Look at your steering wheel. Now look down. Look back up. Your steering wheel is now this thing.
I’m using an old-ass clichéd joke.
This is an Formula 1 steering wheel. It’s used to speak to the pits, adjust break bias, activate turbo boost (I am not kidding), move parts of the car around, even get you a drink. Like almost everything else on an F1 car, it is made of carbon fiber, and is ridiculously expensive. Why carbon fiber? Because it’s light, and absorbs impacts extremely well. The steering wheel has to be able to be removed in five seconds in case of a crash, since the seating area on this thing is so tight, you can’t get in and out with the steering wheel in place.
Here’s an Italian guy explaining how the steering wheel for last year’s Ferrari worked.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6HFvF-QfTo
Now: all that stuff he said about how KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) isn’t in place anymore, and that makes the wheel easier to deal with? That’s no longer true. KERS is back in this year, in an effort to have more overtaking on the track. Just like in your wimpy Prius, it takes energy released under breaking, and charges a battery with it. That battery can then be accessed to provide 80 more horsepower. You can use it all at once, or gradually over a lap, but once the battery is drained, you have to wait until the next lap to use it again. It was tried in 2009 to extremely mixed results. Ferrari won the Belgian Grand Prix with it, but it also caused a fire in Red Bull’s factory, and shocked a mechanic for BMW Sauber. Bernie Ecclestone, the commercial rights holder for F1 believes that F1 isn’t more massively popular worldwide because there’s not enough passing. That’s a little like saying that soccer (or football, for those of you who actually watch it) isn’t more popular because the total score isn’t higher. As a result, KERS is back in, as is the button that enables it, and the display that shows how much charge you have left.
Also added this year is a moveable rear wing. The button for this opens a flap on the rear wing that stalls it out, reducing downforce, and increasing your straight line speed. This can only be used if you are within one second of the car in front of you, and if you deploy it, the car in front of you cannot. In the first race of the season, no one successfully employed this option to pass anyone, but a few people used it to spin out on turns. So, mission accomplished!
Last year, McLaren employed a genius system to gain more speed on straights. They installed an air intake port in the cockpit that the driver could block with their knee. When blocked, air traveled over the car normally. When opened, air bypassed the rear wing, reducing downforce. Like every genius interpretation of the rules of car construction, this was kept secret until the first race, and then every other manufacturer simultaneously complained it was a breach of the rules, and came up with their own. Ferrari’s required the driver to activate it with his hand, which became a safety issue. While barreling down the track at almost 200 miles per hour, the driver had to take one hand off the steering wheel. This year, drivers are making the same complaint about the steering wheel itself.
There’s so much going on with this year’s wheel, drivers feel they are close to becoming too difficult to operate. Nick Heidfeld feels that the wheels have reached a saturation point, and the fuck up levels are extremely high, while Fernando Alonso thinks that he needs to stop being a pussy.
The argument could be made that if everyone has the same access to KERS, then the average speed of all cars would increase, leveling the field and defeating the purpose. Also, the argument could be made that Sebastian Vettel smoked everyone in Australia without even having KERS installed on his car (this is actually true).
Here’s a link to a detailed explanation on what each button did on BMW’s 2009 wheel. There was no KERS button, because after they shocked a guy, BMW decided not to run it.
Also, here’s another video, this one in English and from Lotus, explaining how their wheel works.
