Formula One: As Michael Schumacher prepares to take the Formula One crown, possibly at the French Grand Prix this weekend, some see the sport as simply an arena of noise, advertising money and burning rubber. Wrong. looks over the enormous contribution of Formula One to standards of reliability and safety in the cars we use every day
There are close to 60 million followers of Formula One racing in a typical season. This is partly why major car manufacturers take part.
It's the biggest billboard they can buy, albeit an expensive one. An annual bill of well over €100 million is not unusual to field a team in what is generally accepted as one of the most costly sports in the world.
But is there more benefit than mere branding? Does the ordinary driver get something out of the millions paid to family Schumachers and their support teams and the hardware needed to get their - most of the time - earthbound flying machines safely around the most challenging racing circuits on the globe?
Think disc brakes. Think wishbone suspension. Think engines that can now last well beyond the life of the car in your driveway. Think telematics that operate the controls of your car. Think economy that doesn't at all relate to the ferocious fuel-gulping of Schumie's flaming Ferrari in full cry. Think safety.
Think exotic materials for building components, engines and bodyshells. Think more air-efficient bodies. Think faster car design. Think tyres that are safer and more long-lasting.
All those and more have in some way or another been developed or improved by motor racing. Even if it is very much a "chicken-and-egg" situation on which comes first, race-winning or automotive technology, there's little doubt that the two are interconnected. Peter Ball, spokesman for Toyota's Formula One team, says unequivocally that the company's recent entry to the Big Racing Game "will help us to bring better cars to the marketplace."
The investment of this newest entrant to the Formula One "circus" includes a 300-employee dedicated factory in Cologne to produce its cars. As well as the bodies, the factory produces 300 engines which will be needed for its current first season.
And with the car speeds and the mechanical hardships getting ever more severe, the engines have to become much more reliable at these extremes. Making that happen translates directly back to what will eventually go into the 1.1-litre engine powering your Yaris.
Engine technologies improve too: the variable valve timing which an increasing number of road cars have under their camcovers was developed in racing applications, as was the use of ceramics in components, and turbocharging.
Engine makers such as Honda, suppliers to Jordan and BAR, constantly receive data collected by its engineers on the Formula One tracks of the world and use it to improve the engine under the hood of products such as the Civic and the Jazz.
A Grand Prix engine may last only the 90 minutes or so it needs to finish a race, but the couple of seconds by which it might perform better than its competitor could mean an extra point in the championship, each one of which is estimated to be worth a million euros in road car marketplace kudos.
The increased use of aluminium in today's road car engines, with its lightness and economy benefits, can be directly pedigreed back to developments by race engine specialists such as the old Coventry enginebuilders of Climax fame, which kind of dates me. But the technology has moved on since then. Even though F1 rules restrict use of expensive "exotic" materials in certain areas, in the interests of fair play, our Fiestas and similar are benefiting.
Racing has even built today's famous marques: when Henry Ford entered and won a race at Grosse Point, Michigan, in 1901, he immediately earned himself a local reputation as a car builder which allowed him to form the Ford Motor Company two years later.
In the subsequent days of the "Tin Lizzie" Model T, that car became a staple for "everyman" to get into car racing, while in the 1950s and 1960s the company's NASCAR triumphs and later the GT40 domination of Le Mans provided the blue oval not only with a sexy profile, but with testbeds to enhance reliability and performance.
When I began driving, the drum brakes on my father's Ford Consul needed adjustment every 3,000 miles and replacement at around 9,000, and in between gave me many unnerving stops because of imbalance and wettings in any deep puddle. Today's road cars have disc brakes at least on the front, first used in Le Mans in the 1950s, developed in Formula One racing. Typically today they don't need attention on a road car for some 30,000 miles or even longer.
While we may cheer at the extraordinary accelerative abilities of racing cars, how superbly well they stop can be a far more interesting experience. Brake assist systems in today's Primeras, Mondeos and Lagunas can be traced directly back to sensor and electro-mechanical developments in motor racing.
Many road cars today use variations of independent wishbone suspension. This was first invented for race cars in the 1930s. Later, active suspension systems were developed by Formula One racers, until they were banned because they provided some teams with too much advantage against those who used just their driving skills. But today's increasingly common intelligent suspension systems owe their current place to race-led development.
Then there's that most important contact with the road, the tyres "footprints". Avid watchers of Formula One know that the two current biggies are Bridgestone and Pirelli, each providing quite different performance profiles to their racing customers.
The tyre requirements of a race car and a road car are quite different - the Formula One tyre, for instance, is softer and is not required to drive further than a couple of hundred kilometres under maximum pressure. Yet, the racing experience in performance and design does have a, perhaps reverse, relevance to what's under your and my cars.
When Goodyear was in the Formula One rubber business, it went on record as saying that half of the benefit was in tyre technology improvement.
A Formula One car is a small vehicle, and is also a missile bolting at up to 300 kph and even more. We regularly see them impacting at such speeds: these days, the drivers usually walk away from accidents that less than a decade ago could have killed their counterparts. And did.
The technology in structural design, "crumpleability" and safety cages here also translates directly into the improvement in "survivability" in road cars which have recently shown a massive improvement in newer models against their predecessors in the Euro NCAP crash test series.
Seatbelt technology has also been enhanced from the very exacting requirements of race and rally cars. Airbags have not, because airbags have never to my knowledge been used in racing cars. But the telemetric information from high-level racing incidents produces very important information on how sudden changes in G-forces can affect the body.
In 1996, a Formula One regulation required a raised side to the cockpit and a "deformable" section around the head which cut the G-forces in a typical side impact from 192 to 75.5. In such a former impact, the driver's head would have for a few but fatal milliseconds have weighed a tonne!
This life-saving improvement will likely be enhanced even further when a new head-and-neck restraint system (HANS) is made mandatory in the next season. It's not unlikely that it will find itself in a road car in the future.
That kind of improvement and the information of how it has been achieved has been invaluable to carmakers intent on making their products safer in less extreme circumstances, but in car environments much less "cosy" than a single-seater racing car.
Finally to telematics, which we see in operation on TV with race managers staring intently at screens which provide several hundred different bits of information every second. Telematics have helped to revolutionisethe engine management computer systems in everyday road cars.
The technology means that your service technician can diagnose previously indecipherable problems - "it WAS making a funny noise on the Naas Road, I tell you!" In the very near future it will allow you to automatically maintain distance between your car and the one in front.
It will even take its own evasive action quicker than you could react yourself. All this is, in no small measure, due to the money spent by a seemingly extravagant racing team in requiring to know about and fix problems without the car ever coming off the track. So Ferrari pays "Schumie" a reputed €25 million a year to keep its prancing horse in the winner's enclosure, and it's entitled to do everything to protect its investment.
Face it, you're not worth anything like that. But, indirectly, they're looking after you too. As are Toyota, Honda, Bridgestone, BMW, Mercedes, Renault, Ford and even guys who don't build road cars. Thank you, guys.