Well, I don't know. At least we can guess how much does the car weight
with ballast.
The weight of the driver and the weight of the fuel should be easy to find, don't they?
I trust more in ESPImperium's figures about how much fuel the car carries, so I won't guess.
Let's wait for his input (if he ever sees this post).
This leaves me the hard task of guessing driver weights. Let's check what we can find.
Massa, 59 kg
(I don't know why I started with him: maybe because I've always thought he is small. At 1.66 m, yes he is).
Hamilton, 66 kg
(wow, he is taller than Felipe, by 8 cm, up to 1.74)
Vettel, I don't know. The guy claims to weigh 58 kilos at the Red Bull site, but an article I stumble upon, explains he went
down to 62.5 in 2009... He's having too many nachos with cheese since entering the team, I guess.
The same article (
here) explains that the fatty one in the grid is Robert Kubitza, at 78 kilos, but he seems the only person in the entire grid that wasn't born in The Shire, if you follow my drift, exception made of Rösberg, who is clearly born in Lothlórien (ha, ha, how funny I am).
Alonso's suffering for losing 5 kilos (where in the weight scale he ended is not explained, he's one of the beefy ones, along with Webber, aren't they?) is dutifully explained and how it lead FIA to increase car weight by 15 kilos that year (5 kilos lost to exercise plus 5 kilos lost during the race plus a broken water bottle plus a fainted Alonso are given as the motive. It is hard to be thin... and you have to be missing all that chorizo with wine before the race).
Alonso asking for a Red Bull after Bahrain 2009
I learn quickly that Heidfeld some time hit 59 kilos (in the winter of 2009), Nico Rosberg went from 72 kg (he seemed puffy, didn't he?) to 66, and that Webber is conceding defeat every time he has the munchies because he refuses to use a diet, while Vettel is a feather, comparatively speaking.
I also learn that in times of yore, weight being a more precious commodity, jockeys abounded (Moss, Stewart and Prost are cited as examples of smallish guys).
My curiosity takes me to try to learn the figures for them, but in vain. Moss weight or height interests nobody that I can find. I don't have the time to check for Stewart and Prost, but Prost surely seemed another Middle-Earthish guy.
For the moment, reading Moss biography, I'm reminded of the drive he made at Monaco in 1961 at the wheel of a Lotus 18, against the more powerful Ferraris. I should post that in the Best Drive Thread, btw, but I digress.
So, after all that blah, blah, blah, and trying to put my act together, I conclude that in average, if we take 59 as the smallish F1 guy around and 78 kg the heavyweight champion of F1, which is the weight that Kubitza, who is not precisely the Michelin Man, hit sometime around 2008, I got that
the average driver is a light 68.5 kg model (that is like 151 pounds in the Land of the Free, less than 11 stones in the Commonwealth).
Well, the people I work with is back from the printing shop (at last!). Let's hurry. I am sending a PM to ESPImperium to find the fuel weight. This leaves me with the ballast as the only (yeah, sure) missing factor.
BTW,
has anyone ever seen a picture of the ballast in an F1 car? That would be another interesting exercise and would leave us with the answer to the question posed in this thread. I remember the Formula One car that was exhibited, broken in pieces and hanging from wires in London, that someone posted years ago. Where is the ballast in those pictures?
For the moment, I find that ballast is (in part) put at the ends of the wings! Gosh, why hasn't nobody said that in the (too) many threads about flexible wings we have here?
Anyway, I can also tell you that if you assume ballast to weigh, I don't know, 200 kilos, it is a block with a side of 9 inches (22 cm). The thing (made of tungsten) weighs 70% more than lead.
If it is made of depleted uranium (you wouldn't believe the many wild guesses I've found writing this!) then it can cost you around 500.000 U$ for 80 kilos (where the ballast weigh is between 200 and 80 kg is anybody's guess).
If Webber is, wild guess I make, 20 kilos heavier than Vettel, the later carries a cube of 10 cm of tungsten somewhere in the car (probably as a skid plate or something like that, but...).
Finally, the simple answer is that the car, according to sources that apparently also have no idea of how much the ballast weighs, nor take in account driver or fuel (or oil!), weighs around 400 kilos. Sure, believe them. I will believe my eyes once ESP tells us about the fuel and we find where in the car is the darn ballast hidden. We should be able to do that.
