BAR Honda

Everything-the four engines, hundreds of tires, tire warmers, diagnostic computers, even the paint for the pit floor-is budgeted, inventoried and flown to every race. It then makes sense to employ the lightest, most durable and effective components out of carbon fiber anywhere it can be utilized. Almost everything is made of carbon fiber, along with the Brembo big brakes. All of the ancillary and extraneous elements of the pit are fabricated out of carbon fiber as well, even items such as the housing of the external blower that cools the engines when they come in from revving at 18,500 rpm, the handheld signs they use and the headphone trees that house the radio headsets everyone wears. This is planning to win on a scale that's beyond the track. These teams literally bring their worlds with them to every race on the circuit, and persevere on the circuit with R&D, testing and constantly collecting information and research to make their teams even incrementally better.

If you have ever attended a Honda Corporate event you may have been bombarded with messages about how Honda is not just a car company or a racing team, but that the main thrust of Honda is technology development and being at a BAR Honda F1 event speaks that message the loudest. At BAR Honda, as well as other teams, bi-directional telemetry is a normal and essential part of operations. The key members of the tech team have radio headsets on for clandestine team communication, handheld PDAs in their possession at all times, exchanging infrared data with the car, engine and their main diagnostic computers and each other. As well, through telemetry, rather than the driver, the tech team is able to regulate such elements as fuel consumption or braking controls electronically, and the main computers are connected to operating table type areas that contain and display real-time stats as they are working; each engine is constantly calibrated, coddled and comforted like the most cherished baby.

The so-called digital versus analog argument will always exist, symbolically juxtaposed onto speed seekers in all walks of life. As we all know, ECUs and chip upgrades are notions that old school wrenches once called blasphemous to the craft of engine-building, but moving forward, technology is the future of speed. The notion that Honda is primarily a technology company, which is the core of the company's thrust moving into the clean fuel era and beyond provides fodder for digital generation's daydreams of racing to the future.

There's a long list of F1 advancements and affectations of our daily driving habits and interests, from wheel technology, to using exhaust heat to create downforce, to safety standards for other classes of racing (even Steph Papadakis uses a HANS, Head And Neck Safety device-regulation F1 equipment). Like it or not, Formula One technology was the impetus for today's current standards such as higher revving engines with smaller displacements, paved the way for the V-TEC engine setups, paddle shift and tiptronic technology, and lighter weight engine components crafted of high-tech materials offering more power-to-weight ratio in a vehicle.