Stress management

Formula 1 racing at its finest is about a car on the very limit, brushing the barriers at Monaco or lifting a plume of gravel dust elsewhere. It’s this tightrope walk between triumph and disaster that partly defines the sport. But pushing things close to the edge is not solely the preserve of the drivers. In a business where performance is everything, almost every part of an F1 car needs to be designed so it is as light as possible. Yet this also needs to be balanced against a requirement that a component is strong enough and durable enough to last a race. Finding the fine line between these often conflicting demands is the work of the stress engineer.

‘Our job is to essentially maximise the performance of structures, while also ensuring they are safe and reliable,’ says Rob Hansen, head of Structural Design at McLaren Racing, who joined the team as a stress engineer back in 2007. Before that he worked in the same role at the Rolls Royce aero engine plant in Bristol, on behalf of engineering giant Atkins, having gained his first-class degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College London in 2005. He now heads up what he describes as a compact team of ‘really capable and highly experienced specialists’ at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, though he stresses – no pun intended – that these days the title