How does an F1 car work?

Jaroslav Filip

Most of us know how any car works, it has 4 wheels (some exceptions are also made), it has some sort of power supply to power the wheels to rotate. But with F1 it's more complex. The first thing we can talk about is the shape, some people would say that F1 car has less drag than other cars, but that's not true, it is the right opposite of that, it has more drag than usual cars by far, fun fact, an F1 car could be driven upside down at certain speed and still hold on the top. It has this much drag, because you need so called downforce to turn into corners at high speed. Downforce is how much Newtons is holding the car on the track. Next thing are the tyres. Tyres need to be changed at least once in a race, because after a certain amount of time, they are pretty much unusable, they wouldn't have the same grip as they had, when they were fresh. Also, there are two types of tyres, the first one are slick tyres, they have no pattern and have much more grip (they are also categorized as soft, medium and hard). Second one are wet tyres, they are only used in wet conditions and have a pattern. There are intermediate tyres that can evacuate about 30 litres per second and then there are wet tyres that can evacuate 85 liters per second.

As I talk about grip and downforce, there are 2 things that are often mentioned on race weekends and that is understeer, that means the front of the car didn't really turn the way you wanted and you would come wide out of the corner. The second one is oversteer, that means the back of the car becomes harder to control and in a lot of times you are going to spin.