F1/Screenshot by Nick Hide/Roadshow
It’s a good day if you’re a fan of motorsport, specifically Formula 1. This morning, we will see the dawn of a new era as the 2022 regulation race car comes to life. F1 will reveal the new race car via a livestream ahead of the British Grand Prix this weekend, and the car promises to make for closer racing and better battles on track.
In F1, the competing teams each build their own cars but they have to follow tight specifications set out by the FIA, the sport’s governing body, which refreshes the rules every few years to keep the sport exciting. Each team has to walk a fine line between being disqualified and squeezing every last millisecond out of what’s possible under the regulations. In practice, the cars look much alike, so what’s revealed today will give us a very good idea of what the 2022 cars will look like and how they’ll perform.
Overall, the goal of this new car is to keep downforce reductions to a minimum. Today, racers following a car lose up to 50% of their machine’s downforce. The 2022 race car should keep that loss to 15% and so help with overtaking. If you follow the sport, you know drag-reduction system trains are very much a thing some weekends. Helping the entire process was Amazon Web Services, which worked to power simulations more quickly than ever to create a better race car.
We’ll have full details shortly after the presentation, so stay tuned. You can watch on YouTube here, starting at 7 a.m. PT (10 a.m. ET).