The Tech of F1 is WILD

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Tech of F1 is WILD”.
Formula One is the most expensive technologically advanced sport in the world. Behind the spectacle lies a relentless pursuit of speed where cutting edge technology means the difference between victory and defeat. Picture. This.

Terabytes of data, every race, weekend. Cutting edge materials that push the limits of both strength and lightness. Sustainable fuels to ignite the most efficient engines on the planet.. All of this in pursuit of 1/10 of a second a fraction of time worth millions.. This is Formula One and I can’t get enough.

( dramatic music, ) ( engine roaring ). Today I am taking you inside the halls of Red Bull Racing, unveiling the secrets of their all new RB20 and revealing the future of Formula One. Turns out. There’S a lot more here than just Drive to Survive., Watching on TV or even in person only gives you a small taste of what goes into Formula One.

Growing up. I was heavily influenced by my dad who actually gave racing a shot in his twenties and very much ingrained in me. A deep love of all things, cars and specifically F1. – I mean seeing the scarlet Ferraris dominate week after week, became a core memory for me.. But there’s no doubt that Formula One has grown enormously since then. And tech is a huge driver of that.. My friend Myke Hurley and I recently spent a couple of days at the Red Bull campus in Milton Keynes, England, to not only witness the cutting edge tech, firsthand meeting legends like Verstappen and Perez, but one of the things that absolutely blew our minds was a drone.. Forget just filming an F1 car..

This thing races them.. If you’re not aware Myke and I have had a F1 podcast for the last couple of years.. I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re excited right, now., I’m pretty pumped., I’m very excited.. All I know is the Red Bull will flow today, and the content will also follow suit., (, laughs, ), Red Bull teamed up with Dutch Drone Gods to create this., It’s tiny, but this is a drone that can reach speeds well over 200 miles per hour.

In just a few seconds. – And it can do it a lot faster than an F1 car. ( engine revving ) We’re about to see the first run.. What do you think I’m pretty excited., I’m nervous, but in a good way., It’s just one of those things where it’s like. How often do you get an opportunity like this right? Like I mean it is so cool. Yeah.

They staged a drag race with an older Red Bull F1 car piloted by David Coulthard on an admittedly damp day out at the Milford Proving Grounds, and it wasn’t even close.. So I’ve got ta ask what was it like going against the drone, Because it feels like that drone is insanely, fast. Yeah, it is..

It just gets up and goes up to its V Max very quickly and clearly a Grand Prix car. It takes time to get speed, get down force and then get grip.. So in this sort of situation, there’s no comparison. The way the drone flies is wild., Forget autopilot or fancy stabilization.. This thing is raw entirely reliant on the skill of the pilot.. Takeoff is actually vertical, as the pilot has to carefully bounce the throttle to angle it like a jet fighter and absolutely take off.. It’S outfitted with a pair of cameras, a stripped down GoPro for the main angle, as well as an analog camera which is solely for sending the live feed back to the FPV headset.. It’S incredible to see actually., It looks such a simple device, but clearly the amount of moving parts and for Shaggy to be able to to handle virtually. You know the direction.

I’ve seen some footage and we’ve been on track at Silverstone, incredibly precise how he can follow the actual racetrack.. The setup is wild.. Not only do they need an additional drone to relay the signal to make sure there’s no loss of control at over 200 miles per hour, but the operator has to track an F1 car accurately on a racetrack, as it accelerates flies through corners and brakes, and it Has to do it reliably. This first version of the drone drains its battery in just a couple of minutes, AKA enough to make it one lap. To get even a small taste of what it’s like to fly. A drone in first person, view at over 200 miles per hour. I got to try a much much smaller version.. I have never flown an FPV drone before.. What do I need to know? Have you flown normal drones? I’Ve flown some normal drones, but not a lot.. Well, it’s quite a bit.

Different. Fingers on the sticks. Got it.. Oh Oh., Oh okay..

I saw the piece of plastic flying.. Look at that., Oh hey, okay., That’s actually kinda fun.! Now I get to do it with the goggles.. I’M going in. Going up in the matrix..

I can’t really see anything at all.. Oh, oh, oh yep., (, laughs, ), It’s really hard’cause! You have like no sense of anything., But when you see the footage that they’ve captured with this, it is truly wild.. Red Bull are helping to develop this with an eye on pushing it into live production in the future.. Imagine following along with a qualifying lap to get that true sense of speed that nothing else can deliver. Bye little buddy., I’m glad I didn’t wreck you too bad.. One of the coolest parts of the trip as an F1 fan, was the tour of the factory where they build the Red Bull cars., For very, very understandable reasons.

Since secrecy inside an F1 factory is paramount, I was not allowed to film inside, but the scope of their operation blew my mind.. What are you expecting going into it? The scale I’m excited for the scale. Like what is the scale of an operation, putting together an F1 car, Because I could imagine it’s either huge or smaller than you think.. The scale of this place is nuts.

Their control room. It looks like it was designed by ex-NASA engineers because it was. Each race generates those terabytes of data and it’s all actually crunched in real time to make split second decision calls. And the tech.

I mean the huge CNC machines, resin printers, that spit out wind tunnel. Models. I mean look, I’ve toured factories labs, you name it and nothing touches Red Bull., The sheer investment, the insane attention to detail.. It is no surprise that they are currently crushing the competition.. If all that’s not enough, maybe my favorite part of the trip was getting a sneak. Peek at Red, Bull, Powertrains., They’ve partnered, with Ford to for the first time build their own engines starting in 2026. And holy ( duck quacking ). Look I again was super super. Not allowed to film anything inside but seeing the room size dynos that they have for testing engines, but even more so the hand-assembled parts, the fact that they have entire rooms. Look. They had an entire room dedicated to testing turbos., Not just like “. Oh we’re gon na run it in the machine or whatever.”.

They had like freaking like shipping container-sized burners, just to burn gas to spin these turbos at tens of thousands of RPMs at these absurdly high temperatures just to simulate the load that they would get when they’re running in an F1 car.. I expected the tech and everything to be fancy and new.. This is a brand new operation., But the scale of it was unbelievable.. Look, you probably hear the words mind, blown a lot but touring these facilities, seeing the actual nuts and bolts of how an F1 car is designed and built. I’Ve got ta, be honest. It is one of my favorite experiences.

I’Ve ever had making videos. And then came launch day for the RB20, the 2024 Red Bull F1 car, which will begin racing this weekend.. So we are just a couple of hours away from the launch of the RB20, the latest Red Bull racing F1 vehicle.. But before we do that, we’re taking a look down memory lane at the last several generations., Really all the way from the RB1 all the way through to the RB16B.. It is really interesting to see just how much the vehicles have evolved.. You can see the sort of the low noses of the RB1..

You can see all the way through these incredibly complicated wings., And then you can see how the high noses came. In., Like it’s a great view of how F1 and how Red Bull have evolved their vehicle over the last 20 years., It’s actually kind of staggering to be in a room like this and see not just all the cars, but all of the wins. All of the championships that are in these banners around these cars showing the incredible history of the Red Bull racing team.. It really is like quite a sight to behold. Formula One cars look quite similar to each other at first glance, but almost every part is custom. Built.

Parts can be designed test printed manufactured and completed in a span of just hours., And this happens all day every day the entire year. ( triumphant, music ) All right. So we’ve just seen the RB20 in person. So now I’m going to have an opportunity to chat with not only Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, but also Christian Horner, to get a little bit of a sense for not only where the car is now, but also the past and the history of F1.. Because to me, the tech is the most interesting part of this right, Like I love the racing, but the immense amount of technology that goes into these vehicles is fascinating to me.. So it’s something I really wan na talk about as far as kind of not only where things have been, but also where things are going..

Also, it’s kind of cool.. How do you feel like the sport has evolved, Because, not only of course, it’s much larger. The teams are larger. The budget, like everything, feels like it’s a grander scope, but also the cars are so much more complicated.

Like we got a tour of the factory yesterday and it is unreal the amount of work that goes into it. The parts the customization. Like how do you feel like the sport has sort of grown in that time? Well, it’s evolved massively.

And if I look at the technology, that’s been the thing: that’s been most impressive., You know. The evolution in just 20 years has been remarkable. And the use of software, the use of data and the way and the speed of data has been unbelievable..

So that’s been the most impressive thing. That’S evolved., As you can imagine, safety is a huge concern in Formula One. And the cars have, while they’re much safer than they were in the past, gotten incredibly large.. And while that means that you can have this incredible tech, you have the ground effect aerodynamics to suck the cars down to the pavement.

It also has some downsides.. What are the things that you would love to see if, like you just had like a magic wand, and like oh 10 years from now, you can kind of remake F1. However, you want Well there’s quite a few things.. I mean, but they’re, not realistic anymore. In the world that we live in, you know So, for example, bringing a V10 engine back.

It’S a lot lighter. And look at the size of this car, it’s so much smaller than what we have now right. So I think this is actually like a really beautiful size for a racing, car.

Yeah., Something a bit smaller cleaner. Yeah.. I mean that for me, yeah less weight lighter cars that would help., I think, lighter cars will be a good thing. Talking with both Max and Checo they’re, both like “, Oh, lighter cars, would be great.”’Cause. I mean the cars these days, they’re incredibly fast, but they’re huge. They’re heavy right.

If you compare’em to the car that we had 20 years ago, it looks like a go-kart in comparison. ( Austin laughing ). The closest I’ve ever gotten to driving a Formula One car is playing F1 in a simulator., But what’s interesting is, is that not only does, of course, Red Bull and every F1 team have an insanely, impressive setup that I will tell you, no one is ever ever Ever allowed to film much less even see, but it was interesting talking with Max about how he treats video games not only in his off time, but also how he used it growing up to learn more about how cars actually maneuver.

So obviously, 20 years of Red. Bull is like an enormous amount of time, but I know that you also spend a lot of time off track. Doing like sim racing and stuff.

Kinda like how do video games play into not only your sort of enjoyment of the sport, but also just being prepared, and just like? Where does that kind of come from? I mean I did start driving also virtually already from a young age, but that was you know at the time just on the controller.. Then you get a little steering wheel and it slowly got more and more professional. And of course, at the time you know the games are not where they are today. And I have to say nowadays I think you can relate on them a lot more.. The only thing really missing is like the G forces and stuff, but I have to say there are a lot of great games out there, that you know really focus on on the physics of the car and the tire models and stuff. So yeah. It’S getting really really serious.. I’Ve tried like motion rigs and stuff, but it’s just slower.’Cause you’ll.

You know it’s easier to make a mistake because of the movement. Of course, for here it’s good at Red, Bull, the factory, because that’s how you you know you’re fully driving a real life to get a bit of a motion. And it’s not about pure lap time. It’S about making it fully 100 % accurate.

But yeah for sure you know in the coming years also there there will be more and more developments. And at the end of the day, if you set up a championship where everyone is in a motion rig, then it’s The same for everyone right Yeah., But at the moment it’s better just to have a fixed stationary rig. That makes sense. It’s funny. I actually had a similar experience growing up with games such as “ Gran, Turismo ,”, to the point where the first time I got behind the wheel of a car and tried to drive it remotely quickly, I was shocked at how much that games like “ Gran Turismo” had actually informed me in the way that cars actually maneuver in the real world., And it’s interesting that it’s sort of the same on the F1 side, although it’s probably like a decade of driving go-karts before you really get good enough.. But it’s still. It’S very interesting to see that F1 drivers feel so, like superhuman, you know, I mean you see the training that they go through the G’s, that they experience the kind of just insane environments that they have to perform in., But at the end of the day, they’re Driving cars. And I think it’s really important – to sort of ground things.

Because most other sports, I could kick a ball. I could throw a ball. Like there’s a lot of these things that are like I could sort of comprehend and get my head around., But Formula. One feels like it’s, this exotic, absolutely otherworldy sort of thing., But in reality they’re driving cars very, very quickly.

And for all the tech in the world you’ve got. Ultimately, it comes down to the feel, the knowledge and the sheer determination to drive the fastest cars in the world better than anyone else out there. And that my friends, that is Formula One. And I really wan na drive a Formula, One car..

So maybe next year I can convince someone to let me drive the car. Y’all. You got my number. Hit me up.

If you got, you need some extra testing, I’m available. (, dial tone, humming, ), (, crickets, chirping, ), So much happens here and I am incredibly excited to have gotten this sneak peek like- Privileged. As Formula One fans …. This has been unreal., Unreal., Unreal., Unreal., Never unforgettable..

Now you go home and watch it back on TV, again., (, Austin and Myke laughing ). .