Stewart Mitchell

A question of philosophy

How F1 car designs are influenced by the career path of their technical directors

Like any other sport in the world, developing the equipment in motorsport is an effective route to getting ahead of the competition. As with other sports, typically, technical convergence occurs as understanding increases. However, the first half of the 2022 Formula 1 season hadn’t seen the convergence some expected before this era started.

So, how does such a physics-driven problem create so many different design options? The answer is philosophy. More specifically, the philosophy of those that lead the various technical groups, and their relationship with the physics at play.

AlphaTauri technical director, Jody Egginton, for example, spent much of his early career as a mechanical design engineer and race engineer before he made the move into management, and explains his personal philosophy: ‘We drew dramatically different cars in the concept phase regarding bodywork and the floor’s details,’ he says. ‘The floor is one of the biggest aerodynamic performance differentiators but the devil is in the detail.

‘The bodywork has its authority, but it’s also a function of what you do with the floor, and where you are with the power unit. Following the design phase, the sensitivity of specific parts differed from what we expected. My philosophy was to design for flexibility and development scope and package protection to give ourselves a lot of opportunities for manipulating the car, particularly in the sidepod packaging.

‘We haven’t used much of that package protection yet, but we felt it was the right way to develop the car. The worst thing you can do is to develop a fantastic aerodynamic platform and then have to re-design a lot of the mechanical bits underneath it and shift them around to realise your dream.’

XPB

Engineering disciplines

James Key, McLaren’s technical director, on the other hand, studied a bachelor of engineering degree, mainly mechanical, but which comprised a whole range of engineering disciplines. He started working in Formula 1 in 1998 at the age of 26 and became Jordan’s technical director in 2005, aged 33. That made him one of the youngest to hold that position in the sport at the time.

‘Your engineering background and expertise definitely influence how you view a car, and your technical philosophy,’ he says. ‘What influenced me most was that I started working trackside. When you see the sharp end as your first understanding of what Formula 1 is, that’s an illuminating place to learn. You can put

together the way the tyres are behaving, your control systems, your aero balance, where the driver is on track, your mechanical set-up and the track condition. You can put all that together in your head and see the wider picture.

‘But suppose you went to Formula 1 technical direction after working in specific subjects like aerodynamics and vehicle dynamics, or as a design or control systems engineer. If you’re an aerodynamicist, you see a set of surfaces and, regardless of what’s inside it, you want to optimise that to the nth degree. Anything that gets in the way of that, like a wishbone or something else, becomes a pain.

‘However, those wishbones are fundamentally important if you’re a mechanical person. With that [aerodynamic] background, for example, you sometimes carry that focus on, and it doesn’t always render well in the context of the whole car. ‘My technical directing philosophy focusses on optimising everything for the car on the track and configuring the team to operate at track level.’

Matt Harman, Alpine F1 Team technical director, spent much of his early career designing F1 power units, which influences his engineering philosophy as technical director

Different angles

This year marks Alpine F1 technical director, Matt Harman’s, first year in that position in F1. Harman spent half his F1 career designing power units, so comes at the position from another different angle. ‘I think my background allows me to be quite critical and understand a lot of the compromises and trade offs we need to make on the car in many detailed engineering areas,’ he says. ‘Over the years, I’ve taken responsibility for lots of different areas of the car, and I’ve gained quite a lot of understanding of those sensitivities. ‘My philosophy is to consider the harmony of systems, particularly in some of the areas like powertrain integration, for example, where things can often feel faster because they improve in a unit of kilowatts but actually, at the end of the day, once you’ve added up all the parasitic losses, we could end up with something that’s not quicker.’ These differences in philosophy, and those of the other technical directors not singled out here, can be observed in the cars throughout the Formula1 grid. As such, despite the multitude of tools available to the talents in Formula1, the nature of the technical personnel’s knowledge, their individual relationships with physics and their previous experience, when considered in the context of the car’s environment, remain a considerable influence on the overall design and philosophy of the resulting machines.