What is a Formula One car? It's the very cutting edge of technology. It's nearly 1,000HP of Hybrid power. It's hurtling around a race track at 300 km/h. It's the latest in a line of Turbocharged beasts, the fastest racing car on the planet...
STEERING COLUMN: What an F1 Car Really Is
A Formula 1 car is all of these things, but it is more than just a simple machine. It is long days and even longer nights - the blood, sweat and tears of a team made real. It is weekends on the road, missed birthdays, lost hours in airports. It's sacrifice, stress and bumps in the road. It is the physical expression of a 1,500-strong group of designers, engineers, mechanics, technicians, executives and more, competing at the pinnacle of world motorsport.
It's the thrill of the fight, the rush of rising to a new challenge. And more, a determination to innovate and go beyond the expected. It's mathematics and angles, CAD, CAM, CFD and high performance computing power. It's brutal efficiency. It's a product of a world-class technology campus, and thousands of hours spent designing, machining, creating and building a machine capable of taking on the best in the world.
A Formula 1 car is bleeding-edge engineering. It's the innovators and grafters who poured their love into its creation. It's helping to shape the future of powertrains and automotive technology. It's 200 high-frequency sensors transmitting wirelessly. It's complex data science, management and protection. It's the push to bring 5G to life. It's accelerating the future.
And what about our Formula One car? Our Formula One car is about setting the benchmark. The strive for a fifth World Championship crown. A mark of defiance to our rivals that we will not falter, nor let it slip. A chance for this team to fight again and earn a place in history alongside the greatest this sport has ever known.
Our Formula One car is a master-crafted carbon fibre and honeycomb composite structure, and at its heart, sits flesh and blood. It's the best drivers in the world putting it all on the line to win on a Sunday. The vessel of a champion and a new challenger - the chance for ultimate glory.
It's the bitter taste of defeat in Monaco, of holding back the tears of a dream come true in Austin, and it's the relief of the rains in Singapore. It's the roar of the crowd as their hero wins in Silverstone and it's the cool, controlled, never-say-die attitude that nets you your first win in Sochi.
Our Formula One car is a milestone, a ninth attempt at the ultimate prize. It's the legacy of 63 wins, 122 podiums, 71 pole positions, 43 fastest laps and 35 one-two finishes from 79 race starts. It's another chance to add a new name to the list of famous Silver Arrows champions, a chance for a new car to claim the right to the title of the fastest Formula 1 car of all-time.
Our Formula One car is the men and women, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters that made it. It's the geeks, the nerds and a handful of the cool kids who live to race it.
What is a Formula 1 car? It's so much more than a machine...