• Question: What is the lightest part of an F1 car?

    Asked by slaystiger97 to Colin on 18 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Colin Dick

      Colin Dick answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      Hi there,

      I’m not sure what the lightest part is! I suppose there is a small bolt or screw somewhere which is the lightest =) we try to make everything really light so that the car is quicker at braking and accelerating. I would say that the lightest parts are the front and rear wings, because these are made of composite carbon materials which are low density. The rest of the car (such as the engine and other mechanical parts) is mostly aluminium because this has loads of strength but it’s also not too heavy.

      We also have special metals that we use for hot parts of the car, like the exhausts, because the temperature gets really high (higher than the melting point of aluminium, around 660 degrees C). This is called Inconel and it’s a ‘super-alloy’ – I don’t know much about this, but you can read about it here:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconel

      Cheers,

      Colin.

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