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(I sincerely hope that this falls within fair-use guidelines.)
Csaba's column in the March 2004 issue of Car & Driver discusses a new book from David Bull Publishing written by Peter Wright, formerly of Lotus, titled Ferrari Formula 1: Under the Skin of the Championship-winning F1-2000. By way of example of the enormous detail contained in this book, Csaba cites the following about the current Ferrari F1 offering, which I read with a continual sense of sheer amazement:
"...Although current regulations limit the minimum weight of an F1 car, including the driver, to 1323 pounds, the Ferraris are actually much lighter than that figure. They're brought up to the minimum weight with about 154 pounds of tungsten ballast applied to the bottom of the carbon-fiber tob to lower the car's center of gravity as much as possible....
"...In 2000 the Ferrari's 3.0-liter V-10 developed 806 horsepower at 17,500 rpm and 253 pound-feet or torque at 15,500, with an 18,000-rpm redline.
"To smooth the power curve, the engine employs variable-length intake trumpets that stroke through their length multiple times as the engine revs from 6000 to 18,000 rpm. These require very quick electrohydraulic actuators to keep up with an engine that can gain revs at the rate of 25,000 rpm per second. To further smooth power delivery at part throttle, the drive-by-wire throttles for one bank of five cylinders lag behind the throttles for the other bank until the throttles are about 80 percent open.
...
"Whirring around at 18,000 rpm, the crankshaft could lose a lot of power whipping oil to a froth, so the engine's dry-sump lubrication system uses two scavenge pumps to extract every drop of oil from each two-cylonder crankcase module. Add one more scavenge pump for each cylinder head, and you have a total complement of 12.
"The engine bolts to a carbon-fiber clutch housing that encloses a tiny 4.5-inch diameter three-place carbon-carbon clutch. It's tiny because the size of this component determines how low the engine can be positioned in the car....
"Bolted to the clutch housing is the transaxle with a case created by welding 24 fully machined totanium components together. Inside, the planetary gear differential is designed to be as narrow as possible to maximize the width of the underbody diffuser at the rear of the car.
"This is critical because the diffuser is the most efficient aerodynamic component on the car. It generates more than 40 percent of the downforce that allowed the Ferrari to generate roughly 4.0 g of lateral grip at 160 mph. The tires generate nearly 2.0 g of that grip, and the rest comes from the aerodynamic components that generate downforce of roughly 2000 pounds.
...
"In a midrange setting [ for the adjustable rear wing ], aerodynamic drag is so high that the car decelerates at 1.1 g when the driver lifts off the throttle. That's as hard as a Z06 Corvette brakes in a full-ABS stop. The carbon-carbon brakes contribute an additional 3.0 g of retardation, which explains why the stopping distances are so short that passing under braking is virtually impossible."
In short, these damned things are closer to surfacebound jet fighters than they are to anything you or I know as a car. Which is why, as I sat there on the throne reading this, I found myself thinking and muttering aloud, over and over, things like "Fuck me with a camshaft...."
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It's a pity that the FIA has banned a lot of cool technology... really, 1993 was the technological peak for F1 - since then things like fully active suspension and traction control have been either banned or highly restricted. It used to be that F1 cars were the testbed for new road car technology... those days are past.
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