“The only intelligent thing about Mansell’s Williams is the suspension”: it was 1986 and so Nelson Piquet mocked his teammate by bringing up a technical marvel never seen before in F1: a system of shock absorbers managed by a computer that he adapted the car’s set-up according to the points on the track.
We all know how it ended, the Williams FW11 won the constructors’ championship hands down and the innovation of the English team made history. A story that – since then – has never stopped, reaching the present day with a sophistication never seen before: the driverless racing car.
An impossible challenge which after many tests was even achieved in a championship, the Indy Autonomous Challenge which sees the participation of 26 teams, more than double those of F1. And the participation of two Italian teams, PoliMOVE-MSU (Polytechnic University of Milan, Michigan State University, University of Alabama) and UNIMORE Racing – (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia). A record that is not the only one for Italy given that all the cars come from Parma: they are the self-driving Dallara AV-21s.
But not only that: there is also the fact that the e-Novia research group has developed more than one hundred and fifty projects in collaboration with companies of the caliber of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati, and has given rise to the foundation of ten spin-off companies -off, mainly in the vehicular sector. Among these: e-Shock, Blubrake, YAPE and HiRide, which today are part of the e-Novia Group.
And if motorsport purists turn up their noses, it must be said that there is a lot of humanity here because a lot of study is done at the Indy Autonomous Challenge, thanks to the collaboration of over 40 universities from 11 countries. Yes, because the championship was designed precisely to enable the engineering skills of the best university students from all over the world to excel. A competition that will make enormous progress precisely in those technologies capable of accelerating the creation of fully autonomous vehicles, as well as the implementation of advanced driver assistance systems, the so-called ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). But also all the different control systems: intelligent or virtual actuators and sensors, braking, traction, stability control systems, electronic suspensions and much more.
Of course, the single-seaters that race in the Indy Autonomous Challenge are scary just to look at them because the cockpit is completely blocked. That is, where the driver normally sits, in the single-seater, there is a white cover. Below there is the thinking heart of the machine which makes it possible to make a group of cars race together, fighting each other, without human control.
A horror compared to the warmth of a driver, the heart he puts into racing, his strategies. Certain. But we also need to be honest and recognize that the crazy sophistication of modern F1 is leading to machines acting like men and men acting like machines. In the end, if this concept of Erich Fromm is taken to the extreme even further, we will move on to self-driving single-seaters without even realizing it…
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