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:::::: All about F1 Car ::::::

1. F1 car is made up of 80,000 components, if it were assembled 99.9% correctly; it would still start the race with 80 things wrong!

2. Formula 1 car have over a kilometer of cable, linked to about 100 sensors and actuators which monitor and control many parts of the car.

3. F1 car can go from 0 to 160 kph AND back to 0 in FOUR seconds!!!!!!!

4. F1 car engines last only for about 2 hours of racing mostly before blowing up on the other hand we expect our engines to last us for a decent 20yrs on an average and they quite faithfully DO....that’s the extent to which the engines r pushed to perform...

5. When an F1 driver hits the brakes on his car he experiences retardation or deceleration comparable to a regular car driving through a BRICK wall at 300 kmph!!!

6. An average F1 driver looses about 4kgs of weight after just one race due to the prolonged exposure to high G forces and temperatures for little over an hour

7. At 550kg a F1 car is less than half the weight of a Mini.

8. In F1 car the engine typically revs upto 18000 rpm,(the piston travelling up and down 300 times a second!!) wheres cars like the palio, maruti 800,indica rev only up to 6000 rpm at max. That’s 3 times slower.

9. The brake discs in an F1 car have an operating temperature of approx 1000 degrees Centigrade and they attain that temp while braking before almost every turn...that is why they r not made of steel but of carbon fibre which is much more harder and resistant to wear and tear and most of all has a higher melting point.

10. If a water hose were to blow off, the complete cooling system would empty in just over a second.

11. Gear cogs or ratios are used only for one race, and are replaced regularly to prevent failure, as they are subjected to very high degrees of stress.

12. The fit in the cockpit is so tight that the steering wheel must be removed for the driver to get in or out of the car. A small latch behind the wheel releases it from the column. Levers or paddles for changing gear are located on the back of the wheel. So no ear stick! The clutch levers are also on the steering wheel, located below the gear paddles.

13. To give you an idea of just how important aerodynamic design and added downforce can be, small planes can take off at slower speeds than F1 cars travel on the track.

14. Without aerodynamic downforce, high-performance racing cars have sufficient power to produce wheel spin and loss of control at 160 kph. They usually race at over 300 kph.

15. The amount of aerodynamic downforce produced by the front and rear wings and the car underbody is amazing. Once the car is traveling over 160 kph, an F1 car can generate enough downforce to equal it's own weight. That means it could actually hold itself to the

CEILING of a tunnel and drive UPSIDE down!

16. In a street course race like the Monaco grand prix, the downforce provides enough suction to lift manhole covers. Before the race all of the manhole covers on the streets have to be welded down to prevent this from happening!

17. The refuelers used in F1 can supply 12 litres of fuel per second. This means it would take just 4 seconds to fill the tank of an average 50 litres family car. They use the same refueling rigs used on US military helicopters today.

18. TOP F1 pit crews can refuel and change tires in around 3 seconds. It took me 8 sec to read above point ( no.17).

19. Race car tires don't have air in them like normal car tires. Most racing tires have nitrogen in the tires because nitrogen has a more consistent pressure compared to normal air. Air typically contains varying amounts of water vapour in it, which affects its expansion and contraction as a function of temperature, making the tire pressure unpredictable.

20. During the race the tires lose weight! Each tire loses about 0.5 kg in weight due to wear.

21. Normal tires last 60 000 - 100 000 km. Racing tires are designed to last 90 - 120 km (That's Khandala and back from Mumbai).

22. A dry-weather F1 tire reaches peak operating performance (best grip) when tread temperature is between 900C and 1200C.(Water boils at 100 C remember) At top speed, F1 tires rotate 50 times a second.

:::::: Drink n Drive ::::::

Nissan rolled out a concept car with drunk-driver protection a few days ago. According to US NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) statistics on the MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) Web site, 17,602 people in the US lost their lives due to drunk driving in 2006. That was about 41% of all US traffic fatalities. Drunk driving isn’t a new problem. It’s been around for as long as the automobile (while drunkenness has been around for millennia). It’s unlikely that education alone will ever eradicate drunk driving because it hasn’t for the last 100 years or so. Nissan’s drunk-driver prevention hardware goes straight to the source by attempting to prevent a car from being driven by an inebriated driver.

The problem of course is determining whether or not a driver is too impaired to drive. You probably wouldn’t buy a car that sticks a needle into you to sample your blood every time you turn the ignition key, so Nissan’s approach uses a battery of sensors to take readings that help the car infer your mental state. First, there’s a high-sensitivity alcohol sniffer built into the gear shift knob. If the car senses too much alcohol in the sweat on your palm, it locks the transmission and tells you that you’ve got too much alcohol inside of you to drive

Sneaky drivers might be tempted to have the passenger in the front seat do the shifting, thus spoofing the sensor in the gearshift knob. So there are a couple more alcohol sniffers sampling the air in the passenger cabin. If they sense too much alcohol in the air, the car’s navigation system issues an alert to the driver, which can be ignored.

However, alcohol consumption isn’t the only path to driving impairment, so Nissan has installed a camera in front of the speedometer that peeks through the steering wheel and images the driver. The safety system analyzes the driver image, locates the driver’s eyes, and checks eye-blink rates. If you aren’t blinking at the proper rate (possibly because your eyes are closed), the system will attempt to get your attention using a verbal alert and by yanking on your seat belt. The car may yank your chain (seat belt) if it detects you wandering in and out of your lane as well.

All of this takes me back to the summer of 1972, when I designed an automotive sobriety system for the Cleveland Steam Car, a joint project between Case Western Reserve and the Cleveland Institute of Art (the CIA), located across the street from Case. The Cleveland Steam Car was an entry in an urban vehicle competition. It’s frame and body were built at the CIA by students interested in automotive design. Case supplied electronics and was supposed to supply a steam engine, but the car ultimately ended up with a 3-cylinder Saab engine converted to use propane.

My sobriety tester consisted of 10 unmarked, illuminated buttons on the dashboard. When you wanted to start the car, the tester would flash a random pattern of four buttons and you had to key the pattern back into the tester. If you got the pattern right, the car would start. Otherwise, you walked home. Nowadays, you’d need little more than a $1 PIC processor to implement the entire sobriety tester but in the summer of 1972, the microprocessor was less than a year old. They cost a lot of money and development tools cost even more money. So I implemented the tester with about three dozen TTL chips. It was a stretch for me. I was still an undergraduate and this was my first big logic design.

It’s hard to remember that there was a time when engineers didn’t use microprocessors because there weren’t any. In the summer of 1972, there were precisely two commercial microprocessors available: Intel’s 4004 and 8008. Both were priced out of reach for most designs, including my little college project.

Today, I see far too much thinking based on the costs of microprocessors three decades ago. Processors are no longer expensive yet we work extremely hard to minimize the number of processors in a system, at the expense of software complexity and quality. Loading multiple tasks on processors causes unpredictable interactions that won’t occur with separate processors. Yet too many design teams act as though processors are expensive and programmer time is cheap.

Re-evaluate your assumptions in this regard.

“If I'm drunk and wear gloves and sunglasses, have the windows open for fresh clean air it will be ok?”

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