It feels like Formula One is more accessible to fans than ever thanks to great outreach efforts and documentary series like Netflix’s Drive to Survive. But for fans who don’t have an engineering degree, F1 cars can still look strange and confusing because of their bizarre shape.
Despite having four wheels, F1 cars don’t really look like the vehicles you and I drive to work. Today, our mission is to pick apart the unusual design elements that stick out on the series’ race cars and understand why they’re there, starting with what is perhaps F1’s most defining trait: the uncovered wheels.
Open-Wheel Racing
Formula One is the top open-wheel racing series on Earth, meaning that the tires on its race cars are outside the bodywork. This is a good place to start for non-engineers because the decision to make F1 an open-wheel racing series has nothing to do with engineering. In actual fact, the sport requires open-wheel vehicles because of something even more difficult to understand than math or science: tradition.
What we know today as F1 only started in earnest in 1950 and built on the tradition of Grand Prix racing, which is French for “big prize.” That category dates back to the earliest days of automobiles when many cars were little more than motorized carriages, whose large wheels were located outside of the body.
As Grand Prix racing evolved into F1, most racers kept entering open-wheel vehicles even though they weren’t required to. While less bodywork meant less weight, it wasn’t always clear that uncovered wheels were better. Some teams chose to enter closed-wheel racers that looked more like the road cars of the day, such as the successful Mercedes W196 that raced in the mid-‘50s (below).
However, by 1961, an open-wheel design was mandated by the Federation International de l’Automobile (FIA), which is in charge of developing the rules for F1 (among other racing series). As this 1958 article written by Denis Jenkins and published in MotorSport shortly after the rules were announced shows, even at the time, it was clear to fans that the decision was made on the basis of tradition:
“As far as enclosure of the wheels is concerned, the banning of this will ensure that the cars continue to look like racing cars as we know them traditionally, and there are many people who like a racing car to look like one, even if it is an unscientific design.”
Open-Top Racing
Incidentally, the same set of rules that required an F1 car’s wheels to remain uncovered also necessitated a driver’s head to be exposed to the elements. Counterintuitively, the decision was hailed as important to safety.
“Those people intent on making racing safe have good reason in demanding open cockpits,” wrote Jenkins, “for I doubt whether [Stirling] Moss could have got out of the experimental Vanwall in a hurry during the Monza practice this year, and you never know when you might want to leave in a hurry.”
Surprisingly, even though open cockpits leave drivers’ heads vulnerable to being struck by objects left on track (just ask Felipe Massa, who was injured by a dislodged spring at the 2009 Hungarian Grand Prix), a driver’s ability to exit a vehicle in a hurry remains one of the important considerations behind keeping an F1 car’s cockpit open (just ask Romain Grosjean, who escaped a fiery crash in seconds at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix).
The vulnerability of drivers’ heads means that helmets are a big deal in F1. Although motorcycle racers were the first to start wearing hard-shell (open-face) helmets in the 1930s, they became mandatory in F1 in 1952. However, the full-face helmets we’re used to today were pioneered by Dan Gurney (below). He was sick of getting out of the car with a face full of muck from the road and, in 1968, became the first professional race car driver to wear a full-face Bell Star helmet in competition. To this day, racers around the world (as well as motorcycle riders) benefit from the innovation.
Big Wings for Big Prizes
Two notable elements of an F1 car’s design that have nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with speed are the giant wings that sit on the front and rear of the vehicle. These parts of the car work just like the wings on a plane, except that they’re upside down, so they push the vehicle down towards the ground, rather than up into the air, which improves grip and helps them go around corners faster.
The Lotus 49 is credited with bringing this innovation to Formula One in 1968 when it was equipped with winglets at the front for the second race of the year in Monaco. The car would ultimately set the fastest lap in qualifying, earning it pole position, and from there it won the race with Graham Hill at the wheel. Such was the success of the wing that at the very next race, Ferrari installed wings on its cars, and ever since, designers have been racing to give their drivers more downforce.
While most road cars don’t have big wings like F1 cars, many supercars use aerodynamic elements to help them drive around corners faster. In the wider world of automobiles, improvements in aerodynamics help cars cut through the air more efficiently to improve fuel economy and battery range.
Catching the Air
Big wings aren’t the only way F1 cars try to capture the wind; sidepods and air ducts are another prominent piece of the race cars’ design that you might have noticed. To understand why these vehicles need big pods on their sides and a triangle on top, we first have to establish that the engines in these race cars are placed just behind the driver. Teams do this to put the heaviest part of the car (the engine) in the middle so that the weight is as balanced between the front and the back as possible.
So-called mid-engine race cars date back to before the Second World War, but they started coming into fashion in F1 in the mid-‘50s, and the Cooper T43 became the first mid-engine car to win a Grand Prix in 1958. The design quickly took over the sport, and just two years later the Ferrari 246 became the last front-engine vehicle to win an F1 race at that year’s Italian Grand Prix.
What does that have to do with side pods? Well, engines need a lot of air to function properly. First, they need oxygen to run, and second, air needs to pass over radiators to prevent the motor from getting too hot. Your car (probably) has a grille at the front that collects air to perform both tasks and in the early days of the mid-engine revolution, F1 cars also had a grille at the front to catch the wind.
However, by the late ’60s, teams were toying with the idea of placing the intakes and radiators elsewhere on the car to save weight and concentrate even more mass into the middle. The Matra racing team became the first to run a car with an overhead air intake at the 1970 Mexico Grand Prix, and a year later, England’s Tyrrel won the Formula One World Championship with the 003, which had an overhead air intake to feed oxygen into the engine. Today, the section that rises above the driver’s helmet does the same thing while also acting as a roll bar to protect the driver’s head in case the car lands upside down.
The side pods are also designed to catch air, though they feed it into the radiators to cool the engine down and the first car credited with adopting this design was the 1970 Lotus Type 72. The English team found that shrinking the nose down led to a more aerodynamic shape that made its cars faster and, ultimately, the 72 ended up winning the World Championship that year (sadly its legacy is marred by the fact that a fatal crash made its driver, Jochen Rindt, the only racer to win a drivers’ championship title posthumously). However, the design took off, and it remains a hallmark of F1 cars to this day.
On the road, these innovations can be seen in mid-engine supercars. As a matter of fact, the first car to ever be considered a “supercar” was also the first mid-engine vehicle available to the public, the 1966 Lamborghini Miura. It, too, has air intakes along its sides, as do many supercars today. Some even have an overhead air intake, like the Gordon Murray Automotive T.51.
Final Thoughts
While that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to F1 technology, that should give you a sense of why the series’ race cars look the way they do, and what each element of their design is there to do.
