Carbon-Fiber

In today's motorsports carbon-fiber is extensively used throughout the car to save as many ounces as possible. If making a part that only weighed an ounce less than its metal counterpart, but cost thousands more, they will use it, because in racing every ounce adds up. Those ounces are what makes or breaks first place.

Weight savings in general is just an all around advantage. You use less energy, i.e. fuel, go faster, and handle better. The great Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus and creator of many a great formula cars, said "Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." He also once said, "You won't catch me driving a race car that I have built.", but that is a quote for another post.

Carbon-fiber has been the go to material for the past few decades in aerospace technologies and racing. Although it is not very cost effective(it's incredibly expensive), it has many benefits.

First of all, the most known use for it is to save weight. You can make very light items with it. Secondly, it is good in an accident. In normal accidents in a car, the metal around you absorbs the shock and impact. Carbon fiber, on the hand, shatters apart, taking the impact with the shattered parts. It is not very cost effective on normal cars, because people wreck their cars everyday, and replacing carbon bumpers would be excrutiatingly painful on the wallet, but in F1, where you crash into a wall backwards at 180 m.p.h. it makes a whole lot of sense.

At the shop for SAE, I handle alot of the composite work, including carbon-fiber. It's actually a very delicate material when dry, and not impregnated with resin. It's almost like a surgical procedure when I have to lay up a part, because there is alot of factors that go in to making a strong, lightweight part. Now, it sounds like a huge hassle, just to save some weight, but I come to my final reasoning behind using carbon-fiber. When you pull a part, and it comes out with the weave all shiny and even, no distortion, it's simply gorgeous to look at! 

I would post a picture, but my camera is broken, and the picture I was going to post, blogger wanted to be a punk, and not allow me to. I'll try and edit one in soon.