RooDuct Technology Trickles Down to F1



RooDuct Technology Trickles Down to F1

During the second F1 practice session at Austin, Texas, Steve Matchett on the SpeedTV telecast told us about how the Red Bull team has come up with something that is, “absolutely remarkable.”
OK, so I don’t come to your house and make your ducts on-site,
but I do make brake ducts with the same process with affordable ABS plastic.
Because both F1 and Fox are pretty protective of their visuals, I have a transcript below.

“Hobbs: Yeah
Matchett: The level of technology in Formula 1, absolutely remarkable.
Kenny was showing me a process now, a little bit like rapid prototype work called SLA I believe
whereby they are actually manufacturing components, little, little brake ducts, little cooling ducts out of a composite type material.
They are manufacturing those components in the pit lane from engineers sat in England at Milton Keynes operating the uh, CAD-CAM system
operating the software system and then VIA the internet, those co-ordinates are sent down the line straight to the pits at,
here at Austin and they are manufacturing components, you no longer need to fly them across the world, they are Built in the pits!
It’s (laughing) its just I mean it’s beyond space-age technology.
Hobbs: Its all that, its all that print system, right? Layer on layer on layer on layer on layer.
Matchett: Yeah, at one time it would just be like wax rapid prototypes to give a three dimensional model but now the technology has advanced so much they are manufacturing little cooling ducts around the brakes that you can actually put straight onto the car.”

Glad to see you’re catching up F1!

Here’s a screen shot of a duct that appears to have been printed:

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