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How F1 Drivers "Sit" (Someone, Please, Design These Guys a Proper Seat)
I'm actually on my way to the chiropractorI'm actually on my way to the chiropractor
Formula One racing is a testing ground where manufacturers can push automotive engineering to extreme limits in the hopes of achieving breakthroughs. Things like radial tires, traction control, anti-lock brakes and even steering-wheel-mounted paddle shifters then trickle down to cars in the consumer sector. But one thing that won't migrate from F1 cars to your average Ford Focus: The seating.
In the video below, F1 driver Nico Rosberg (of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team) shows us how insane the seating position is. Looking at photos or footage of any F1 race, the only parts of the driver you can see are the top half of their helmet and their fingers turning the tiny steering wheel, and I always assumed that beneath the cowl, they were in a seated position; I was wrong. You'll also be interested to hear him describe foam as being too heavy, and the limitations of sitting—lying, rather—on carbon fiber:
With all of the attention lavished on an F1 car's mechanicals, it's surprising to hear the lack of design that goes into the seats. Little foam flaps tacked here and there as an afterthought, I mean really? Automotive design students, I smell a thesis project in the making.
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Gel seating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_Wn1EFLa2C8
Thank you Thomas!
http://formula1.about.com/od/drivers/a/Driver_Weights.htm
Okay Core77 is "just a blog" but this article does no good to designers... or me at least.
Ironically, this is perhaps the only time that large scale commercialization and advertising has saved lives. There's a very interesting BBC documentary about the history of F1 safety called "Grand Prix: The Killer Years", in which someone puts it bluntly: "If your company name is on the side of a car, then perhaps you don't want to see a young man being burned to death in it". Which was what used to happen - the lucky ones died were those who died before the almost-inevitable fire started.
As for the whole design-of-the-seat thing, I'll just quote Steve Jobs: Design is how it works. And these seats work. Like everyone else has said, there's is no lack of design here; it's just design in the sense of manned space flight rather than a BMW. Only if you see "engineering" as somehow "not design", does it make sense to say there's a lack of design. But that's BS.
Does nobody else think this F1 thing is taking itself rather too seriously?
There are few (maybe no) products on earth designed as thoroughly as modern F1 cars, when you begin to understand them they are an amazing lesson in the power of design/engineering.
1. Safety
2. Get the driver as low as possible
3. Make it weigh as close to zero as possible
4.-99. ...
100. Comfort and ergonomics
These cars need to withstand enormous crash impacts, there is tremendous design effort expended on materials and crash testing to support that. The seat also needs to be removable in one piece in a very short amount of time to allow the removal of an injured driver without damaging his spinal cord if it's been injured.
For handling you want it to weigh nothing, and for the mass of the driver to be as low as possible. Typical "design" criteria you're grousing about are not important. The driver is in the car no more than a couple hours at a time, it only has to be comfortable enough to allow him to do his job.
Zippy- G suits wouldn't work in a car. Planes experience all their G's vertically, which pushes the blood down into the legs, and a G suit squeezes it back out. A car's peak G's are lateral (cornering) and longitudinal (braking), so the blood doesn't get pushed down. Instead of blood leaving the head, you get inner ear problems, and possibly blood collecting on one side of the brain. You just can't take much more than 5-6 g laterally without experiencing vertigo. (See CART's ill-fated Texas race about 10 years ago.) The only solution is to go slower.
1. They need to have the minimum frontal area possible. Lying position helps this and also lowers centre of gravity.
2. Safety requires that the drivers shoulders are under the body work to prevent them from being thrown out of the car alla Gilles Villeneurve
3. Foam is custom moulded
This is an industry (Formula 1) where grams cost thousands and millions of dollars to shave off and driver comfort is very much an afterthought (not driver safety just ask Robert Kubica for one).
The seat design is optimized to fit the external aerodynamic packaging.
"Taping pads" on for comfort is something done at a race track when transition times between in and out of the car for the driver are between 3 minutes and an hour at test sessions and races and need to be fixed/adjusted/replaced as fast as possible with the least/lightest material possible used.
These are some of the highest paid athletes in the world. Fernando Alonso makes 40 million a YEAR for Ferrari. They are forced to cope with the design of a carbo fiber "couch" that's molded to their body with some foam for cushioning.
I could imagine a woven vectran solution over a carbon fiber framework with a tensioning system or FEA designing flex into the carbon fiber for cushioning. The issue for the driver is to get the most feedback from the car without excessive vibration.
Ski boots could be a parallel, but Lindsey Vonn's boots probably don't have much padding either.
A great solution direction is a quickly layered system to add and subtract the smallest additions and subtractions possible to cushion a driver. Barring that a micro bellows solution where air can be used as a cushion and directed inflation in areas could be filled and deflated with nitrogen to optimize seating comfort for the driver.
A bellows type seat is hard to do because of the forces generated by the driver compressing them and the number of different pad areas required to be used to keep the position correct along with material expansion for additional padding.
It is an intriguing issue you've noted, but surely not ignored as your insinuation indicates.
The best parallel that comes to mind for me is skiing boots. Rental and lower consumer level boots are made with generous space allowance in the shell and relatively thick padding to allow for variance in foot shape. Higher end skiing boots are lighter and allow more control, achieved by using less compliant materials and smaller tolerances. These are usually thermoformed to match the foot shape of the user, and then small pieces of foam are added to modify areas which are producing chafing or pressure.
The requirement for minor modifications is a requirement in high performance areas where there is a human interface, it is not necessarily a hallmark of poor or lacking design.