In F1 pits Red Bull now able to measure in microns

[John S]

 
They've got clever hand held gizmo from Leica for set up  -  vid below.

F1 is a sport of the finest margins. The cars are a complex combination of around 100,000 components and making sure that each part is perfect is the job of our Quality department. With the introduction of the hybrid V6 engines in 2014 the game was changed again, the cars became even more complicated and the margins were made even tighter.

This placed even more emphasis on ensuring accuracy and quality at every stage and an increased focus on making sure that car assembly at the track was measured not just to millimetres, but to micrometres.

Fortunately, that's just the kind of currency our Quality team deals with. A micrometre (or micron) is 0.001 mm, that's about 25 times smaller than the eye can generally see, luckily we have some pretty impressive bits of kit that allow us to measure these things in astonishing detail.

A couple of months ago Hexagon Metrology, an Innovation Partner of Infiniti Red Bull Racing, came to us with a new piece of technology which would be a game-changer in ensuring build quality at the circuit. Their Leica Absolute Tracker, the weapon of choice for the Quality team at the factory, was to be reimagined as a smaller, portable unit which could come to races with us.

Chris Charnley, Head of Quality explains: "When tenths of millimetres can equal tenths of seconds on track, being able to ensure consistency and precision in setup can offer real performance gains."

So the portable tTracker is now a permanent fixture in the Infiniti Red Bull Racing garage and will have an important part to play as we push to win more Grands Prix next year.

The fact that it's a pretty futuristic bit of tech involving lasers which the engineers love playing with is just a bonus...
Infiniti-redbullracing.com, Tues 13th Jan.

[Scott]

Let them tweak things to the short side of each mm I guess.  I like Ferrari's new Sim even better.  A lot sexier.

[J.Clark]

It looks cool, but I was hoping for some explanation instead of some background music.