The F1s must undergo very expensive slimming treatments to return to the minimum weight of 798 kg. There are cars that exceed by more 10 kilos the FIA constraint (they cost around three tenths of a lap time in Barcelona) and only Alfa Romeo is on target. Nanoprom has developed a paint that can save one kilo (more or less depending on the car) with an expense that would be the tenth part of that calculated.
Formula teams 1 they are fighting the weight war. Helmut Marko, Red Bull consultant, declared that a world championship cannot be won with a single-seater that exceeds the limit of 798 kg. The commitment of the technicians is to make the machines lose weight, well aware that 10 kg are worth three tenths of a second on a track like Barcelona, How much, In short, a new aero package.
Complicating matters is the budget cap it has placed a 140 million dollars the spending limit for the season 2022 is, developments too, are included in the count, for which the world game can be heavily conditioned by the ability to introduce innovations that can improve performance with sustainable costs.
There are teams that are trying to put their single-seaters on a weight loss diet: on an F1 it is one of the most complicated exercises because to achieve a result it is necessary to intervene on every aspect of the car, touching on delicate aspects such as the introduction of more exotic materials (among those allowed) which can affect reliability, the duration and also the price.
According to a reliable evaluation that we had collected in the paddock, the reduction of 1 kilogram over i 798 minimums can cost approx 250 EUR thousand.
Well, important teams are considering stripping parts of the cars to earn a few grams, bringing back what Mercedes did when Alfred Neubauer, sports director, the 3 June 1934 on the occasion of the ADAC Eifelrennen at the Nurburgring he decided to remove the white color from the Mercedes-Benz W25 because the car exceeded 1 kilo the fixed limit of 750 kg giving life to the “silver arrows”, leaving the aluminum bodywork visible.
Meanwhile, it is worth highlighting that the single-seaters of the 1930s were lighter than today's F1, but it is at least curious to note that current cars could remove more or less a kilo by changing the type of paint with a maximum cost of 25 EUR thousand, i.e. the tenth part of what is necessary by working on lightening the individual parts of the machine.
We talked about it with Gian Luca Falleti, owner of Nanoprom, the Sassuolo-based nanotechnology company ready to return to F1 with a paint derived from Polysil: “First of all, it is not a paint – explains Falleti – but a liquid glass that does not contain plastic. It is a product that does not burn and, then, improves the safety of single-seaters. It is applied cold so it does not need to be cycled in the oven, also shortening the application times”.
Looking at the bodies of the current single-seaters, the weight saving could be slightly less than a kilo on a car like the Ferrari F1-75 which has no transparent, but decidedly superior on a Red Bull RB18. And how come no one takes advantage of these opportunities that the market offers? The savings in terms of money is impressive with a ratio of one to ten or the issue of costs is just sand in your eyes?
[Source: https://it.motorsport.com/ ]
