynamics of the car all the way back to the tail end of it. And that has to be kind of dealt with almost a total redesign every time. Yeah exactly, well yeah, not almost, I mean not quite. But you have to refine so many different things just because of that one little change at the front of the car, and and that happens. You know, they might change something in the middle of the car and that affects everything from that point back. Um, it's just there's so many things. Again, this whole series is mind boggling when you look at the rules, you look at the way, um everything again just has to be just just going over and over and over and over again to make sure that everything is perfect. Man, Well they are perfect. When we come back, we're going to dive into that perfection a bit. We're gonna talk a little bit more about uh stuff like like, uh, you know, I just learned before we came in here that they don't do refueling anymore, because when I was looking at the old histories, they talked about refueling and pit stops. We're gonna talk about pit stops, talk about how much fuel these things carry, uh, and you know that will tell you how efficient they have to be in order to complete these distances, because the distance for Formula one is considerable. And we'll talk about some of this incredible technology that you find in the vehicles of today when we come back. Now, Scott, before we uh came into the studio, you know, I we were talking about pit stops. I was actually talking about stuff I don't understand in racing. I was like, you know, I even had to look up how pit stops work, because I know about pit stops. I know what they're meant to do. But I was thinking, like, well, how does that work in the in the sense of the action of the race as a whole, Like, you're obviously off the track at that moment, you're no longer accumulating lapse, You're you're having your car uh having the tires usually replace that sort of thing. How does that work in the context of the full race? Not thinking oh wait, everybody else also has to do that. So in the end, it ends up being how how fast and efficient your pit stop crew can be. That's when you said, why don't you take a look at like a typical Formula one pit stop. And the video, by the way, guys, was fifty five seconds long. Ten seconds in, it was still just the title picture. It was. There was no there's no video. Around twelve seconds in we saw the picture of the pit crew. We didn't see a car pull into the space to about thirty three seconds into this second video. Uh, the car was at a full stop by thirty five seconds and the car was gone at thirty eight seconds. Within that span of thirty five seconds to thirty eight seconds, the pet crew completely removed and replaced all four tires on this Formula one race car. And that's a relatively slow stop, yes, And then Scott blew my mind by telling me how fast the fastest Formula one pit stop ever was, which happened this year. I think where was it was the Grand Prix um in Great Britain. I think you remember exactly where it happened. But um, it was a one point nine second stop and that means four tires off, four tires on and back out. And it's that fast. It's one point nine seconds. Um, that's the world record time at this moment, and it's probably gonna drop even more. Um, but it's an incredible thing to watch. If you've never seen one, take a look at it. Because and F one pit stop is a is a thing of beauty. It's it's so it's terrifying. It is so choreographed, it so it's so perfect in every in every aspect, I mean, the way that the team handles themselves. It's it's completely different from any other series in the way that they do this. Now we've taken out the complexity of adding fuel that does take some time, not as much time as you might think. Uh, you know, to add sometimes twenty plus gallons of fuel to a car, it only takes a few seconds. Really, Yeah, when when you when you compare that to your average experience at a typical fuel pump, you might think, when were we going to get that technology? You don't want that technology. There's there's a lot of problems that come with with forcing plus gallons of fuel into a car, and you know in three seconds. Yeah, you might think while you're standing there, I would really, especially if you're saying outside in the Georgia heat in the middle of the day, refilling your car, you might think I would really like to get back in the air conditioning, but some things were happy to trade off on that. Right, it's a it's a lot easier. And they have just switched over to this, and I think they've done it for a couple of years now. Uh, they've removed the the idea that there are are refueling a car during the race, so you feel up before the race and after the race, of course, you know, during qualifying and you know other other activities practice. Uh, they are allowed of fuel in the pits, of course they have to, but during the race they just don't do it. The cars are designed so that they burn, or they're intended to burn, and that's one of the f one regulations is that you, um, your engine is only allowed to burn a certain amount of fuel per hour, and they calculated that that out so that you know, during the race, it doesn't burn more than what you're able to carry, and if it does, that means that your engine is running too rich anyway, and you're not supposed to be doing that. You're you're in violation of the rules. So, um, every car that's out there has enough fuel in them from the very beginning to go the full distance without having to do that. They just do the tires only, and that's different right there. The other thing is that you know they have like I think it's fourteen or sixteen people out to do this procedure, this, this, this, you know stop. Yes, it's a much larger pet crew than you would see a NASCAR for example. Yeah, everybody has just one single job. And I know that in a NASCAR, you know there's a you know, they're very specific jobs as well, or you know, an IndyCar or whatever, but far fewer people are over the wall as they say in those in those sports. Now this one, there's a garage area and so they just kind of wander out into this this box you know, where they pull into to do the pit stuff. But um, fourteen or sixteen, I can't remember the number of people that that do this. But um, you know, when you have one job, I mean one job. All you do is your job is to remove the tire that comes in off the car that was just on the track. That's it. Just take the tire off once it's once the the wheel nut is gone, which is another person's job. Wheel nut comes off, the wheel night goes back on. You know, it's that's it. And one person operates of course, the front jack, the backjack, and you know there's there's people making adjustments and all that. But um, when you have there's was it three or three maybe even four people per tire, it's I think it's three per tire, it's one you take off one person, who's one person who's bringing on the new tire. So they have the new tire, they're waiting. Do you have one person whose job it is to you take the tire off, and then you have one person whose job it is to remove and replace the nuts. So just getting those three people in that one tiny little area to operate and and function without you know, knocking each other over every time, it's incredible. It's really interesting to watch it. And I can't imagine the countless hours they have to practice to make every single move perfect. Right, you have to conserve your your space because if you're not, then you're wasting time. Now if you make if you make a pit stop, that is even let's say it's double the time that we just talked about. Let's say it's it's three point eight seconds, that's a disaster. Yeah, I mean that's crazy to think about. But three point eight seconds is a disaster because you're gonna have to make up that lost time someone else, even if you were in number one. If you're leading by less than two seconds and the person behind you when they have their pit stop is not taking nearly as long, you know you've you've lost time. Pit strategy is is really something fun to watch. And I know that it sounds terribly boring when I just say it like this, when you're watching the race and you kind of get into it, you know, towards the end, and you know the pits strategy becomes so vital in winning a race in a lot of cases. Um, it's it's it's there's far more to it than you might think. Really, yeah, I mean it's it's fascinating to watch. It's a game of chess. We were talking a bit about the distance you have to go. So the last thing I saw about distances was that you would complete a number of laps that are equivalent actually that exceed three five kilometers. So the minimum of a Grand Prix is three kilometers, with one exception, that exception being Monaco. In Monaco, it is two hundred sixty and a half kilometers. A tighter track there. It's a smaller area as you can imagine. Monica is not a very large was it was Providence. What is what is Monica? I don't even need a principality to me, it's it's the most magical place on Earth. I visited and it's amazing. I bet it is. Yeah, I love BEAUTI I'd love to go. That'd be cool, but but it is. It is very tight and uh, Monaco is a different race altogether, right well, And if you were to add an their lap on there so that it would end up, you know, being closer to the correct distance, it would go too far. So it's one of those where you have to you know, you have to make a call. And uh, but yeah, Monica is pretty phenomenal. It's also whenever I see footage of the race and Monaco, it is terrifying to me to watch these cars going down these these roads and and sometimes you see people watching on not terribly far away from where these cars are are rushing by, and more than two or there on balconies kind of hanging over the track. It's it's it's an interesting race. I love Monico. It's beautiful and um, it's fun to watch the race there because it is so um, it's steeped in history as well. You know, it's so tight and it's so fast, and you get that real sensation of speed there um that you might not get well you actually, you know, you get it in a lot of road courses. But there's just something magical about Monco. It's beautiful. It's really interesting. Um, you don't you know, I don't know where to go with this. We've got so much material here. I don't if I'm overstepping my bounce, But I would love to talk about the engine for just a moment. We can because the engine and we haven't talked about cost or anything on this yet, so all right. I recently did a program on the on the Fast Track about why there are five reasons why you can't put an F one engine into your road car because a lot of people have engine swap questions, and like you said before, you don't really know a whole lot about racing engines versus car engines, and they're dramatically different, especially in F one engine, and you can't just stuff and F one engine into a road car and expect it to work. And there's a lot of reasons it's probably a hundred reasons why this wouldn't work, but the five and I'm gonna go through them super fast. If you want to hear it, you can. I guess I can plug my own shiller, right. You could go over to the fast track and listen to the five reasons explained in more detail. But um, the first one is they're they're really hard to start. Now this is kind of tough to comprehend here, but a normal engine, you're able to attach a wrench to it in the front and spin the engine. You're able to make the pistons move up and down using a large lever. It does take some mechanical advantage to be able to do that, but you can spin your own car engine that way. It's a lot like turning the prop on an airplane. If you can imagine that, it's it's started, and you could theoretically turn it fast enough to start the car like the old crank starts. But I don't want to do that, so um with quickly breaking everyone in your body start spinning, absolutely shatter your arms. Um this uh, you know with the UP one engine, it's it's a lot different. You cannot turn an F one engine when it's cold. They're they're created with such a tight or high tolerance. They're engineered so uh precisely, like like a like a fine watch or something like that. That I mean, they're so precisely engineered and fitted together that the pistons are essentially seized in the engine at at like the ambient temperature. So it doesn't matter what the temperature is out of here, it's it's you have to pump. You have to extern and use external pumps to pump heated fluids through this thing. You know, both coolant and the engine will the lubricant, and it has to be up to I think it's a hundred and seventy six degrees fahrenheit before you can even begin to move the pistons within the piston uh cylinders. That's how tightly they are they are engineered. There's there's such precision machines, and I had no idea that that was, you know, a factor in this whole thing. So you would not be able to just get into the car and start it up like you could a normal engine. You would have to have these external pumps heat up the engine and then you know, and then even then you would have to have an external starting, which is like a big drill that starts the whole thing. Um, you know, it spins it like, you know, several thousand rpm in order to get it even going. And even then it's hard to start. It's it's difficult to get the fuel flowing correctly and all that. So this is this is amazing. What reminds me of is um how you start up jet engines, because a jet not not that it works on the same principle. These are two different principles, don't get me wrong. But to start a jet engine, you have to pump uh pressurized air through the jet engine because it's designed to operate once you are at a certain speed moving through the air. Well. Obviously on ground you're not moving through the air yet, so you can't get those turbines turning at the proper speed for it to be a self propelling reaction. Right. This idea that the turbines turn because of the outgoing UH exhaust from the jet engine, that that provides the turning force to keep the turbines coming. To pull air through the engine, so you have to pump uh pressurized air into it first, and typically you do that either using an auxiliary power unit or you have, uh, the little huffer carts that hook up to an engine. So to me, like when you started explaining this, I'm like, wow, this sounds a lot like how it's hard to start a jet engine. It's just that we're talking about an internal combustion engine, not a jet engine obviously, so now there are differences, but that's fascinating that you have to have these external factors in order to begin the thing, even to even start the process. And that's what this is. All right, I'm just gonna tap the brakes here so that we could take one more you know, break for ads, and then we're going to be back with the conclusion of Formula one one on one. As you might have guessed, they're not cheap. And this is the first time we're gonna really talk about prices here on this. I think this is the first time. Get this, okay, and I this blew me away. I'm talking about just the engine, just the price of the engine. These range between seven point seven million and ten and a half million dollars per per engine, just the engine, for just the engine. Another good reason why you weren't going to put these in a regular road car. Just one engine. That's all we're talking about. So yeah, even I mean, any manufacturer would never be able to justify putting an engine like this in their car. Now, there are there are some derivatives of an F one engine that have been have kind of showed up into road cars, you know, like maybe the V ten engine that was used in an F one car. But it's not, you know, meticulous, it's not as um um finally tuned, is not as you know, it doesn't have all of the the components of the F one engine. Of course, it's just derived from it, right, it's it's the design of the F one informed the design of this other engine exactly. And and these F one engines they spent at something like fifteen thousand RPMs. They can go up to twenty r p m s, which is like, I mean, that's that's like that's motorcycle or even faster RPMs in a in an engine for a race car. If you if you saw that that gauge on your dashboard, you might flip out of this next one is what you're what you're talking about. It's cooling. Um. In order to keep these engines cool, you would have to travel at such incredible rates of speed. And not only that the design of your car would have to be so dramatically different from what it is that that you would have to build these enormous side pods on it with these huge radiators, and that would kind of like negate any performance advantage you might have from such a strong engine. You're gonna you're gonna have such a like a wacky design, I guess a better lass lack of a good way to say this, just to paint the heat that's coming off those those enormous side pods on the car, the ones that are next to the driver, those are big cooling pods, and and think of those is having giant radiators inside them that are laid out at kind of a forty five degree angle from the front kind of laid down to the back. They're they're really big. They're they're several feet long, and they're except you know, extremely as wide as they can make them, really and that requires so much airflow over top of them to keep it cool, you know, because these engines run so hot, um that you know, you just would it just wouldn't be possible to keep the amount of incoming cooler that you would need to keep the engine cool in in a regular road car and without dramatically redesign everything. Um, we did talk about fuel a little bit, and UM, I want to tell you that these are designed you're not allowed to burn through more than one of petrol per hour of driving. So that's the limit is a hundred liters per hour. That's about thirteen point two gallons of fuel. If you want to, um, you know, extrapolate what that what that hundred liters amounts to. They do carry around two leads for a race, though, so that's a lot of fuel that they're carrying on board fuels things, so they do get through the whole race without without refueling. That's about sixty gallons of fuel that they carry, and by the end of the race they're probably running pretty low if I had to guess, well, yeah, because it's like the again, the time limit and max, assuming there are no red flag stoppages, is two hours. And this is surprising to me. The fuel mixture that they use is not terribly different from what you might use in a road car. It's strange. Now you might think that you know, they're using some kind of crazy jet fuel or something, you know, like the people love to think that, you know, they're using rocket fuel or something. It's really not that much different from what we use. It is. It is formulated a little different. It's very specific per vehicle. And I'll tell you how they do that. At the end of the race, they analyze um the oil. They take the engine oil from each car and they take a sample of it and they run it to their chemist, and their chemist looks at it for up to fifteen different types of metal that might be found in that oil at the end of a race, so that that indicates where the wear is coming from. So part of an engine is wearing a little bit prematurely, causing metal flakes to break off and get into the oil. They know where that metal came from, because it might be the piston ring, it might be the piston itself, it might be from you know, the the camshaft, you know, whatever bearings they have in there. They're able to determine from the fifteen different types of metal where that wear is coming from, and then they send that information to the person who is is developing the fuel for them or the company that's developing the fuel, and then they specially formulate the fuel for the next race in order to minimize the amount of where that happens and that one part of the engine in the next race. Yes, yes, so that's how specific this gets. And you can imagine that that's not cheap to do that. Yeah. Now, there was a time before the the formalization of these rules where there was a little bit more experimentation with with car fuels, and that's probably where these stories about rocket fuel and stuff come out of, largely from also Germany pre World War Two happened, they experimented a lot with that. But then there were rules that essentially said that Formula one race cars were to run on petrol. Uh, it's just it's very precisely formulated petrol. Yeah, yeah, it's it's very exacting science. So it's not exactly what we're thinking of when we go to the pump like hitting Formula one. No, it's not not quite that simple, you know. I'm sure they're exact requirements for each one, and then even then they fine tune it throughout the season, extremely fine tuned. The last one on this is of course, the life span of the engine. Now we've all seen races where a car goes out and you know, two laps in they developed some major problem. And you know, after all this money, all this everything we've talked about, you know, they're there, I don't know, ten miles into the race and there's catastrophic engine failure because they're they're subjected to so much pressure, so much, so much force is happening in these engines at this time. I mean we're saying that you know, they spin around what pm. That means that the the pistons are traveling up and down about three hundred times every second. Yeah, three times every single second. So that's the type of pressures that we're talking about it. I mean, we're saying, like I want to say, it's like fifteen thousand or p s I is what those cylinders are subjected to every second. So a lot of pressure in these things, and of course they have to be rebuilt all the time, and we know this from racing. We've seen this in so many different series, um, you know, drag racing, and they practically do it every quarter mile. They rebuild engines all the time, right or even less if it doesn't make it a quarter mile. Um, but most race cars can only last one, maybe two races. At the most before they to be rebuilt. These are every race and the maximum that they can reach is about maybe maybe two races at the most. Like SIS, it's about a thousand kilometers, is like the maximum life at optimal conditions for an F one engine, which means that if you were to put one of these into your road car, think about you know how many not only is it seven to twelve million dollars, but seven to twelve million dollars every this many times. And I'll tell you so, the average US person person puts thousand, four hundred and seventy six miles on a car every year. That's average. If you own a vehicle, that means that you would be rebuilding your engine twenty two times each year if you were average. Now most a lot of people, of course, are gonna be way above that average, are going to be under. But twenty two times per year, you're spending seven and a half to ten and a half million dollars. So I'm gonna need to sell some more girls, do you see what I mean? Like and again, if you want more detail on all this, and maybe you don't, maybe that was way too much to be but it's not. But if you go, and if you want more detail on this, you can go to the Fast Direct show and listen all about it. But I find the numbers in Formula one to be just fascinating and the dollar amounts. And should we just briefly talk about the car, Yeah, because we've we've started it with the engines. Let's talk about how expensive this kind of vehicle is when you're looking at it soup to nuts, and then we'll also talk about you can also mention things like that's one expense, right, one expense is just the vehicle, But then beyond that, you have to actually pay money to be part of this whole experience. So there are companies that are spending mind boggling amounts of money on participating in Formula one. Yeah. And so for some of the smaller teams if you want to call them that, the ones that aren't in the upper echelon, uh, they're spending right around twitter and fifty million dollars a year to be part of F one for one season, so a quarter of a billion dollars per year and to be in this and if you're happen to be working for Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull you know, the top teams in the series. Right now, we're talking about four hundred plus million dollars every single year and a lot of that. Of course, this goes into the car. It takes you know, between it's gonna I'm gonna say, I see a number here that's a little bit low, given that we just learned that, you know, the engine is ten and a half million. Sometimes, I'm gonna say that, um, anywhere between twelve and fifteen million dollars per vehicle per car. So when you see, you know, an F one car that's destroyed in an accident on the track, you're talking about, you know, between twelve and fifteen million dollar loss to the team. They might be able to salvage a few parts here and there, but essentially it's a twelve to fifteen million dollar loss at that point. Um. Then of course that doesn't happen often where they lose every single bit of the car, but they do lose parts and and I've got a list here of the parts, and I will not go over every part of this, but this kind of blew my mind when I saw this. You know, how often, uh, do you see where an F one cargoes out on the track and they hit a little bit of debris, you know, something that not a tire necessarily, but something that's on the track. They bump a corner or whatever, another car even Um, you know that front wing is designed to come right off and right back on. They do it super quick. They can do it in a second, two seconds, whatever it takes. It's super fast. That part, that front wing part can cost be anywhere between one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred and thirty five thousand dollars. It's kind of beginning to feel like I'm in their own business. You can make two wings a year, you know the thing like, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna wrap up with with another one in in a moment here because I want to show you something in specific. But um, if the transmission in the car we talked about the engine already, the transmission in the car can can be up to six hundred thousand dollars um. You know, if you're on a lower end team, you're only paying them only about four hundred thousand for that. But if you want to grade, you know, you you're gonna have a six d dollar engine. That's for the top teams. Again, the fuel tank alone, just because of the way it's designed and with the materials made of hundred and forty dollars and that's kind of again a low end tank. The the the carbon fiber monocoque design, you know, which is essential to the safety of the driver and the structure of the car itself. That's very expensive and teams won't scrimp on that. There are lower cost options, I believe, but most teams are paying around six hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that. And of course once it's damaged, it's done. You don't get you don't get to reuse that. That has to be replaced UM, as is with with most of these parts. UM there's the halo device, which is that crazy thing that goes over there over their heads now kind of blocks in the um UM. It protects the um exposed helmet and head of the of the driver. That's something that I wish we had more time to talk about. Really, it's a pretty fascinating piece of tech that that I just love the tech that goes into these cars, I really do. There's that is uh it's designed to hold the weight of a double decker bus, a London double decker bus. If you were to just set it on top of it, I think it's like twenty six thousand five pounds. It can withstand that. And it's designed again like if a you know, a tire is coming at the driver. If it's it's an outside company that builds it. They build kind of like the it's it's made out of um oh, gosh, I have a note here. It's made out of like platinum. I think, um, that's not cheap. No, no, it's not cheap. And you know I do have a note. I'll have to I'll find it here in just a moment. But it's a it's like a certain aerospace grade platinum level five something. It's it's crazy, it's really really expensive, and it's it's um it's it's kind of a heavy item, but it's essential for their safety because it is this open cockpit and they have had so many, um, you know, incidents where a tire has come up, or a piece of suspension or a full car you know, has come up and landed on the on the other vehicle, and of course you know with your your helmet your head exposed there. It's it's a really dangerous type of racing. This open cockpit, I mean, that's that's been part of the Formula one history. Two is the fact that it's been a very dangerous sport, one in which in the early years of Formula one racing, not a whole lot of thought was given to drivers safety necessarily. It was you know, that was not It was sort of considered it's kind of like the space race in many ways, and that it was thought that that if you were the type of person to pursue a career in that space, you were a thrill seeker, and it was the the the importance of racing and going fast was more important than uh, doing you know, safety features like you have astronauts. You you can listen to interviews with astronauts about well do you worry about like how dangerous this is? Like I'm no, I'm I'm I have I feel compelled to do this. And the same thing was sort of thought of in the old racing days was that, yeah, you know, safety be great now, but that's not right what we're worried about. Well, you know, I can tell you now. I found this note. Um. It is the strongest part of the car and that shows you it tells you how much they're you know, firmly um backing this idea that driver's safety is becoming more and more and more important as the decades progress. In Formula one and in the sixties, they were a little bit more lax with that type of thing. And that's why drivers like Jackie Stewart and several others that other names that you would recognize, uh, that they really they protested. They they sat out races, they didn't race in certain places because they were losing friends every month. The reason why we saw changes was largely because the drivers and the races were starting to demand changes. Yeah, the cars were getting so fast, so fast, and the tracks were so fast, and the safety standards just weren't there. They just weren't protecting the drivers the way that they should and and Jackie Stewart realized this, and several other racers did as well. There's there's a lot of information out there on Jackie Stewart and what he did to kind of push safety forward in Formula one, and it's a huge leap forward for the drivers and the safety and you know, just kind of their overall well being, I guess, and I found um this note about the halo. And I'm sorry, I think I said, did I say platinum? I hope I didn't say platinum when I when I said what material wastum, it's it's a mandatory UM device. Obviously it's aerospace Industry grade five titanium. It probably does yeah, UM, but it can. Again, it can withstand the weight of that London double decker bus, which is like twenty six It is incredible. It is the strongest part of the car at this point. And again that's a that's a nod to safety. UM. Another piece of tech, A couple of pieces of tech that UM finally written a tech right type stuff. UM. You know they have biometric gloves that the drivers were Now I don't know if you knew this or not. You didn't talk about this, but they the drivers wear biometric gloves. And this is actually a safety feature because it facilitates the medical response to the driver when they're you know, if there's a medical situation that's happening and the driver doesn't even really know what's happening yet. It registers in these gloves with pulse rate. UM. It's also got um, what's the oxygen level in your blood? Blood? It measures that um, but it will tell them as they approached the vehicle, you know, if it's been in an accident, the driver's condition and what to look for. You know, the don't know pretty much exactly what's going on with that driver at that point, whether they've got a pulse, whether they don't. Unfortunately a lot of times they don't. I mean, these these rex are pretty severe when they do happen. You're going on incredible speeds in a in a vehicle that's still even with the added safety features, it's very design is one that you could easily see there there'd be some pretty catastrophic injuries if there is a crash. And I didn't mean to step over your your discussion about the Space race and you know the astronauts and how they I mean, but these guys they know going into this, just like just like the astronauts, they know going into this that they're in it for the whole thing. It's either it's all or none for them. And there's always that chance every single time. And it's not being overly dramatic, It's true. Every single time they get into that car, it could be the last time they get in that car, and they know it and as does as do the astronauts. They know it, they know what they're in for, but they knowingly take the risk because you know, the reward for them is so great that they decided that, you know, this is something I want to do and I want to dedicate my life to this, really, so they've got these these biometric gloves. One of the things that I've also noticed about Formula one race cars is, uh, the steering mechanism is very different from what you would see in a standard vehicle. Have you been peaking at my notes? No, I'm just thinking about pictures I've seen of these crazy easy steering mechanisms. You remember early on when we sat down and I said, I'm gonna turn this piece of paper over on the desk here so you can't see what it is. That is what it is. It's a steering wheel. And I don't know what's more complex, my notes around the steering wheel or the steering wheel itself, but the steering wheel in a Formula one car is incredibly complex. And the thing is, I've watched a lot of videos about this, and the buttons really do make sense when you have a driver described to you what they are, right, So if you were to look at a picture of this, because you know, obviously this being an audio podcast, you aren't given the benefit of what Scott just showed me, which was a picture of this. It looks kind of like a video game controller in a way. Right It's it's calling it a wheel seems uh like it would be misdirection because it's not a full wheel shape. You've got the you've got the little bit of the wheel on the left and right sides. But it really does look kind of like a video game controller, almost like it has a screen in the in the Front's got some dials and some buttons that are an easy reach where of your hand place. Man, I see now that there are clutch buttons on the wheel itself, which is interesting. I I have no idea what the rest of these things do. So tell me a little bit about this. I'll make it quick because there's way too much to cover here. This is his own podcast. Really that the tech that's involved in in a Formula one steering wheel is unbelievable. Their videos about this, there's a lot of online articles about it, and in fact, I will tell you that the price of the steering wheel, it probably would not surprise you to hear that this is expensive as well, between fifty and one thousand dollars per wheel. Now, a lot of racers, a lot of drivers for each car will have up to three different wheels. They'll have a primary wheel that they normally use. They'll have a backup, you know, just in case something happens, you know, during an accident or whatever, you know, practice or just malfunctions. And then they'll also have a lot of times an experimental wheel that then loads on new buttons, has new systems, new settings, that type of things, you know, So the buttons do different things, and it's it's less complicated than you might think. I mean, when you're looking at it, it's extremely complicated. But the drivers learn this very quickly. They understand every single function of it, and it's all within reach, and it's it's all customized to them. The hand grips are customized. They're formed to their hands so they fit exactly in their hand. It's not a it's not a one size fits all thing. They're all different shapes, they're all different sizes, and the buttons are essentially the same. I mean, there's I mean, I gotta go through every single one again. But you know there's like a radio button. As you might expect, there's a neutral and reverse button for the car so you don't um inadvertly run over your crew as you pull into the pit. You know you can get neutral. There's the pit lane speed limitter, which is limited to either eighty kilometers per hour or sixty depending on the track and how much space do you have. Each track has its own pit lane speed. There's um how there's a button for something called the drag reduction system, which we haven't even talked about. But drag reduction system is like movable aerodynamic wing on the back of the car. So it's like the elements you would see on an on an aircraft. Yes, yes, it's like the flight surfaces on wings and tails of aircraft. Yes. And you can reduce your drag by by pushing this button and there are certain parameters where driver is allowed to do that, but it's controlled by the driver with a button on this wheel. And it's really it's just the flap on the rear wing that gives you an aerodynamic advantage in order to pass the car that's in front of you. And you have again the parameters are like certain zones on the track that you're able to use this, and I think you have to be within one second of the car in front of you in order to push the button one second following speed. Now, UM, I guess that's up to you know, F one rulemakers. You know exactly how close you were when you use this. But it does give it give you advantage and it promotes passing. So that's one of the things they've done to make a little more exciting. Um. They're differential settings that are for entry and exitive turns, and this changes the balance of the car while you're driving it, so you can kind of promote um, you know, additional additional oversteer, additional understeer, whatever you like. You can kind of fine tune the car as you're driving it. Um. There are, of course, you know, there's this clutch operation for your shifts. Of course that's what you saw earlier. There's paddles on both sides up and down. Uh, there's an overtake button, there's a messaging buttons, there's it seems like there's of course, there's an energy recovery harvesting button, which means that you know, you can gain that little extra boost of power if you need it for passing. Uh, there's the button to listen to your favorite ieheart radio podcasts. That one has a little hard on it. The most confusing, Yeah, that's right, that's funny. The most confusing ones to me are the dials. There are dials at the bottom that have you know, like tire presets or chassis presets, and you can kind of fine tune the chassis that way. But it's not just a button. The driver has to remove his hands from the wheel, his biometric glove from the wheel, and fine tune the chassis and the tires and you know all this. It's it's just it's a fascinating feature to this whole thing, and you can control so much from it. I can. I can understand why it's expensive, but yeah, I don't know. Fifty dollars expensive, it's I mean that's the price of a car, just that wheel get up two hundred thousand. That's the price of a small house, you know, And and they need three per vehicle. I mean, it's it's it's the prices are just insane. But I love the series overall. I think, as you've been able to tell, I've I've gone on and on here for probably far too long, but I I am I'm a big Formula One fan. I hadn't watched it for a long time. I kind of got back into it last season. And the problem here in the United States is that oftentimes the races, because they're being held many times over in Europe, they might start at you know, six in the morning here, you know, when it's like a midday race there, and so that makes a little difficult to watch unless you're recording it, right and I have in the past record of them. But if I happen to be up on Sunday morning at six am, usually that's what's on my screen. It's pretty cool. I mean, like I said, just the watching the videos that I've seen, Uh, it really does bring together that that necessary combination of incredible engineering and technology and amazing like laser focus for everybody involved on that team, whether it's the driver or the crew. It's it's phenomenal how synchronized everything has to be in order to ring out every thousandth of a second you can, because that could be the difference between coming in first or second. Sure, and you know, we are I think we say this every time, or at least I do on my show. Anyways, this is kind of the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, there's there's so much tech that is crammed into these cars. Their their entire sections. On the F one site, if you go to f one dot com, you can look up just the technical information and just the technical advantages that have been created or or um um you know, fine tuned just this year by certain teams, and you can go back in different years. You can look at eighteens upgrades and seventeens, and you can look at historical documents, and there's so much information available in the series. And it's just again, if you're a tech person, and I would guess that you would be listening to this podcast, Uh there there is more tech here than you can image. It's just it's a fascinating series. It is amazing. It is amazing. Now, there's a couple of things I want to say before we sign off. One of those is that I did mention I was gonna briefly explain the diffence between Formula one and Formula two racing. The biggest difference is that in Formula two racing, every team is racing with the same car, essentially the same basic type of vehicle and engine, so there's no differentiation there, and the idea is to create a more level playing field and also to reduce the cost of entry um. And if you go to Formula three and Formula four, as you go up the numbers, uh, then you'll see that the barrier to enter is slightly lower. By lower, I mean it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of the millions of dollars. So it's so your mileage may vary. You're not buying a ten and a half million dollar engine for your Formula four car. Yeah. So it's also kind of it becomes sort of almost a league, a farm league for for future Formula one drivers. There's only so many Formula one drivers who are allowed to participate per year. Yeah, so f one scouts not only will they go to other series and look for drift one drivers, people that are are talented in their own series, whether that's uh, gosh, it could even be NASCAR, could be Indycarcart, could be any of those series. But they often will go to, you know, the Formula two series and take a look at you know, who's who's the young rising star that series, right, and maybe we try them out and add them to the team next season for the Formula One team. Yeah. Here, here the keys. He's not keys, but here's the uh, let's just say it that way. Anyway, Here the keys to the fifteen million dollar car. Don't don't wreck it, Junior, don't don't get a scratch on the paint, please. I don't know if I don't think there are any F one drivers that are named Junior, probably not. Lots of lots of NASCAR drivers, lot of juniors over in NASCAR. You know, maybe maybe you'll have a lot of the thirds. Maybe, but but yeah, that's that was one of the things. The other thing I wanted to mention was that, you know, we kind of toyota around a little bit in the history of Grand Prix racing. But that's something that you and Ben covered at great length in a previous episode of Car Stuff, and I want people to be aware of that because if you really, I mean, this is an incredibly rich and fascinating history. Um, it's full of drama, not just in the races, but in just the progression the evolution of the sport. And so yeah, I want to do you do you have that episode? I do. And you know, there might even be drama in the podcast. I'm not sure. I mean it's it's sort of a drama queen between Ben and I. There might be a little bit of druma. You never know. But we did actually a two part series on this. We did how Formula one Works. So, um, if you search how Formula one works on Car Stuff Show dot Com in the the search box up there, you will find back in May, we did that two part series and it's roughly, you know, it's I think you're about forty forty five minutes each and uh, and I think it's, uh, it's a pretty good look back at Grand Prix racing and then of course Formula one and some of the players and some of the uh, the rules, and of course now we're six years beyond this, so you know, what we're talking about right now is a little bit different than what it was back then. But essentially the history is never going to change, obviously, so you're gonna get a full story there if you want to go back and look at that. And awesome, thank you for referring to them to absolutely always use some more views on that one, right, yeah, yeah, and you know, it never hurts to get that download number popping up a couple of months as good. Why not fun? But yeah, it's also I mean, it's to to nail this home. I mean, we know that in twenty the it will be different from nine, Like there'll be different rules that will come into play, and it'll it'll end up putting teams in a in a you know, a scramble to get everything finally tuned. And we'll see that progression happened throughout the season as well. I know the fans are already talking one. They're talking about rules and potential rules, and you know what that's gonna mean. And if fans love to talk about this stuff and you have to argue about it, it's it's it's it's it's really kind of fun to get into the forums and read about some of this stuff. You're just you know, kind of kind of lurk there in the background and watch what's going on. Yeah, I mean, and here here is a baseball fan. I thought, just getting into arguments about the designated hitter rules, passionate and I got nothing on race car fans. They do get they do get passionate, get intense, they do, they get intense that's a good word for it. And maybe we'll even do a deeper dive on tech in Formula one in the in the near future, kind of really dive into some of this stuff a bit more. But I felt like for the first episode it was more important to get kind of that general overview, like obviously, like we've been going on for a while, we could go on for another two hours just about the tech. Uh. And so Scott, I may tap on your shoulder one day and say, hey, how about we go in and finish what we started perfectly fine, And I hope I didn't stretch your show out too long here on. I'm fine with it. Is the one who's you know, she's the and yelling at me. Yeah, she's ready to go home. I've got I've got a lot to say about the series. As you can tell, I've I've been an open wheel racing fan my whole life. I love Indy car Um Formula one a little bit less than any car, but I'm still a big fan, as you can tell. And it's just it's all fascinated to me. I could talk for hours about this stuff, I really could. And I think you and I just have kind of a good report, and we're able to go back and forth with the stuff pretty good. We have conversations like this at our desk all the time. Absolutely. That's why I was like, I need to get Scott back into the studio. And then uh, Michael tweeted me and I was saying, Hey, where's that Formula one podcast you promised me ages ago? And I thought, this is the perfect opportunity. Michael. I appreciate it too, because I love to get into the studio and talk about this stuff. It's fun. Yeah, it was great, and uh yeah, well we'll come back to this in a future episode and we will cover more about the the space age technology that's that are in these vehicles and how that again helps contribute to the amazing performance we see. How about how titanium is not platinum? Listen, Scott, if we want to go down a list of things that have been said on this podcast that turned out to not be accurate. We're gonna be here for a very long time because I've been doing this for more than a thousand episodes, and I make a gaff at least once a show. Perfectly, that's acceptable. Yeah, No, We're we're we're well under the threshold, We're fine. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff from three whole years ago, not even three yet, but uh yeah. Also just uh shout out to Scott and and love sent through the universe to him. I hope he's doing well. Miss you, buddy, And um yeah, I hope you all enjoyed this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle on future episodes, A lot of people have been reaching out with some great, great suggestions and I am working on those ideas, so that will be coming up. But if you would like to be one of those folks, reach out to me on Twitter. The show's handle is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really sick. Yes. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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