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A dedicated racing vehicle and an everyday car are very different beasts. The iconic Porsche 935 wouldn’t be the most conventional -– or indeed legal -– choice of transportation for a family trip upstate for instance, because that isn’t exactly the purpose this beast of a machine was designed for. However, a car is still a car, and this means that there’s some vital crossover between racing technology and everyday road vehicles.
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Racing machines are designed with two big priorities in mind: To drive as fast and efficiently as possible, and to do so while not endangering the safety of the driver or others. Both of these factors have required designers and manufacturers of these vehicles to keep abreast of developments in key areas of auto technology, including safety, efficiency, and raw power.
Naturally, the push to make cars more efficient racing machines than those of competitors has helped to accelerate the development of the whole auto industry. This is because many of these developments have found their way into today’s conventional passenger cars. Let’s take a look at some of these key developments and their origins in the racing world. There’s one important thing to note before we begin: In some cases, a technology may not have specifically first been seen in the racing world, but was refined and popularized there. High-profile examples of such have been included too, for their overall importance to the industry and making our everyday cars the technical marvels they are.
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Rear view mirrors work wonders for a driver’s visibility
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The vulnerability of pedestrians and motorists alike is sharply reduced by one simple inclusion on vehicles: rearview mirrors. This is a fundamental feature that you might think has been on motorcars since their inception, but surprisingly, the first race car to feature a mounted rearview mirror was the Marmon Wasp driven by Ray Harroun at the 1911 Indianapolis 500. This was the very first edition of the now-legendary race, and Harroun’s car won the day.
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The driver didn’t have an engineer, allowing for precious weight to be shed in a model built only for one, but it also meant that the driver of such a car would have struggled to determine the positions of competitors behind them. The mounted mirror was Marmon’s solution to this, and the visual advantage proved to be crucial not only in gaining a competitive edge, but in everyday road safety too.
On today’s vehicles, they’re typically equipped in less obtrusive and more practical places, but the principle remains the same today as it was for early racers. Whether you’re trying to park, overtake a fellow driver or see exactly what your children are doing in the back seat, today’s rearview mirrors are a wonderful convenience if not an absolute necessity. From its humble beginnings on Harroun’s Hornet, rearview mirror technology has advanced far enough for the development of smart rearview mirrors, such as Nissan’s Intelligent model that offers communication with a rear camera to display a clearer view for the driver.
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Roads are safer and smoother
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Of course, depending on where you live and drive, you might consider this one debatable. We’ve all tangled with potholes over the course of our lives, but overall, today’s roads are surely much smoother and more resilient than they were for those enterprising first drivers of over a century ago. Many racing cars, of course, are designed, built, and maintained for the best possible performance on tarmac, and so the surface quality of the tracks themselves needs to be high quality.
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This is where some important developments in road-surfacing technology have been made. For instance, take the Circuit de la Sarthe, the setting for the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans race, the biggest event in motorsports. From 1922 to 1926, this lengthy dirt track was treated to an incredible makeover, which The ACO describes as “chalk chippings with a tar/bitumen emulsion which was itself covered with tar-coated grit.” This innovation, on one of motor racing’s greatest stages, would help to demonstrate both the importance of smooth and well-maintained roads and how to achieve them.
This isn’t to say, of course, that we won’t still almost disappear down potholes from time to time, around a century later. On the whole, though, the development of such paving techniques as these ensure that millions of cars on the world’s roads enjoy a smoother journey every day. There’s nothing more satisfying than driving on a freshly tarmacked stretch of road, and the then-innovative pathing of the Circuit de la Sarthe marked a big step towards this for everyday drivers.
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Headlights and fog lights have been incorporated to make driving far safer
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Fog lights are another bright idea from the world of racing that would be easy to take for granted. However, there’s really no understating just what a breakthrough they were when they first came to the 24 Hours of Le Mans showdown. The most prominent factor of this race, of course, is the way visibility changes over the course of a full day. The better drivers were able to adapt to the changing conditions, the safer they would be and the more of an advantage they could potentially enjoy.
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The first vehicles to equip fog lights at the race were a trio of B3-6s from Lorraine Dietrich, which would sport the feature in 1926 (having won first and third place in the 1925 race) at the behest of the Marchal company for the manufacture of lanterns and headlights. With this being such a novelty at the time, all eyes were on the vehicles’ performance to see whether this could be a feature worth adopting. The answer would seem to have been a resounding yes: B3-6s claimed first, second, and third positions, with the visual advantage reportedly paying dividends when passing the central stream hazard of the track, which could boast a great danger as a result of the fog that was common there.
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The vehicles had a single central headlight, a success that would lead to more elaborate headlight and fog light systems on cars today.
Intuitive use of everything from steering wheels to the ignition itself
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At its most basic, a car’s steering wheel is the equivalent of a ship’s wheel: Turn in one direction or another to steer in that direction. The average car steering wheel, however, is equipped with an array of buttons, which can do anything from activate the horn to fiddle with stereo settings and much more. The idea, of course, is to keep as many controls right within the driver’s reach as possible, without making the wheel’s surface too busy. The concept of the steering wheel as a convenient control hub at your fingertips dates back longer than you might think, just before the dawn of the twentieth century.
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The first car to boast a steering wheel was another racing machine, an 1894 Panhard model. The wheel’s creator, Albert Vacheron, may have had no inkling of just how ubiquitous his creation would become. Before this vital breakthrough, autos were commonly driven by tiller, as was the case with the iconic Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which was created by Carl Benz in 1885, one of the earliest examples of a car as we — largely — know it today.
Vacheron selected the innovative steering wheel for the July 1984 Paris-Rouen race, scoring fourth place and surely drawing attention to the virtues of a wheel as a convenient and precise method of control for an auto. Today, many of us are unlikely ever to see a tiller-controlled car outside of a museum, but decades of steering wheels followed, including some cool and creative ones. Keyless easy-start features are seen on a range of other vehicles today, and they too have been huge boons for racing drivers and commuters alike.
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Disk brakes allow for smoother, more efficient braking
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There are few aspects of a car’s operation as fundamental as the brakes. Disc brakes, in particular, are incredibly common today, and their origins harken back to the world of racing vehicles.
The drum brakes that had defined earlier models’ architecture reached a point when they simply didn’t cut it, according to Norman Dewis, chief development driver at Jaguar. Dewis explained to Evo in December 2017, “The disc brake was miles ahead of the drum … cars were going up in performance … but the drum brakes weren’t keeping up with the performance of the cars. So even on the ordinary roads, braking was not sufficient.” As Dewis notes, a different system was particularly important for racing machines. 1952 marked the debut of the Jaguar disk brake, which had been tested in secret at a makeshift aerodrome track.
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Dewis leaves no doubt how important the project’s racing origins were, stating that “… it was basically purely for racing that we did the development.” At the 1953 24 Hours At Le Mans race, a Jaguar C-Type, the only model to compete equipped with disk brakes (courtesy of a collaboration with Dunlop), swept to victory. The range of tricky turns over the long course made braking efficiency key to the endurance contest, and a vital advantage of disk over drum brakes is their comparative resistance to overheating, thanks to the disk component’s constant access to open air.
The first commercial application of the technology didn’t take long to arrive: 1955’s Citroën DS was the first production vehicle to boast disc brakes. Today, they’re seen on the majority of vehicles, primarily on the front axles, for their power and reliability.
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Electric cars have come on in leaps and bounds
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For those who haven’t embraced the rise of the EV, these cars have a lot to prove. We want to know that EVs can go the distance, literally and figuratively, and that they’re a worthy alternative to the ICE. This isn’t just the case for our everyday rides, of course. For EV race formats to continue to thrive and grow, investment and advancement is needed.
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EVs have become more and more enticing as their performance has improved, and it’s the competitive racing arena that has driven this advancement. When Formula E began with the 2014-15 season, the vehicles had a maximum regeneration of 250 kW, and a power limit to match. Generation 2, for the 2018-19 season, saw this boosted by 100 kW and 50 kW respectively, making for a sport that’s ever faster, more exciting, and more dynamic. Generation 2’s vehicles had almost double the battery capacity, a real paradigm shift that meant rather unwieldy car changes mid-race were no longer necessary.
The sport has come an incredibly long way in a short decade or so, and Formula E cars are formidable, just like their Formula One counterparts. While the average EV enthusiast isn’t driving around in the latest Generation 3 Formula E models (now sporting maximum speeds of 200 mph compared to the original models’ 140 mph and approximately 463 HP over Generation 1’s 266 hp, with upcoming Generation 4 cars expected to have around 789 horsepower), the EV industry has learned, and continues to learn, a lot from the proving ground of Formula E.
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Lawanda Latson