'We are still a human sport'

Formula 1 is a mix of engineering and athleticism as driver and car come together in a bid to win races. Newsweek goes behind the scenes with the Atlassian Williams F1 Team to see how the sport keeps people at its core

- By JENNIFER H. CUNNINGHAM and LAUREN GIELLA

FORMULA 1 IS THE WORLD’S MOST TECHNICAL SPORT.

While hockey sticks now might be made of carbon fiber instead of wood, soccer balls are getting lighter and easier to control, and new ski shapes and materials can help downhillers bombing down a piste, little compares to the research, science and engineering effort put into making open-wheel racing cars go really, really fast around a track.

The 11 teams that compete in F1 can each spend up to $215 million a year to produce what they hope will be two winning cars for their driver pairing, although the drivers’ multimillion-dollar salaries do not fall into the equation. Across a season that spans five continents—from Melbourne to Monaco, São Paulo to Singapore, and Las Vegas to the deserts of the Middle East—it is one of the most global competitions in sport.

The confines of the spending cap, introduced in 2021, forces teams to consider every dollar spent to maximize value. It also gives smaller competitors, like Atlassian Williams F1 Team, a fighting chance of winning races following an era dominated by big names like Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari, who spent many hundreds of millions more to guarantee success.

This pursuit of technical greatness has borne innovations which everyday drivers can see in their vehicles, including paddle shifters, hybrid engines and active suspension. The teams’ research has also yielded other discoveries. Williams, for example, helped create an aluminum device similar to an F1 car’s rear wing that helps make supermarket refrigerators more energy efficient.

It is the search for small, marginal gains that motivates F1 teams. James Vowles, team principal at Williams, calls it “the relentless pursuit of a millisecond.”