Behind the Ops Episode 25
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Intro: You're listening to Behind the Ops, presented by Tulip. 

Madi: Kyle, how long have you been a Formula 1 fan? 

Kyle: Oh boy, so I'm a bit of a fake fan I'll admit. Um, so I watched the Netflix documentary and I grew up always loving planes and I have a mechanical engineering degree and all that good stuff. So I said, oh wait, there's these planes that go upside down with incredible mechanical engineering on a track and they go around a circle.

That's super cool. Where have I been all this time? Uh, so for the past two years I've now started getting into it a lot more. And it's super, super interesting. It's got all the fun character drama of other supports, but crazy, crazy levels of engineering and technology going on as well to manufacture these things.

Madi: So have you seen any pushback from OG Formula 1 fans on these like Netflix newbies? 

Kyle: Oh for sure, I have to always be like, oh I watched the Netflix show, but I'm also an engineer, like a single word follow up. Like, no, no, no, it's okay. I promise. I have a reason to be here, but yeah, there's been a bit of that. I think there's a couple other documentaries by those same producers now in like golf and tennis. So they're starting to spread around, but this one's been huge for the sport in the U.S. at least. It's absolutely blown up since the past couple seasons have have released. 

Madi: Well, I know there's a couple big races coming up be before we...

Kyle: Mm-hmm. 

Madi: ...kind of hop into manufacturing and Formula 1 and how they're kind of connected. I wanna give you a chance to show all of our listeners that even though you are a Netflix fan...

Kyle: Mm hmm. 

Madi: You are an engineer and you could pass my, uh, Formula 1 pop quiz. 

Kyle: Oh, I hope so. I really hope so. 

Madi: Great. So here's loosely how I'm gonna structure this.

I'm either going to define it and ask you what the name of the thing is, that's the hard questions, or I will give you a word and you can define it for me in Formula 1 context. 

Kyle: Sure. Yeah. Oh boy. 

Madi: So starting with what is a pole sitter? 

Kyle: Yeah. So position in a Formula 1 race is determined by placement in some qualifying races that happened earlier in the week.

Uh, and then a pole sitter is I'm going to assume somebody who's going to be in pole position a lot, pole position being the first place in that starting grid. So, you know, somebody who finishes first in qualifying is going to start first on the GP for that week, uh, and that's in pole position. So I'm assuming that.

Madi: Yeah. So that's, you know, basically right on the money for the description here. 

Kyle: One for one.

Madi: Uh, not to be confused with a form of medieval torture involving sharpened sticks. So that's from, uh, Formula 1.com. We'll put that in the show notes for everyone. 

Kyle: Okay. 

Madi: Um, but I'm glad you got that one. So what is a power unit?

Maybe this is like an appeal more to your engineering side. 

Kyle: Yeah, no, this is the really fun part. So in Formula 1 cars, they have the internal combustion engine, but because so much of their power is generated outside of these six cylinders, it's actually the whole thing is called a power unit or sometimes a power factory.

So the internal combustion engine is a six cylinder guy. They tend to keep it six cylinder because it's louder and literally people just want a louder car cause it's more interesting to watch. But there's also two different electrical units that work to recapture like heat from the brakes and energy from the exhaust to go back into the turbo.

Uh, and by combining those two bits with the engine to overall give you torque or charged your battery, that's together called the power unit. Notably we might get to in a bit, uh, that's changing a lot in 2026. One of those three pieces is actually just going away entirely, but it's the thing that make it go fast.

Madi: Nice. All right. Final, final question here. I'll give you the definition and then you can, you know, confirm during cornering, blank is when the rear wheels of a car lose grip causing the back end to step out, whereas other blank is when the front wheels lose grip, which sees the car travel at a shallower angle than the one the driver is asking for.

Kyle: This is the USB port of F1 terminology for me. I'm going to get it wrong the first time, and then you turn it upside down, and then I'm going to get it right. So, um, one of these is oversteer and one of these is understeer. Um, and I just, by the years long ago that I watched Top Gear and Richard Hammond had a great little explainer on this that I've completely forgotten.

I'm thinking oversteer is when you lose grip on the rear wheels. So your rear is going to kick out. That means that understeer is when you're losing grip on your front wheels. You're not able to corner hard enough and your front is going out. 

Madi: So we can ring the bell, you know, you know qualified guest here.

Kyle: Incredible. 

Madi: Kyle O. 

Kyle: Nobody should ever doubt me ever again. 

Madi: Not with that score. Whip it out. I'll make you a certificate and be like I am certified by this total amateur. 

Kyle: Great. Send me to Miami right now. 

Madi: Well, now that we, you know, got the qualifications out of the way, why are we talking about this? What makes Formula 1 relevant to manufacturing?

Kyle: Right, so these cars are an incredibly unique high tech feat of manufacturing technology, right? So, over the course of an entire season, this whole factory is only going to construct a couple cars. Specific for one driver of which they have two, right? So everything about this car is completely custom made for a. The driver and b. A litany of restrictions and regulations put on by by the industry or by the governing body.

So the fact that these cars exist at all is a huge manufacturing achievement, right? That things can be kept with this tight tolerance and they're so interesting, but the methods they use here are really cool, too. There's a lot of advanced materials technologies. All of these cars are built with on, you know, on the body of with carbon so much so that of the majority of these constructors factories being in this one area in this one valley in the UK, there are a lot of times be carbon layup specialists who will just contract and hop kind of across the street between place to place because all they do is carbon layup because my carbon layup they need to do is so precise and technical. It's like you're making a fighter jet that just goes on the ground instead.

Madi: Okay, so a lot of like precision. 

Kyle: Exactly. 

Madi: Material. Engineering. 

Kyle: Somehow you need to be able to make something so perfect and precise that it's going to perform how you want it at crazy speeds and crazy heats and everything and then you need to do it, you know, three to five times because if one breaks, you need to be able to plop a new piece in immediately and not lose time or days on the race.

Madi: And I think that that gets to kind of the thing that, that I think about when, when making a comparison between these two fields is the logistics involved.

Kyle: Right.

Madi: You can manufacture the thing, but...

Kyle: Right.

Madi: You have to maintain its performance. And there are people involved in that.

Kyle: Right, there's so many people involved in just getting these cars there in the first place.

So if you have a race on a given day, right? All the things that are there are most likely going to be shipped there by one of their major carriers. And these guys will have a whole Formula 1 team devoted to just getting the entirely prefabricated house and garage and parts and disassembled car and everything to these races.

So that takes up, I think it's something like five Boeing triple sevens. Just devoted to shipping these guys everywhere. So, if you want to talk about manufacturing, you talk about how things get there, these entire paddocks, houses, garages, with plumbing and kitchens and heating and cars and tools and parts and everything, all get packed up, put in boxes, shipped off to Baku or Austin or wherever, and then get set up and run the next week, broken down and gone on to the next place.

It's an incredible feat of logistics to just get these things everywhere. Um, because like I said, everything is buildable, but that means that these things are made really interestingly, like the, the garages and paddocks are all modular, right? Every single kitchen and bathroom and meeting room all gets to be put in a plane or on a truck.

So everything needs to be made buildable like that. 

Madi: So when we're talking about like the logistics of moving the items, but also back to the kind of carbon part and like how you're thinking about the design of the different pieces. There's really like a a value chain for Formula 1 where everything needs to fit together.

And then there's like constant motion.

Kyle: Right, there's constant parts moving because when you're in a season, you have a race pretty much every week. So you need to be able to have a car that's out there and going to perform in every week. And if last week you I don't know, were driving your car with an engine fire for a while, and then didn't stop, and then finally stopped, so now the whole back of your car is all melty and gross, and your aerodynamics are ruined, you need to be able to go back to your factory, create new body parts, pieces, carbon, metal, whatever, put that back on the car, make sure it fits, get it back out there, because now you're halfway across the world for the next GP, and then put that back on and have it run again.

So, the fast turn of these kind of things is, it's always just completely amazing to me that people can be making these new parts this fast. We already saw there was a break for the past month or so...

Madi: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: And we've already seen like major changes to the rear wing of some of the cars or to the body of some of the cars.

Like they've already been changing their body design even outside of a wind tunnel, all just based on, you know, computer simulation and things like that. 

Madi: And forgive the ignorance here. Are there also like needs to make during race repairs and updates to cars? And what does that like? How does that kind of factor in like a melted car is different than maybe a wheel or something?

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. So you are required to pit at least twice during a full race. And normally when this happens, you're changing your tires because you have to. You, you can't use the same type of tire of which there's soft, medium, hard throughout the whole race. So you always have to pit a little bit anyway.

And this is to get new tires because yours are now kind of frayed or worn or whatever. But sometimes if there's debris on the track or something, you'll hit your front wing and then that whole front wing will also come off and you can put a new one on. 

Madi: Okay. 

Kyle: This is all in the context of pits needing to be under, you know, four-ish seconds to be considered, you know, good.

The really, really fast ones are under three. And that's all four tires coming off, other parts coming off. You can't replace, you know, gas or anything, but these kind of... Body part repairs happen. Yeah, right. Especially with debris on the track or whatever, because as soon as you take a little nick in that carbon fiber design, that's it compromises the structure and now the whole thing can shatter.

So carbon as a really finicky material means you have to do a lot of these things really fast. 

Madi: If you're optimizing within like a second, right? Three or four seconds each time that the car comes in. Are the races that close where like one second? 

Kyle: So the, yeah, it'll be, uh, unless you're a certain, uh, Dutch Red Bull racer, a lot of times the differences between you and cars around you is going to be no more than a couple of seconds.

So if you're saying I need to pit at some point and I will get a speed boost when I get on these other tires, then I need to strategically figure out when I want to go into the pit, because even if I'm losing a place for the sake of going in, I'm getting put on, uh, soft tires so I can go faster and I'll be able to make up that lost time.

But all of that strategy is involved with when people pit, what tires they go to, because that's not standardized. Um, and that's part of what makes it really interesting. 

Madi: And are those, that seems like some of that is just driver decision making but part of it would be like continuous improvement efforts by the pit team.

Kyle: Right. 

Madi: To make that faster.

Kyle: Yeah, so drivers have a whole team of engineers behind them and they'll have like a race coach or engineer that's talking in their ear I mean like I think we think we need to pit now. We're looking at the sensors on your car. This thing's not going right. This is too high, you know, whatever so they'll have an entire team of engineers behind them helping strategize how they're doing these things by deciding when to you know, going to the pit, what tires to use, things like that are what makes the strategy of this really exciting on top of, you know, everything that comes with the normal skill inherent in racing.

Madi: And the other part of the strategy. And you mentioned this earlier when we were talking a little bit about rules and the, um, not the engine, the power unit. 

Kyle: Yeah, power unit. 

Madi: There you go, power unit, yeah look at, learning.

Um so it seems like you have all these experts that they'd start to just converge on having the exact same car like what governs that and what, what, what's changing there.

Kyle: Right, oh, yeah. So like I said, almost all of these constructors, they're called have their place in this one valley near Silverstone in the UK.

So they tend to share not designs, but resources between there are, like I said, these contractors that will go between different constructors and help them out. On top of that, who makes the car isn't necessarily who makes the engine. So Honda, for example, will make an engine that's going in somebody else's car body.

So collaboration between these manufacturers happens often, and sometimes that allegedly gets a little bit more into copying and that's where some of the drama of the recent years has come about where people look at a car and say that looks too much like Mercedes cars. Surely they stole some brake duct shape or something, right?

So that kind of cross competition is really interesting because when you think about how these things are made, these cars are so precise that you can't really accurately simulate everything they're doing. So to your question. There's a lot of regulations and restrictions that are put on constructors to try to level the playing field here.

And one of the main ones is limiting the amount of time that you have in the wind tunnel. And we've seen this make a huge impact in recent years, where teams that do worse in previous years have more time in the tunnel in the next year, because that's really where you get to do all of your testing.

Since you're manufacturing these completely custom parts, being able to change millimeters or whatever on a dimension is is doable and really important. Now that being said, there are a lot of new changes coming to the power unit, uh, in 2026. 

Madi: Okay. So a couple of years still. 

Kyle: It's a couple of years.

We have, we have a couple left, but most notably, um, one of those two pieces in the electric half of the power unit are going away. It's essentially like a piece that goes in the turbocharger is going away. And what that means is that people are completely able to redesign their engine power unit, um, almost from scratch.

Uh, so there are new manufacturers coming in. Ford is actually coming back. So Ford has a pretty good history with Formula 1. You know, they owned the Jaguar F1 team, which left in 2004. But with them coming back as a partnership with Red Bull, there's now two American representatives in the paddock, being Ford, um, advising Red Bull on, by their words, mostly the electric half and the battery half of, of their power unit, and, uh, Haas, who are headquartered in North Carolina, I believe.

Madi: Gotcha. 

Kyle: Them coming back in is really interesting. There may be a fully American manufacturer in as well in a partnership with Cadillac, but they've submitted a proposal to join. And that proposal is yet to be decided on. 

Madi: And that reentry is into 2026. 

Kyle: Correct. That's yeah, into the 2026 season. 

Madi: Yeah, that's wow. It took a couple decades off coming back with new rules.

Kyle: Right. Yeah. And when these regulations change, the amount that the cars need to change is significant, right? There was a change two years ago regarding downforce and how the car is shaped. So all of the cars needed to be remade and remanufactured to accommodate this thing that happens when the car is really close to the ground.

Um, and it actually kind of sticks to the ground more, but yeah, these are all need to be remade every single year. You're only making a couple cars, so it's not even like you're running a lot off the factory line. They just have to be perfect. 

Madi: Well, knowing the complexity, the new players, the way the logistics and materials are working and give you a little soapbox right now with all of that together, why don't you share a couple of predictions on performance and adjustments that you either hope or expect to see for 2026?

Kyle: Yeah. So I'm really, really interested to see what Ford does. Ford has put a lot of money into electric development in general. We can see, you know, with their, their new cars coming out and everything with a Ford built power train, they're really putting a lot of R and D money and betting hard on good electric power production.

So I'm really interested to see how Red Bull does, which as dominant of they've been already, um, now, ideally they even have more expertise and design in the electric half of their power unit. I am also really interested to see what happens with, you know, the, the big names that have been around forever, like the Ferraris and the Mercedes of the world.

Ferraris had a, unfortunately checkered history this year, but historically they're one of, you know, the longest standing great constructors. So since they have their own factory and can make a lot of these things in house, I'm curious to see how they do as well. But overall, there's a lot going on in Formula E, which is the electric version of Formula 1.

So by 2026, I can see these things converging a lot more on how popular they are, but the main thing to watch is going to be this engine change and see as people are able to essentially make a electric half of the engine that is as powerful as the internal combustion half, how that changes their strategy and, and how they work on, um, things like, you know, breaking and cornering.

Um, it should be really, really interesting. 

Madi: We got sustainability. We got competition. We got manufacturing. We got some new rules. 

Kyle: Sustainability is actually a whole big, um, part that the FIA, the whole governing body has been pushing, right? So even by 2026, another one of these things that they're doing is saying all of the fuel In the cars is going to be quote unquote sustainable as well.

So I'm not sure exactly what that means if it's, you know, all like corn based or if they're turning wind into gasoline, but that's been one of their main focuses for the past couple of years. So it's also driven some, some interesting changes with the amount of gas you can carry and the materials you can use and things like that.

Madi: Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining for this bonus episode. 

Kyle: Of course, any time. 

Madi: It's a really cool space, and if anyone has any, you know, questions or thoughts, definitely ping Kyle, especially on his takes. 

Kyle: Yes, please. Tell me how wrong I am in every single detail. 

Madi: Alright. 

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