Spending upwards of £10 million on an F1 car might seem logical if the money went towards the engine. Guess again. It’s the high price of Titanium and Carbon FIbres that make building an F1 car so costly. To better understand why they would spend so much money on materials we have to understand the importance of margins in F1
In a race consisting of 50 laps, if a car comes in 10 seconds off the lead, they would finish in a far off 4th place position. 10 seconds off the lead, and the difference between 1st and 4th is lost. Money spent in the F1 world is justified by the return they deliver, and losing a race is not a justified return.
A spending breakdown shows that carbon fiber is the single largest expense for an F1 team. The F1 monocoque is made of carbon fiber that costs approximately (\pounds1,000) per square meter, and that’s just for the basic materials. Technicians have to finish the lay-up process manually, which is a very time-consuming and costly part of the production. Each layer has to be placed in the exact right position so that it will provide strength. After the lay-up process, the entire structure has to be placed in an autoclave, which is a machine that operates in high demand. It also requires expensive operating costs and will take several hours to finish the necessary steps for the final production in an autoclave.
Then, the teams have to build more for the monocoque. They have to because there are regulations that say teams must have extra backup chassis available, and due to accidents, more monocoques are needed. That chassis carbon fiber and production costs F1 teams millions of pounds each season because there are several monocoques made per team. If the teams have no luck with accidents, it’s not uncommon for them to use up around three or four monocoques in a season.
Carbon fiber is also used in the bodywork, floors, wings, and many other small parts. Each individual part requires a mold, a separate lay-up, and an independent curing cycle. A front wing, which costs over £100,000, must be replaced after every session if it gets damaged. The costs can add up very quickly. Teams must also bring multiple bodywork sets to every race to deal with different aerodynamic setups and bodywork damage.
The initial raw costs of titanium components are very high. It is a lot more expensive than steel, aluminium, and other comparable materials, as it is about ten times more expensive than steel and three times more expensive than aluminium. Beyond the material costs, titanium is troublesome to machine. It chips and wears down tools, generates a lot of heat, and is an overall difficult material to work with. A suspension part that takes an hour of machining in aluminium can take up to five times longer with titanium. These added machining hours are excessive when producing many parts like with F1 components.
F1 teams utilize titanium in various components such as suspension parts, fasteners, and exhaust parts, including brake caliper pistons. Each titanium bolt costs £20, while a steel bolt costs only 50p. However, F1 cars contain thousands of bolts and fasteners. While the weight saving of titanium, per bolt, is only a few grams, collectively, it results in several kilograms across the entire car, thus justifying the expense.
The exhaust system, in particular, deserves mentioning as costing more than the average suspension system. The superalloy used in the F1 exhaust system is Inconel, a nickel-based superalloy. One exhaust system could cost a team £50,000. Due to various reasons, including development of different specifications, teams could burn through several exhaust systems in a season. Apart from the cost, the unique properties of Inconel is the only metal that can take the combination of highly extreme conditions that F1 exhaust systems go through, such as extensive heat, extreme temps, and metal fatigue.
From a competitive angle, this spending makes total sense. There are cutthroat options when it comes to material choices, and if your competitors are using the latest in carbon fibre technology and exotic titanium alloys, you can’t risk fall behind. The moment you go with a cheaper alternative, your competitors are stronger and faster, yielding better outcomes and more prize money, and for you, worse outcomes, and a real risk of losing sponsors. Putting this in the simplest of terms, it all becomes cash flow. Spending on materials becomes a cash flow trap as teams spend millions, for the non-spending cost you even worse in terms of losing competitive edge.
The other layer comes in the form of development costs. Before you can actually put to use a new improved carbon fibre lay-up, or a new titanium alloy, you’ll need to put in some of your resources for testing, and that means the manufacturing of some test pieces, running all sorts of stress test, using computer simulations, and maybe even crashing some costly components to determine their risk and safety characteristics. A new chassis design, for instance, could set you back a couple of hundreds of thousand dollars in development costs before the first full race-ready version is even built.
Staff expertise contributes to the material expenses too. With these materials, the top-tier professionals need to work. It is uncommon for a composite technician to be able to lay up carbon fibre to F1 standards, and these people are very expensive to hire. Rarely too, are machinists who are competent to work with titanium and other exotic alloys. Because the top-tier professionals work with them, teams invest a lot into training and retaining these people.
Some teams have made attempts to cheaply source materials, and the results are often unsatisfactory. Before, the performance deficit would be tracked, and the results would be poor, because there would be a slight diminishing quality of carbon fibre, or in non-critical areas, there would be a substitution of titanium for aluminium. This was a cheap, poor quality, and non-critical replacement. This is F1 s top-tier competitors taken on a sheepskin. It is poor in quality and non-critical, yet a product of capitalism.
The purchase of titanium and carbon fibre is investment of modern F1, wasteful is a matter of perspective even in excess. Performance that is FM- unmatched, and even in a poorly made product meant to poorly protect the top-tier competitors, that is, the F1 competitors in disguise.