I went on a tour of the US F1 facility today. The building is about 10 minutes from the university and my Motorsports Instrumentation professor was able to talk them into letting us check the place out. The facility is not yet opened to the public. At 40,000 square feet, it was a rather small place. Obviously we couldn't take pictures or anything like that but we did learn a lot about the team, the procedures, and where they stand at the moment and that sort of thing. I was surprised by how much stuff they're doing 'in-house'. The guy walking us through the place kept mentioning other teams that out source a lot of the parts and who other teams may purchase different components such as transmissions, engines, tunnels, etc. The facility has a machine shop fully equipped with all the top of line HAAS machines. The reason that they use HAAS for all their stuff is due to the connection with Haas himself, and because its from the area. There was a huge FDM rapid prototype machine in there so they could quickly mock up random stuff. They also have a huge 5-axis machine that came from a company 20 minutes up the road. We were fortunate enough to see the blocks of foam glued together that was to become the next mold for the center tunnel. The machine the entire thing from the stacks of material, then polish it to use as a mold for the carbon fiber. All the fiber work is done in house. They have the largest autoclave I've seen so far and they have a larger one on order to be able to lay up the floor pan. They have the cnc downdraft fabric cutters in the clean room and the downdraft stations for trimming the actual carbon in the body shop, where there was a full paint/bake booth. All their wind tunnel testing is done locally here as well. I got to see the cosworth engine up close and was surprised how tiny that thing is. They had a tunnel mocked up on a surface plate with the engine bolted to it. The entire block was about the size of my hands with my palms touching. The 'flywheel' if you will, was also interesting. It was about 5-6" in diameter, and had a good 20 or so bolts holding it on. Pretty crazy to see in person. I've seen the pictures of this stuff before, but it wasn't until getting to actually touch it that you realize what it is.
There wasn't really all that much to look at as far as suspension, etc since they have any of that stuff made yet. They had some aluminum parts machined as rough cuts for testing and the carbon tunnel stuff there but that was about it. The engineers worked in a room of about 30 or so computers. They mostly do all their modeling in catia or solidworks and their CFD is all done with their own program. The engine controls and data acquisition systems for the car are all maclaren instruments. They team as a whole is using imperial units, which some of the engineers didn't agree with, but that's how they want it done. The team is using their own gearbox designed all in-house but since they are running a cosworth engine, they run into SI units for fasteners,etc. That seemed to be a 'touchy' subject for the engineers in there, lol.
Other observations, the secretary is pretty hot and there was an Audi R8 outside,
I think that's about everything I can think of to describe off the top of my head but we saw and talked about so much. It was really a cool experience.
