• Question: If it's possible: How could you change a Formula 1 car to being quieter (as they're very loud), but keeping the same speed?

    Asked by LionVanGaal to John, Michael, Chris on 16 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: John Allport

      John Allport answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      It’s perfectly possible to make a Formula 1 car quieter, they became much quieter last year when turbocharging was reintroduced, but the fans (and Bernie Ecclestone) didn’t like that, so the engineers had to make them noisier again!
      I work on the same sort of techniques on road cars in order to make them quieter. You can also customise the noise for a particular application, for example when Jaguar brought out the X type and S type cars in the ’90s, I was part of the team tasked with making them sound “like a Jaguar”. The hardest part of that was defining what a Jaguar should sound like! Making it sound like that was the easy part.

    • Photo: Chris Hackett

      Chris Hackett answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      john sounds like the expert on this. personally I wouldn’t know but an educated guess would say to alter the muffler.

    • Photo: Michael Carley

      Michael Carley answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      You would mostly need to change the exhaust system, since that is where most of the noise comes from, but that could have an effect on the engine performance, since exhausts are often tuned to improve engine power.

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