Question: By how many Mph have you increased the speed of a car since you started designing/inventing?

Colin Dick answered on 18 Jun 2013:

Hi Steffi,

I didn’t know the answer to this question until you made me think about it! I had to do a little sum, see if you can check my working for me =)

We work in KPH, but we can convert to MPH afterwards.

A typical lap around Barcelona is 4.5km and, at the start of the season, it takes 80 seconds for a lap then the average car speed is:

4.5 / 80 * 3600 = 202.5 kph

Now, if we make ‘a few changes’ to the car and the average laptime is now reduced by 0.2 seconds, then the new average speed is:

4.5 / 79.8 * 3600 = 203.0 kph

So making ‘a few changes’ increases the car speed by only 0.5kph (or 0.3mph).

If we now consider a race around Barcelona to be 66 laps, then the we can see that this 0.2 second improvement converts into 13.2 seconds in the race (0.2 seconds *66 laps). In 2013, this would have been enough to promote our driver Kimi Raikkonen from 2nd up to 1st!

So you can see that even a small amount of speed (0.5kph or 0.3 mph) is very important to us!

Cheers,
Colin.

P.S. I can’t tell you any real numbers because we like to keep things secret =) and when I say making ‘a few changes’, I mean spending loads of time and money testing all our ideas!