Formula One Technology Spill Over

You may or may not have often wondered with all the technology development in Formula One how are we benefitting. I a not talking about the obvious in motoring upgrades, but other things we don't even consider and may see them or experience them on a weekly basis with no clue.

Many of the teams have special departments that work on various projects or develop something new adapting it from the Formula One field into another area.
We all know the teams got together to help with Operation Pitstop making more than 14 000 ventilators for the NHS and other medical hospitals around Europe. The challenge was to increase the numbers drastically to help with the sudden need due to Covid. At the beginning 50 were being made per week and production was ramped up to 200 per day and this was all done at cost.

Ferrari chipped in by helping a hospital which we all know and love being Great Ormond Street Childrens Hospital. The hospital needed help moving patients from the operating room to the intensive care unit as safely and as efficiently as possible. Ferrari studied the hand over protocols making some much needed changes much like a pit stop. After their involvement patient safety has been improved and errors are down from 30 percent to 10 now. I have no idea what those errors are but does sound a little worrying and any improvement is good.

Williams Formula One developed a greener fridge in partnership with the food retailer Sainsbury's. The energy saving technology was used to divert air around the racing car to help increase it's performance. What Williams did was use Aerofoils to divert the cold air back to the fridges saving over 15 percent in energy costs. Over the last 3 years nearly half a million have been fitted and are in use today.

McLaren helped Glaxo Smith Kline with their tooth paste factory. They were called in to help make the factory run smoother and see if production could be increased. The engineers got to study the factory changing a few crucial things reducing change over times during production. Down time is money and obviously the perfect area to concentrate on with the team saving the factory 24 minutes after everything was set up. Those change over savings equates to nearly 7 million more tubes of tooth paste per year.

Another thing that all Formula One teams rely on is data as that is how they increase performance. McLaren helped formulate a system for the air traffic controllers which helped predict which flights were out of schedule and how they could be fitted in saving on congestion and time. This is done by running thousands of simulations every few seconds making it a real live case scenario allowing it to be trusted and relied upon.

There are so many others and expect the next innovations that we will see will involve energy saving at our homes and offices. the teams are not only working on various batteries but also hydrogen. Toyota is already powering entire villages with Hydrogen power stations making them green and safe.