Drilling holes

[Shrek]

Would the steering wheel be lighter than the other teams?

[xpensive]

If you drill a dozen of 10 mm holes in a 4 mm thick piece of Aluminium plate, that's 10 grams saved.

An F1 car is what, 700 000 grams, including driver?

[PlatinumZealot]

On the holey thing in on the steering: Those aren't functioning as holes! they more function like Spokes on a wheel!

You can drill holes to make spokes, you can drill holes to receive Bolts and pins and shafts, to get a desired shape etc. As long as you intend for holes to be there in the beginning.

Hence If you design the object to have holes at certain points.. then those are not really "bad holes" because that is how the object was meant to be!


This is an example of "Good holes" I think the purpose is light weight and maybe to help air flow. The structure was designed to have the holes in place.



When the original poster says "drilling holes" I am thinking of somebody drilling a hole into an object that was not intended to have a hole, or an object that does not need holes for whatever reason. That is very dangerous especially when the person is not aware of how much the object is weakened by drilling those holes.

[xpensive]

Interesting observation that, good holes and bad holes, wonder why I never saw things that way?

[stl0]

I saw a video of the Red Bull transmission during qualifying for Monaco, and they had drilled out the center of each tooth on the reverse gear to save weight, so at least Newey is thinking this way. But it does only work in members that are stressed exclusively in one plane, or very small stresses overall. The cellular beams in the image above take only vertical loads, so the important bit is the distance between the flanges, while the moment at the center of the web is exactly zero. This reduces the self-weight of the beam significantly, and on long spans self-weight is a big proportion of the load the beam has to carry.

Look at the old Porsche Spyder hillclimb cars. These were spaceframe chassis, and everything that wasn't the frame was drilled to an inch of its life. Now what you see on an F1 is the structural chassis, or incredibly sensitive aerodynamically, so drilling what we see is probably impossible or counterproductive. Guys running Trans-Am used to drill monocoque chassis' and even acid dip them to make the metal thinner, but usually with disastrous results. Sam Posey told a story of leaning on his car in the pits and having the front inner fender collapse under his weight. They also had roll cages for stiffness.

I would bet that every single metal part of a formula one car that can be drilled to save weight is drilled to save weight. It may not be much weight, but a thousand hummingbirds crap like an elephant. If the dimensions of a part are immutable (as in a brake pedal needs to be big enough for my foot to operate it) I would bet it gets drilled.

Anyone have a picture of a pedal box from a current F1 car?

[xpensive]

Right, but if Kimi takes a good --- before the race, that is worth 600 of those holes, why there are degrees even in hell.

[Michiba]

Typical of Newey designs, it is minimalist. Nothing on it except what is necessary. Even the LCD display is mounted on the chassis.

Thanks for posting the pic Dave. In relation to the original question, there would be no need to drill holes if you design it right in the first place as shown here.

As for drilling holes in reverse gear, I would say they're doing that based on the assumption that they won't be using that gear during the race. It is only there due to regulations right?

[Shrek]

new question
what about on the (drilled/moulded) pedals and a side benefit would be less foot slippage