Automation station

Today’s machining industry is shifting towards automated technologies to minimise human intervention and increase accuracy. Racecar investigates the engineering behind this trend

- GEMMA HATTON

A modern Formula 1 car consists of up to 80,000 components, all of which have been machined at some point during their manufacture. That’s before counting the number of re-designed or replaced parts, or prototypes and spares that never actually make it onto the car. Hundreds of thousands of individual components come together to create the racecars of today and producing this quantity of parts, along with their rapid development cycles, is only made possible by machines.

Machine technology is not only becoming more accurate and reliable, but the results more repeatable. Unfortunately, to achieve that, machines are removing the human element from the process because we are not accurate enough any more. Human error is one of the biggest challenges facing the machining industry today, which is why companies are shifting towards automation.

However, automating these complex machining processes whilst maintaining accuracy is an extreme engineering challenge.