How F1 formed its coronavirus response

One of the great pleasures of working in the Formula 1 environment is that it's so agile and dynamic. Throw a new set of regulations at an F1 team and its people will see opportunities that no normal group could imagine. Even more impressive is the way they will execute those opportunities. The competitive instinct of the F1 engineer marries innovation, ambition and pragmatism in a unique way.

When the world was first turned upside down by COVID-19, one department linked to government realised it was an ideal opportunity to use this exceptional F1 ability in a humanitarian manner. When the Cabinet Office put out a call for industry to turn its attention to the manufacture of ventilators for patients in critical care, this department reached out to F1 for help.

That department was Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, a group that works in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities, and the government's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish.

The reason that Innovate UK could identify the match so quickly was not coincidental. Its Chief Technology Officer is Mark Gillan (below), who had a long career in F1 at teams such as McLaren, Jaguar, Red Bull, Toyota and Williams.

On Sunday 22 March, within five days of the call, a meeting was convened at MK7, the home of Red Bull Advanced Technologies and the design home of the Aston Martin Valkyrie.

Representatives of the UK-based F1 teams were present along with representatives from Olympus Medical, the COVID-19 lead from the Association of Anaesthetists, the national clinical lead for innovation at NHS England, representatives from the medical branches of the military, and many others.

Once the general problems had been explained by the clinicians present, a presentation was given of a device, originally conceived for military use, that appeared to be a good base for a novel, rapidly manufactured ventilator to bridge the gap between the relatively simple Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) devices and the extremely complex intrusive ventilators used in intensive care departments.

In normal circumstances, for a device to be fully qualified and deployed in production quantities in an operational environment would typically have taken around two years. Project Pitlane challenged themselves to complete the task in four weeks

The device, known as Remora and later named Bluesky (pictured below), was probably at a technology readiness level (TRL) of around three - meaning that it had reached proof of concept but no further.

In normal circumstances, to get from TRL3 to TRL9, where a device is fully qualified and deployed in production quantities in an operational environment, would typically have taken around two years. Project Pitlane, as the group of teams became christened, challenged themselves to complete the task in four weeks.

Bearing in mind this included fundamental design, mechatronics, prototype endurance testing, electronic and printed circuit board design, software programming, failure mode analysis, testing and certification, they set themselves an enormous challenge.

In parallel with this, other projects were ongoing. UCL hospital in London made independent contact with Mercedes High Performance Powertrains, seeking assistance in reverse-engineering a simple CPAP device known as the Whisperflow.

This was a purely mechanical and fluidic apparatus, but as it was no longer manufactured it had to be reverse-engineered and CAD models produced to enable rapid CNC machining to take place. This, as well as production of the first batch of devices, was achieved within days and by mid-April, 10,000 devices had been manufactured. Production peaked on Easter Sunday with 1,230 made on that day.

In typical F1 fashion, not content with accepting a proven design as also being an ultimate design, the team further improved it, resulting in a significant reduction in oxygen consumption, a commodity that was to become scarce if the contagion ever reached its fully predicted strength. As the design rights had expired, Mercedes was also able to make the entire design open source - resulting in 1,445 licences being issued to 105 countries at the time of writing.

The more sophisticated devices made by Smiths in Luton and Penlon in Abingdon were both in full production, but even here F1 managed to contribute. The Smiths device was being built from a suite of outdated 2D drawings, so Williams undertook another reverse-engineering challenge to produce 3D CAD models thereby allowing a much faster production rate to be achieved. Personnel from the teams, on a completely voluntary basis, also helped with production build and end-of-line sign-off for both devices.

Ultimately, within days of the Remora project achieving Medical and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) certification, the Cabinet Office decided that with the reduced number of patients presenting with a need for full ventilation, and with a larger than anticipated influx of ventilators from abroad, the Remora device was no longer needed.

It was an enormous disappointment to the team that had been working 15+ hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly four weeks, but in a very professional manner the project was shrink-wrapped and the vast inventory of stock that had been purchased put into government storage in a manner that, should the need ever arise, would allow the project to be picked up again and taken to its conclusion.

In true F1 spirit, rather than remaining downcast, the team working on it immediately started pushing the Cabinet Office for further projects to get involved in to ease the ever-changing situation.

People often underestimate the contribution that F1 makes to society, as it is often not very visible. For example, the aerofoil-sectioned fridge shelves developed by Williams and now fitted to one million fridges in Sainsbury's has led to an 8,700-ton CO2 footprint reduction for the company. In another arena, McLaren has applied F1 data acquisition and analysis techniques to digital healthcare to allow doctors to understand the contributing factors to the onset of type II diabetes.

The examples are many, but perhaps nowhere has the unique ability of F1 engineering to react to the unknown been better illustrated than in Project Pitlane's response to the ventilator challenge. It is something everyone in the F1 community, from engineers to avid fans, should be proud of.