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Christine Lears secret is out.As a prac-tical girl, she chose a practical careerpath, one that suited well her univer-

sity training in mathematics: she went intocomputers. Yet something didnt feel right.

From an early age Lear has been fascinated bycars. And not just any old cars. Lears once-secret obsession is with Formula 1, the pin-nacle of high-octane motor racing.

Working in Formula 1 has always beenmy dream, she now admits. But even whenshe got a chance to fulfil that dream aresearch position in a university aerodynam-ics group with close ties to the racing-carindustry she kept her secret to herself.Convinced that it was just wishful thinking,she did not dare confess her hopes, and pur-sued a PhD investigating ways to reduce thehazardous airflow patterns that form in an

aircrafts wake.Or,as she puts it,how to landmore planes at Heathrow.

But she never lost the excitement she feltduring Formula 1 races whenever the com-mentator referred to new aero packagesandother tantalizing revolutions in car perfor-mance.She had always wanted to know whatlay behind the jargon,and rather than regretnever having tried, she finally decided topursue her childhood ambition.

Lear now has the job of her dreams.In May she joined the Switzerland-basedSauber-Petronas team,with prime responsi-bility for developing key aerodynamic com-

ponents on its Formula 1 car. There was arunning joke in the office about my very first job with the team, she recalls. Take awoman and give her the mirrors.But havingproved her worth,she now has a new secret tokeep in this highly competitive industryshe is not allowed to divulge the details ofprojects she is working on.

Academic research has its highs and lows,but there is always some comfort in knowingthat the laws of nature underlying your workare likely to be fixed, just waiting to berevealed. If it can be considered a race at all,then it is simply a race to be the first touncover these inner workings.

The pressures of research in Formula 1

are very different. The laws of nature maybe unchangeable, but not so the laws of thesport.The rules under which the teams oper-ate alter from season to season, motivatedby a desire to keep car speeds within safe lim-its while making the cars unpredictableenough to keep drivers and spectators on their toes.The performance ofa car that ishard to handle at speed ultimately dependson the skills of the person behind the wheel,which is why Formula 1 has champions, notmere drivers.

Rapid reactions

The car designers, of course, have a very dif-ferent goal. For them, their machine needsto go as fast as is physically possible. It needsto handle like a dream, glued to the road inthe tightest of corners.And it needs to win.

Whereas an academic may view the idea ofabandoning a cherished line of enquiry withconsiderable dismay, the same is not true forrace engineers.Rule changes are never a set-back, says Peter Bearman, director of aero-nautics at Imperial College London andmentor to Lear and numerous other Formula1 recruits.They relish the challenge.

Willem Toet, senior aerodynamicist with

the BAR-Honda Formula 1 team, agrees.Back in the spring of 1994, car performancehad reached an all-time high and, over onerace weekend, tragically culminated in thedeaths of two Formula 1 drivers Austriannewcomer Roland Ratzenberger and Brazil-ian champion Ayrton Senna. In their bid toimprove car safety, the rule-makers imposeddrastic changes to the design specifications,giving the teams only two weeks to comply.Byrestricting the dimensions of critical aerody-namic components, their aim was to reduce

the downforce (and hence speed) that thecars could sustain under race conditions.Toet remembers the ensuing flurry of

activity well. He and his colleagues resortedto cutting away chunks of the finely honedbodywork of their car to crudely bring it intoline with the new specifications. The down-force of the butchered machine immediatelydropped by 30%.But within a matter ofdays,redesign and tweaking of the downsizedcomponents helped them to recover half ofthe lost performance, maintaining the carscompetitive edge. Extreme physical andmental work was required a true intelli-gence test,says Toet.

This high-pressure environment may

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With the rules of the game changing before everyseason, Formula 1 engineers often have a matter

of weeks to redesign their car before it is tested

on the track. Karl Ziemelis and Charles Wenz join

the race to the start line.

Science in the

FAST LANE

Crash course: engineering teams have significantly improved safety in Formula 1 even during

accidents and with data from cars on the racetrack (right), they have also boosted performance.

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help to explain why Formula 1 recruits heav-ily from academia. My last three PhD stu-dents all went into Formula 1,says Bearman,whose department has now provided about40 engineers for the industry.One of his cur-rent students, Jonathan Pegrum, is clearabout what attracts him to Formula 1.I wantto use what I have learned, says Pegrum,inaerodynamics, it is hard to think of anotherindustry that is at the cutting edge.

Many of the people we employ on theengineering side come straight from univer-sity, says Nicholas Tombazis, chief aerody-namics engineer at the McLaren-Mercedes

team. Tombazis especially values the solidunderstanding in aerodynamics that aca-demic training provides, and his team cur-rently supports two PhD projects inBearmans group.

But this has not always been the case.Although there is now genuine admirationin the engineering community for the tech-nical achievements that underpin a Formula1 car, in the early days of the sport it wasviewed with more suspicion.Cowboys play-ing with fire,according to Brian ORourke,chief composites engineer at the Williams-BMW team.

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Rewind to the early 1970s.Recognizing itslack of aerodynamic expertise,the Formula 1industry approached the aeronautics groupat Imperial College to help solve a naggingproblem: cooling. The cars of that era had afront-mounted radiator, the air from whichwas funnelled up through the nose of the carand inconveniently out through thecockpit.The result? One driver,medium rare.

Solving this problem resulted in a funda-mental rethink about the positions of theradiators themselves (they are now side-mounted),followed by a redesign of the carsnose into the now-familiar, and more aero-dynamically efficient,pointed shape.

Taming the force

This was also a time when wind-tunneltechniques underwent rapid development most notably the introduction of rollingroads. The flow of air around a moving cardepends not only on its shape, but also oninteractions with the road underneath. To

correctly mimic a car moving at speed, theunderlying surface needs to move in pacewith the flowing air, rather than stayingmotionless as was previously the case.

A deeper understanding of the interac-tions between car, air and road led to newways of exploiting aerodynamic effects.Instead of focusing mostly on drag reduc-tion, engineers discovered that you couldmake tremendous gains in performance byusing aerodynamics to stick the car to theroad. This downforce is essentially thereverse of the lift that keeps planes in the air,and is the main role of the wingsattached to

the nose and rear of the car.In the 1970s,Lotus engineers realized that

the entire car could be made to act like a giantinverted wing if the underside was suitablycontoured. This concept became known asthe ground effect, and led to the introduc-tion of various devices including road-hugging skirts to exploit it. Most werethen predictably banned.Despite all the rulechanges, the combined downforce andground effect on modern cars would be suffi-cient, in theory, for them to drive upsidedown on a ceiling at high speed.

Plane sailingBut even with these aerodynamic principlesfirmly in place, designing cars remains achallenge when it comes to controllingairflow around the chassis, racing cars havea decidedly nasty shape. And the cars havedifferent aerodynamic needs depending onthe track conditions meaning specificfeatures change from race to race. So newaerodynamic ideas will continue to featureheavily in Formula 1 racing, and the teamsall now have highly qualified aerodynami-cists devoted to the task.

It has been said that a modern Formula 1car has more in common with a jet fighterthan an ordinary road car. But few would

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from the rapid returns. In contrast to thesedentary pace of university research,devel-opment of a Formula 1 car takes place at abreakneck speed. What I am working on

right now could appear on the car in a race ortwo, she says. Barney Garrood, a recentrecruit to the Ferrari team,says that this was akey factor in his decision to make the movefrom academia. Research in the aerospacesector is static in comparison, with typicaldevelopment times of 10 to 15 years,he says.This is much more exciting.

Then there are the resources. The multi-million-dollar budgets behind a Formula 1team would be the envy of most researchgroups.No surprise then that Bearman refersto the McLaren Technology Centre inWoking, UK, as a temple to technology.

With its sweeping architecture and state-of-the-art facilities, this striking establish-ment was designed to inspire. McLarenwanted to create an environment that willmotivate and influence people who workwithin it,says Tombazis.

For Lear and her former academic col-leagues, gone are the frustrations of limitedtechnical support,or killing time while wait-ing for a slot on a universitys over-sub-scribed facilities.These young guns now findthemselves immersed in a continuous andrapid cycle of designing, building and test-ing.The aim is to have new parts on the car

for every race,says Lear.And like most researchers, those in For-mula 1 get a kick from knowing their workmakes a difference. The goals may be morelimited in a strict scientific sense, but thework has more immediacy than in almostany other field of enquiry. Being able topoint to your own parts on a car and thenseeing that car win a race is a real thrill,says Garrood.

And for Lear, perhaps the biggest thrill ofall comes from having realized her dream.Ina secretive profession, this is one secret thatshe is more than happy to share. Karl Ziemelis and Charles Wenz are Natures resident

petrolheads.

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There is great breadth and depth of knowl-edge in the research community, saysORourke,but the chances of anyone look-ing at the exact configuration we need aresmall. Still, he adds:It is very useful notto say comforting to know who the mainnames are when you get into a difficult situa-tion and need to ask an opinion.

Tuned inAnd when time and money allow, a For-mula 1 team will commission a piece ofresearch work, ranging from an undergrad-uate project right up to supporting a PhD

thesis. I have been involved in around 20such studies over the years, says ORourke,although he notes that the projects have tobe chosen carefully to balance the teamsand the students needs.

Formula 1 has much more glamour thanacademia, but is it the best career move fora young researcher? After all, they areunlikely to have as much control over theirresearch as in academia, the hours are longbut they wont publish anything, and theywill experience little of the Monte-Carlolifestyle of the celebrity drivers.Even attend-ing a race is a rare event.So is it worth makingthe switch?

For Lear, much of the excitement comes

think of racing car aerodynamics as beingmore complex still.According to Xin Zhang,an aerodynamicist at the University ofSouthampton,UK, Formula 1 has pushed thescience and engineering expertise in someareas to a level higher than that of aerospaceengineering. In his view, understanding theflow around the streamlined body of an air-craft is straightforward by comparison.

And despite the secretive nature of theFormula 1 industry, the flow of informationfrom aeronautics to racing is beginning toreverse. When Britains Ministry of Defencebegan developing the current Harrier fighter jet, the GR.7, it drew on the expertisein composite materials accumulated byFormula 1 engineers.

In Formula 1, everyone likes an accidentthat people walk awayfrom. Certainly, therace coverage revels inspectacular high-speedaccidents from which

the drivers emerge rela-tively unscathed beforeoffering a cheery, yetrelieved, wave to thewatching fans.

Of course accidentsdont happen by design.Wed far rather the dri-vers finish the racesafely, says Steve Fos-ter, head of compositedesign at the Jaguar-Cosworth team. Butcombining a thorough-

bred race car with the driverspassion for vic-tory results in a heady mix that occasionallyends in catastrophe. Formula 1 drivers arewell aware of the risks involved when takingto the track.And behind the scenes,materialsscientists such as Foster and ORourke areworking hard to improve driver safety.

When composite materials made theirdebut in Formula 1 in the early 1980s, theywere little known to the racing industry,andeven less understood. As ORourke recalls,the teams were keen to exploit materials withhigh stiffness and low weight advantagesthat they had heard about but did not know

how to achieve.Later, when compulsory crash testing ofthe driver cockpit was introduced in 1988,attention shifted away from stiffness to themore complex material property known asstrength performance. This is essential forensuring driver safety during impact. Today,the composites that make up the cockpit haveto survive multiple impact tests before the caris even allowed to race. Modern compositesenable levels of crashworthiness and protec-tion that would be impossible to achieve withtraditional materials,says Foster.

Despite these successes, working withthese materials is too often a black art, andthis is where the team has its work cut out.

Its a blast: aerodynamics students assess a racing prototype in a wind tunnel at Imperial College.

Living the dream: Christine Lear has fulfilled her racing ambition.

E.LEAR

P.BEARMAN

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