McLaren F1 & MP4⧸1 – Carbonfibre Pioneers! ｜ 4K

Wow, McLaren MP4-1 and McLaren F1. Icons, the pair of them terrifyingly valuable and yet entirely revolutionary because you might be one step ahead of me already and have realised what links these two and what makes them so radical. Carbon fibre. Since the MP4-1 arrived in 1981, McLaren has never built a road or race car chassis from anything other than carbon fibre, a material half the weight of aluminium yet far stiffer and up to five times stronger. In the last 40 years it's gone from nowhere to everywhere, from radical F1 tubs to the centre consoles of SUVs, from perfectly woven strands to chopped blocks. In the automotive world there is no more magical material. But first a bit of history. Do you know where carbon fibres were first used? Light bulb filaments. In 1879 Thomas Edison baked cotton threads to carbonise them. It didn't really catch on. Baking cotton threads was primitive. German chemical engineers had synthesised a material called, brace yourselves, polyacrylonitrile in the 1930s but development was put on hold for obvious reasons. But the material reappeared, with some of the scientists, in post-war America and by the 1950s scientists realised the fibres were strong, light and temperature resistant. Rolls-Royce started using them for fan blades in its aero engines. And it was the aero industry that helped McLaren with carbon fibre, although appropriately enough it was caused for an aerodynamic reason. You see John Barnard, McLaren's chief designer, wanted wider Venturis to create more downforce but if he had done that it would have meant making the cockpit narrower and if it had been made in aluminium, as all F1 cars were at the time, it would have been too flexible. So he teamed up with an American company called Hercules Aerospace, look their name's on the end plate, a company that at the same time was building composite bits for the Space Shuttle. Let's have a look at what lies beneath. How absurdly cool does this look with the panels removed? I mean the Marlborough McLaren livery is my favourite all-time livery but this just looks epic. 4DFV V8 back there. But anyway, mustn't get distracted, let's concentrate on carbon fibre because it was already being used in F1 but only for very simple flat panels. What was new was this whole section, the tub, from nearly at the nose cone back to here. It was basically five fairly flat pieces because they weren't doing complex shapes that were bonded together to create the chassis and this is chassis number one, the very first chassis McLaren made, only made seven in total. This was John Watson's race car for the 1981 season and after he had it, it went to Andrea de Cesaris who was known internally as Andrea de Crasheris because during the course of that year he managed to crash this in races and testing about 15 times and if you look down here you can actually see some repair work that was done. However if you're thinking this doesn't look a lot like carbon fibre, you're right but you're also wrong. Now we're going to go and have a little walk because this is why I love coming to the boulevard at McLaren's technology centre because they have all the other stuff here and you can come and have a poke around it and there's a lot of carbon on display isn't there? So we're going to start here with the front wishbone of Micka Hakkinen's MP4-13 which if you look up close at the weave on here you'll see there is no weave, that is unidirectional carbon fibre. Now when carbon is laid up it's laid in layers, it takes about seven layers on average to make a millimetre of material and on unidirectional all the fibres run in the same directions. However if you come over to the next one you will see what you know traditionally as carbon fibre. You can see it on here and on the brake ducts here and on the suspension, that very distinctive weave it's got or that is from layers of woven material, that is visual carbon fibre which looks prettier but it's not actually as strong as the unidirectional stuff, it's about 10 or 15 percent less stiff. Now I could spend hours looking at all of this stuff however let's stay on track back in time to 1981 and finish up with the MP4-1 because as a project it took them two years to get to this stage, two years for Hercules Aerospace to create this and get it ready to race and it was ready to race for the third round of the 1981 championship. The trouble was someone else had beaten them to it because the first carbon fibre F1 car to set foot on a track was the infamous twin chassis Lotus 88 but banned by the FIA it never raced. The MP4-1 meanwhile wasn't immediately successful, it only won one race that year but what made others sit up and take notice wasn't its success but rather its failure. At Monza that year driver John Watson had a massive shunt, the car torn in two by the impact yet he emerged largely unscathed. It was carbon strength rather than its lightweight that endeared it to F1 originally. McLaren never looked back and when it went into road cars with the incredible F1 it made sense for them to use the technology they were already familiar with which resulted in the world's first road car with a carbon chassis right? Uh no because others got there first. Okay they didn't do it as comprehensively as McLaren, even today it's rare to find someone doing carbon subframes as well as tub but by the time the F1 appeared in 1992 others had also seen the benefits trickling down from F1. A year earlier the Bugatti EB110 launched with a carbon tub and a year before that there was Jaguar's XJR15 but even that wasn't the first which I guarantee you've never heard of. The MCA Centenaire arrived in 1990 but with only 16 ever built it's a very rare groove car indeed. Put all of that to one side because the McLaren F1 was the car that gave carbon construction the boost it needed. From that moment on every supercar firm would use carbon construction for their most exotic cars. Shall we? Oh so exciting! But the drawback is that carbon took a long time to build and was very labour intensive. Pre-impregnated sheets are laid up into a mould by hand then baked in an autoclave, basically a giant pressure cooker, at oven-like temperatures often for 12 to 16 hours. It took 750 hours to assemble an F1 but before that the carbon tub itself had taken 3,000. 48 separate components were bonded together to make the chassis and look you can see a nice visual bit of carbon fibre on the two spars running down here. The question was how long the chassis would last. No one was quite sure. In F1 at the end of a season no one cared if your resins failed and your glue went weak and your weave fell to bits but this was different. Unlike other areas of the car carbon hasn't deteriorated over the years. The magnesium OZ wheels, these are iconic right, but they are now over 30 years old and OZ has discovered that the magnesium is slightly porous and over time it starts to corrode from the inside out. So much so that OZ will now not build new magnesium wheels for the F1. They instead do you an aluminium set which are 2.8 kilos heavier around the car. Now tyres obviously deteriorate anyway but getting hold of a set for your McLaren F1 isn't that straightforward. In fact Michelin only make batches of about a hundred sets every five to six years. What I'm looking for is signs of paint sinkage which apparently the F1 is a little bit susceptible to. It's where you can see the weave of the carbon through the paint. It's not that the carbon's moved at all it's that the paint moves in very hot areas of the car. Apparently it happens to F1s but I just can't see any of it on here. The chassis still as strong as the day it left the factory and we know this because whisper it some McLaren F1s have been crashed including this one Ron Dennis at Suzuka. I've tried to spot the damage you did to the rear three-quarter. Anyway others have been much more seriously damaged. Cars have come back basically broken in half and when that happens they have to rebuild the lost elements of the carbon chassis and they do that and then the last thing they do before they reassemble a car is put it in a jig and test the structural stiffness. They literally do a torsion test and the results of that on the cars that have been tested there's been no deterioration at all. Now the material essentially hasn't changed very much over the years but the production processes really have. The F1's tub 3,000 hours. Here is a Monocell 2 in this case from a 570s. To build this just four hours. There were two key advances. The first was reducing the number of carbon components. The F1's chassis was made of 48 separate pieces that had to be individually bonded together. As methods and technology improved that number reduced but the only way to genuinely productionise the process was with a new system all together. RTM. Resin Transfer Moulding. Instead of the pre-impregnated sheets of carbon being individually laid up then baked in an autoclave, time-consuming and labour-intensive, here dry carbon fibres are placed in a preheated closed mould and then the resin is injected at very high pressure and temperature. We can't show you this because well McLaren wouldn't show us because it's so sensitive but here you can see the finished tub being lifted off the mould. The result is a more accurate finish, improved rigidity and allows metal components to be built into the structure and crucially it's about 10 times faster than traditional layout methods. I know it's a very impressive bit of technology but it's not exactly the sexiest bit of carbon fibre around here is it? I'm off over here.