Physics effects every sport, from baseball to swimming. But when your sport features machines in competition, science can become even more important. One need look no further than how race cars have changed over the years for proof.
You have race cars to thank for the first reliably steel disc brakes, and the carbon-fiber discs current F1 cars use will probably make their way to normal cars once production costs get low enough. But perhaps the biggest innovation was ground-force engineering.
Take the Lotus 78, for instance, which is widely seen as kickstarting the trend of spoilers and other features that help hold speeding cars to the ground. The engineers working at Lotus, it should not surprise you to learn, had backgrounds in aerodynamics that lead them to this solution. And that's just a taste of what engineers with racing on their minds have developed over the years, as Real Engineering explains. Though it's worth noting that plenty of the cars he's referring to as "formula one" don't quite fit the description.
Peter Wright, who specialized in wind tunnels, told Motorsports Magazine about that particular innovation: "We started by looking to see whether we wanted a wide nose or front wings and we played around a little bit with front wings near the ground and looked at the effect of wheels and what the effect was of the height above the ground."
It wasn't the first racing innovation and it sure won't be the last. So if you want to see what your car might look like a few decades from now, keep an eye on the track. After all, the autonomous race cars are coming.
Source: Real Engineering