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The English racing driver James Hunt, Formula 1 World Champion in 1977, gave up his job while still at the top of his career.  Why?  He said it was because technology and engineering were winning the races, no longer the best drivers.  The human element of Formula 1 racing, he claimed, had been lost to the big teams who could spend the most money on producing better engines and faster cars.

Sadly, Hunt died in 1993.  It would be interesting to hear what he thinks now that big racing teams spend more than £500 million on engines each year.

Even if Michael Schumacher is certainly a very good driver, it is clear that if he was driving an old car, he wouldn’t win.  Formula One is now driven by science and technology.  However, it is not only the engineers who are the new experts – now, it seems, it is time for evolutionary biologists to sit in the driving seat!

But what can evolutionary biologists, with their interests in “selective breeding” and producing “offspring”, bring to the world of tyre changes, pit stops and pole positions?

A team of researchers at University College London are combining computer science and evolutionary biology to develop a new generation of fast cars.  The team have designed a number of computer simulations to create virtual environments influenced by chaos theory.  Dr. Peter Bentley, leader of the team, says that Formula 1 is a perfect example of a “chaotic” environment -  a great number of variable factors must be considered when a person is trying to drive a car as fast as possible.  Temperature, weather conditions and the materials the car is made out of are just some of the things which can affect a car’s speed.

“In the past”, explains Dr. Bentley, “this was all done by a trial-and-error procedure, out on the race track itself.  Now, using simulations, we can limit the number of variable factors.”  The team designed a ‘population’ of around 30 slightly different computer-generated cars. Using highly realistic racing simulations, they found the fastest two – the “parents”.

The team looked at the individual features of these “parents” and acted as if they were a genetic code.  They put them together to produce the next generation of cars, also introducing very small random mutations, copying what happens in nature. And as in nature only the fittest, or in this case fastest, survived. The team then repeated this process for 40 generations.

The final car had a lap-time much quicker than its ancestor, the original “parent”.  It was 0.88 seconds quicker than the car which came second – a car of “human” design.   In a sport where a fraction of a second can mean the difference between winning and losing, this was an important difference.

No Formula 1 team has yet bought the results of their research, but Dr. Bentley says several of them are very interested.  

Ironically, however, Dr. Bentley shares one thing in common with James Hunt – when asked what he thinks of Formula 1 these days, he replies, “It’s not as exciting as it used to be. There are fewer characters.”  Perhaps getting Charles Darwin’s ideas into Formula 1 is his way of bringing back the characters!

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