Core77

Interesting perspective. Racecar seats are actually designed to be incorporated into the tub and chassis and then molded around the driver. I have been racing cars since I was 16 and around racecars my whole life. Most purpose built racecars you sit right on the floor of the tub. If you are lucky (which F1 drivers are) you have a little hump under your knees to support your legs. Then a foam molded for your back for your back rest. Adding a actual "car seat" would add to much extra weight. The only racecars that have real manufactured seats are production cars like Porsche's. The comment he made about adding bits of foam around to make driving more comfortable is also very common from the lowest level of racing to F1. For example you never know where your knee or hip is going to rub or hit so as you test you pad up areas that are affected. In my Lotus Super 7, there is no real seat you sit on the tub and have a thin foam back rest. While racing I was hitting my chins and getting black and blue marks so we simply padded around where I was hitting.

It's not a lack of design, but rather one of the common compromises that is needed in high performance products. As he says, the carbon seat is custom made and fitted to his body, then modifications are made as needed.

The best parallel that comes to mind for me is skiing boots. Rental and lower consumer level boots are made with generous space allowance in the shell and relatively thick padding to allow for variance in foot shape. Higher end skiing boots are lighter and allow more control, achieved by using less compliant materials and smaller tolerances. These are usually thermoformed to match the foot shape of the user, and then small pieces of foam are added to modify areas which are producing chafing or pressure.

The requirement for minor modifications is a requirement in high performance areas where there is a human interface, it is not necessarily a hallmark of poor or lacking design.

Jumping on with Eric and Peter's notes.
This is an industry (Formula 1) where grams cost thousands and millions of dollars to shave off and driver comfort is very much an afterthought (not driver safety just ask Robert Kubica for one).
The seat design is optimized to fit the external aerodynamic packaging.
"Taping pads" on for comfort is something done at a race track when transition times between in and out of the car for the driver are between 3 minutes and an hour at test sessions and races and need to be fixed/adjusted/replaced as fast as possible with the least/lightest material possible used.
These are some of the highest paid athletes in the world. Fernando Alonso makes 40 million a YEAR for Ferrari. They are forced to cope with the design of a carbo fiber "couch" that's molded to their body with some foam for cushioning.
I could imagine a woven vectran solution over a carbon fiber framework with a tensioning system or FEA designing flex into the carbon fiber for cushioning. The issue for the driver is to get the most feedback from the car without excessive vibration.
Ski boots could be a parallel, but Lindsey Vonn's boots probably don't have much padding either.
A great solution direction is a quickly layered system to add and subtract the smallest additions and subtractions possible to cushion a driver. Barring that a micro bellows solution where air can be used as a cushion and directed inflation in areas could be filled and deflated with nitrogen to optimize seating comfort for the driver.

A bellows type seat is hard to do because of the forces generated by the driver compressing them and the number of different pad areas required to be used to keep the position correct along with material expansion for additional padding.

It is an intriguing issue you've noted, but surely not ignored as your insinuation indicates.

Weight and G forces. The forces that a F1 driver endures is 5.0 g, to 6.0 g latterly, Around 1.5 Gs acceleration. Around 4 Gs braking so keeping that blood nice and close to the heart is vital. F1 does not use "g" suits common to fighter pilots and so this extreme seating position is about as good as they are going to get to prevent red out or black out. Any notion of padding is pretty silly, your dealing with SIX G'S!!!

Performance isnt comfort.

1. They need to have the minimum frontal area possible. Lying position helps this and also lowers centre of gravity.

2. Safety requires that the drivers shoulders are under the body work to prevent them from being thrown out of the car alla Gilles Villeneurve

3. Foam is custom moulded

"the lack of design that goes into the seats"? You wouldn't believe the level of design that goes into the seat. The design criteria are:

1. Safety
2. Get the driver as low as possible
3. Make it weigh as close to zero as possible
4.-99. ...
100. Comfort and ergonomics

These cars need to withstand enormous crash impacts, there is tremendous design effort expended on materials and crash testing to support that. The seat also needs to be removable in one piece in a very short amount of time to allow the removal of an injured driver without damaging his spinal cord if it's been injured.

For handling you want it to weigh nothing, and for the mass of the driver to be as low as possible. Typical "design" criteria you're grousing about are not important. The driver is in the car no more than a couple hours at a time, it only has to be comfortable enough to allow him to do his job.

Zippy- G suits wouldn't work in a car. Planes experience all their G's vertically, which pushes the blood down into the legs, and a G suit squeezes it back out. A car's peak G's are lateral (cornering) and longitudinal (braking), so the blood doesn't get pushed down. Instead of blood leaving the head, you get inner ear problems, and possibly blood collecting on one side of the brain. You just can't take much more than 5-6 g laterally without experiencing vertigo. (See CART's ill-fated Texas race about 10 years ago.) The only solution is to go slower.

The high leg position is for airflow: these cars get most of their cornering speed from aerodynamic downforce, most of which comes from creating a suction underneath the car. The raised nose helps maximize the airflow to the front wings and underside of the car, and any F1 driver will gladly give up comfort for a few extra tenths of a second improvement in lap times.

There are few (maybe no) products on earth designed as thoroughly as modern F1 cars, when you begin to understand them they are an amazing lesson in the power of design/engineering.

I'm sure that minimising discomfort translates into improved performance. I couldn't help thinking that one could shave many grams off the seat mass by using a small drill. Do the drivers take laxatives before a race?

Does nobody else think this F1 thing is taking itself rather too seriously?

@Fred Schechter Just want to note the Kubica was injured while in a rally race, not F1. F1 has done a lot to make the cars safer for drivers - the ugly stepped nose on most cars this year is from that - to keep the noses lower to minimize chances of driver injury.

Adding to wcraghead's note, yes, Formula 1 has done a lot for driver safety. In fact, the latest fatality in an F1 car was Ayrton Senna -- in 1994. That's frankly amazing to me. Almost 20 years of people racing ludicrously fast in cars that make egg shells look like armor plating without a single fatal accident.

Ironically, this is perhaps the only time that large scale commercialization and advertising has saved lives. There's a very interesting BBC documentary about the history of F1 safety called "Grand Prix: The Killer Years", in which someone puts it bluntly: "If your company name is on the side of a car, then perhaps you don't want to see a young man being burned to death in it". Which was what used to happen - the lucky ones died were those who died before the almost-inevitable fire started.

As for the whole design-of-the-seat thing, I'll just quote Steve Jobs: Design is how it works. And these seats work. Like everyone else has said, there's is no lack of design here; it's just design in the sense of manned space flight rather than a BMW. Only if you see "engineering" as somehow "not design", does it make sense to say there's a lack of design. But that's BS.

@wcraghead Fred was referring to Kubica's head on crash in to the wall during the 2007 Canadian GP.

I'm astonished by the conclusion of this post. Functionality is a big part of creating objects. Interaction between the pilot's body and seat is not something you can know in advance, you have to test and make corrections.
Okay Core77 is "just a blog" but this article does no good to designers... or me at least.

Yes, Scott and David (esp. agree that there are "no products on earth designed as thoroughly as modern F1 cars, when you begin to understand them they are an amazing lesson in the power of design/engineering.") F1 uses processes and materials long before they trickle down to the masses. There is absolutely no doubt that the drivers are most comfortable when they are competitive. I don't need to ask Nico whether he'd give up his result in Shanghai for fewer bruises or so that he can stick his head up and see the country side while destroying the car's aerodynamics. And as to diuretics, well, they do weigh the drivers and the cars. I am sure they use whatever they can to lighten themselves.
http://formula1.about.com/od/drivers/a/Driver_Weights.htm

@wcraghead I was referring to Kubica's Canadian Grand Prix wreck, which is also a miracle for his survival.
Thank you Thomas!

Something that can clarify why a F1 seat is like that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_Wn1EFLa2C8