The final race of the 2021 Formula One season in Abu Dhabi was attended by a total of 153,000 fans, despite ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. A further 108.7 million people watched on TV, joining the cumulative 1.55 billion TV viewers that had followed the season to its thrilling climax. Formula One is a heady combination of extreme individual skill and bravery, teamwork and dedication, and cutting-edge technological prowess.
McLaren Racing has been part of this spectacle since New Zealander Bruce McLaren entered the M2B in the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix. It has accumulated 183 Grand Prix wins, 493 podium finishes, 12 Drivers’ Championships and 8 Constructors’ Championships since, making it one of the most successful teams of all time. The unrelenting pursuit of technical development and the collective passion to turn high technology into race wins continue to define one of Formula One’s most enduring teams.
The ‘formula’ behind Formula One is a series of complex rules and regulations that must be adhered to by the competing drivers and teams. The rules frame a technological window within which each team must produce the fastest car, all within a maximum permissible budget. The regulations create a fiercely competitive landscape where fractions of a gram here, a micron or two there, and the overarching speed of development separate podium finishers from the ‘also rans’.
To help excel in this harsh competitive environment, McLaren deploys Stratasys’ next-generation stereolithography 3D printing technology through a suite of five Neo®800 3D printers to chase the perfect design for the road ahead.
Formula One is synonymous with aerodynamics, the effect of the air passing over, under, through and away from the car being paramount to performance. While computer aided design (CAD) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are key to the design and development of a Formula One car, wind tunnel testing is still the gold standard when assessing how every surface works together either as an assembly or as a complete car.
McLaren uses 60% scale models of parts in its wind tunnels to optimise the aerodynamic package and find more downforce – which provides more aerodynamic grip – and balance the front and rear aerodynamic loads on the car.
Using Stratasys Neo800 3D printers and Somos® PerFORM Reflect resin material, the team is producing thousands of parts for numerous front and rear wing programs, as well as large parts of the side bodywork. PerFORM Reflect was developed specifically for wind tunnel models and creates strong, stiff parts that, when combined with the surface finish achieved by the Neo800, reduces post-processing by more than 30%. The parts combine with a machined aluminum spine to make the final ‘wind tunnel ready’ scale model.
Wind tunnel testing will regularly see multiple iterations of front and rear wing designs, sidepods (including large swathes of bodywork to the rear of the sidepods themselves) as well the complete top-body of the car.
Tim Chapman, Head of Additive Manufacturing at McLaren Racing, explains:
The process for creating a 60% scale top-body from start to finish is also now much faster. With its next-generation stereolithography 3D printers, the McLaren team can turn a top-body project around — from receiving the CAD data to delivery of the finished part — in just 3 to 4 days.
“Previously, to produce a 60% scale top-body, we would have first glued up the tooling block and rough machined this to the approximate top-body shape. Then using hand shaped templates from a technical drawing, we would have hand finished the top-body shape, effectively creating a pattern, before shuttering up the edges and taking a carbon mould from this pattern.“
Once the carbon mould had been autoclaved and removed from the pattern, the actual carbon component (i.e. the model scale top-body surface) would then be laid up in the mould and autoclaved again. This component once removed from the mould would form the top-body for the scale model Formula One car. In contrast, the Neo800s allow us to completely sidestep that tooling and carbon fibre manufacturing process and 3D print the modular parts instead.
The large bed size of the Stratasys Neo800 3D printers (800 x 800 x 600 mm) allows for either large single parts, or a multitude of much smaller ones. The process means intricate details are always preserved with industry-leading repeatability and reliability.
Around 50 or 60 air pressure housings are embedded within McLaren’s car to enable air pressure readings of the various surfaces. This information is then fed back to the race engineers to aid development. The small pressure tapping running through these components means that they need a highly accurate and high-definition 3D printing process. After post-processing, these parts are integrated directly on the car.
McLaren’s Technical Partnership with Stratasys has been instrumental in reducing cost as well as time. With the sport facing uncertain times and no income coming in during the Covid pandemic, the FIA decided to bring the budget cap down from $175 million to $145 million for its first year of operation in 2021, then down to $140 million for 2022 and $135 million in 2023.This significantly focuses teams on the efficiency of the design to production processes, and McLaren tries to manufacture in-house wherever possible.
With the Neo800 3D printers, McLaren can now manufacture all aerodynamic wind tunnel models at its base in Woking, UK, which saves costs on subcontractors and the associated quality assurance. The team can also 3D print jigs and templates, and small moulds that would have previously been machined from metal billets. Not only does the speed of the Neo800 stereolithography process save considerable time, it saves on costly metal material by not wasting large amounts of swarf removed from the subtractive machining process.
This improved speed and lower cost makes it easier to run a responsive feedback loop where new iterations can be produced in response to design issues at any point in the season. With its Neo800s, McLaren can create new parts without the need for re-machining tooling blocks or carbon fibre moulds – all of which are time consuming and costly processes.
As stereolithography 3D printing technology and materials have evolved, so have the ways in which McLaren exploits the technology. While wind tunnel models and prototypes are still a key use case, the team also produces a lot of full-scale components and production tooling. For example, using Somos DMX SL-100 resin with the Stratasys Neo800 3D printers, the team is printing sacrificial tooling to allow the composite lay-up over the mould. Then, through a unique extraction process the resin is removed after autoclaving leaving the cured composite part ready for use. This allows designers to realise hollow or convoluted composite parts easily without the need for costly and time-consuming complex moulds and core manufacturing.
