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60 laps. 200+ miles per hour.
0.1 seconds.
This is what F1 teams are chasing. Over the course of a race, a car’s engineering can make or break the reality of the driver being on the podium or sitting in fourth.
An F1 team spends millions of dollars annually to reduce lap times by 0.1 seconds.
Every piece of the car is scrutinized. Last year McLaren’s team principal Andrea Stella said:
Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain, sometimes not only by marginal gains, some technical opportunities for development.
You would think that he’s speaking about large, complex design updates to the body or engine, but no, he lists the following as the biggest improvements
Aerodynamic efficiencies: improving lap times by 0.02 seconds
Weight reduction: saving 0.01 seconds per lap
Engine Mapping: saving 0.015 seconds per lap
Tire Pressure Optimization: worth 0.005 seconds per lap
Individually these incremental gains seem insignificant, but together they make the difference between first and fourth place.
This is all made possible by overloading each car with sensors, hundreds of them, providing constant data that teams analyze in real time.
The lesson? F1’s philosophy around sensors becomes a core engineering truth: you can’t optimize what you don’t measure.
For those of us without multi-million dollar budgets, you must remember - before chasing improvements, develop your system in such a way that you can identify which variables actually move the needle. Is it cycle time? Defect rates? Energy consumption?
Once you know what matters, prioritize improvements by their measurable impact.
That “small” drawing cleanup may save 15 minutes per print- but multiply that by the hundreds of prints you’ll produce per year and you’ve gained hours of your time back.
The F1 approach works at any scale: measure first, optimize second, improve systematically.
Because whether you’re chasing podium positions or project deadlines, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
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