There’s a reasonable amount of information out there covering the cost of Formula 1 cars and how expensive accidents are for the teams, but it can be hard to understand where all that money goes.
A new video from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 Team offers an insight into just how labor-intensive the race cars are to make. More specifically, it shows a selection of engineers working the night shift at the team’s U.K. factory and gives us a hint of the scale of its operation.
I have heard F1 teams talking about working through the night in the past, but I never realized that, at least for a big team like Mercedes, the factory is just always operational.
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It can also be hard to understand why parts cost so much without context. Sure, carbon fiber is expensive yet it goes on some production cars these days. The video shows you, though, that the level of attention is so big that a group of workers are sanding the floor of the car down by hand and explaini that, from start to finish, it takes about a week to make. And the floor, while very significant for the car’s performance, is not nearly as dynamic as the suspension parts that have to be laser-measured in order to ensure millimetric precision and perfection to function properly.
Meanwhile, for anything near the wheels, every part must be laser scanned in order to ensure that it’s exactly the same as the part that was developed in the design software. Of course, it makes sense that if the part you produce isn’t identical to the part you designed that it won’t work properly, and the team wants to ensure that everything is manufactured 100 percent according to spec.
Taken in context, then, with the amount of human attention and labor that goes into ensuring that everything is perfect, you can see why every single part (and, thus, the car as a whole) costs so much to produce. And that’s just what goes on at night.
With the amount of effort that it exerts, you can also understand why in recent years the Mercedes F1 team has been able to provide its drivers with what was, more often than not, the best car on the grid.