LG and F1 – Good Clean Fun and Functionality

19 November 2009 - By Simon Arron

“Would you care to write something about LG vacuum cleaners?”

It was not, I’ll confess, the most enticing offer I’d ever received. I’m a freelance motorsport journalist and my everyday world tends to be a mixture of aerodynamic fine-tuning, lightweight materials, braking distances, tyre wear and outrageous performance – average lap speeds of 250kph-plus at some circuits, for instance. I knew absolutely nothing about dust filtration. First, though, a little background.

My name is Simon Arron and I have been fascinated by cars since before I could talk. When I discovered that you could race them, too – which didn’t take very long – my obsession deepened. When anybody asked the young me which career path I’d like to follow, the answer was simple and unchanging: “Racing driver.” I didn’t have a clue how to achieve such goals, though – and as my dad drove a Ford rather than a Bentley, I didn’t imagine there would be much sponsorship available from that direction.

How, then, could I become professionally involved with a sport I loved, but which seemed so distant? Writing seemed like a practical option, so I pestered a local newspaper editor. It was only a matter of local events – at Oulton Park, in north-west England – rather than Monaco or Monza, but it was a start. That enabled me to obtain a press pass, which ultimately, a full-time job with a weekly motorsport newspaper. That was June 1982 – and I still contribute to the same publication 27 years later.

I started covering Formula One on a fairly regular basis during the mid 1990s, and since 2001 I have attended every grand prix. When I met up with LG’s Vice President of Global Sponsorship Andrew Barrett in Brazil last October, to discuss the finer points of vacuum cleaners, it marked my 155th consecutive race attendance.

Located deep within the São Paulo suburbs, Interlagos – the Brazilian GP’s home track – is one of the great Formula One venues. Interlagos has heritage and atmosphere and survives as an essential link with the sport’s past. Interlagos was the stage for the first Brazilian GP to count towards the world championship, in 1973, and has hosted the event another 26 times since.

In the middle of the circuit’s high-speed dips and turns, LG had set up its Technology Design Centre in the Formula One Village, where sponsors gather to display their products. And there, between banks of beautiful LG flat-screen TVs and display stands brimming with the latest LG mobile phone know-how, I encountered LG’s bagless vacuum cleaner for the first time. Technology is technology, no matter how it is packaged. As Andrew showed me the LG vacuum and I began to learn more about it, I began to acknowledge a few parallels between this world and my F1 world.

I wandered away to take a few photographs of racing cars, but was partially thwarted by a fierce electrical storm that washed out 40 minutes of the next practice session. As I stood there, I found myself with ample time to contemplate vacuum cleaners and to conjure a few questions for Pierre Bon, LG’s Paris-based European Training Manager, and Paul Monaghan, Head of Car Engineering at Red Bull Racing, which scored six grand prix victories during the 2009 season.

As a Global Technology Partner of Formula One, LG clearly has strong motorsport links… but just how much do its vacuum cleaners have in common with contemporary F1 cars?

Compresssion “Compression is a good place to start,” says Pierre. “LG tackles problems from a consumer’s perspective and pays a lot of attention to what people need. The main issue with a bagless vacuum cleaner is to empty the tank without generating clouds of dust that contaminate the atmosphere.”

After conducting numerous surveys and studying customer feedback, LG tried to compress the dust as efficiently as possible in an effort to make homes hygienic. As a result of its Dust Compression Technology, domestic litter is crushed into a block that is the approximate size and consistency of a hockey puck.

“Compression plays a major part in what we do at Red Bull racing as well,” says Paul. “If you treat it as a change in air pressure you can have expansion as well as compression, so this can be positive or negative. If you think about an engine, you want a positive pressure increase as you bring the piston up towards the cylinder. In the case of the underside of a wing or the car’s floor, though, we are looking to reduce pressure. You can’t call it an expansion, but we are still seeking a pressure change. A pressure change creates airflow and, therefore, force. You can press a piston up or down, or you can use a wing to press a car down so it sticks to the track. Pressure changes are exactly what we seek in many areas on an F1 car and in the LG vacuum.”

Aerodynamics In bygone times, a strong engine and a nimble chassis were fundamental to Formula One success, but the sport’s methodology altered during the late 1970s, when the benefits of efficient aerodynamics first began to be understood properly. Since then, the science of the wind tunnel has increasingly dictated the size and shape of F1 cars. Detail changes to apparently minor elements – a front wing endplate, perhaps – can make a crucial difference in the real-world environment of the racetrack.

“The more work you need to do to move the air, the more power you need to do it,” Paul continues. “Our [F1] car’s engine generates a certain amount of power and, in order to travel down a straight at a certain speed, we have to get the drag levels right. Too much drag will affect our efficiency.”

Smooth airflow is externally desirable in motorsport – and internally essential in the LG vacuum cleaner’s domestic domain. “In principle,” Pierre says, “a vacuum cleaner is a bit like a wind tunnel because it is sucking air into a chamber – the motor generates airflow. In the motorsport industry a wind tunnel serves to purify the airflow– and that is important to us, too. In a traditional vacuum the dust bag serves as a filter, but we don’t have one of those: we have devised an advanced filtration system that keeps dust out of the airflow and helps us to maintain maximum suction power.”

Reliability “Although an F1 car is quite small,” Pierre says, “it is more powerful and more sophisticated than almost anything else on four wheels. Its designers have to strike the right balance between power, efficiency and reliability and that is just the same for us. We want our vacuums to be as small and light as possible, but we also crave power and reliability.

“The bagless vacuum market contains a huge range of options and LG models tend to be at the more expensive end of the spectrum, but the price reflects our quality and reliability is a key part of that. It isn’t easy integrating lots of technology into a relatively small unit. The principle is simple enough – a vacuum cleaner is really just a dust pump – but within that you need to develop effective airflow controls and dust filtration systems. As with F1, efficiency is the key.”

What, though, is the greatest challenge when it comes to harnessing an F1 car’s power and optimising reliability?

“The biggest thing,” Paul says, “is not losing sight of what you are trying to achieve. [At Red Bull Racing] we are in a prototype business, so designs always evolve. The car you see at the initial season launch at the beginning of the year is only ever a snapshot of our technology at that moment in time. Behind every new car there are lots of fresh parts being designed in the name of making it lighter and more aerodynamically efficient, to improve its performance and make it more reliable.

“Some fundamental principles still apply, though: you need adequate airflow through the radiators and you mustn’t put the exhaust too close to anything because it will probably burn it… In terms of overall car reliability you are just looking for good engineering practice and it’s a matter of applying that within a tight package – there isn’t much wasted space on any F1 car. It’s a question of compromise: you need to fit it all in without taking silly risks.”

Design Efficiency and power: recurring themes, both, but they demand a number of compromises. Reducing weight, for instance, enables power to be used more effectively, but at the same time components cannot be so light that they become potentially fragile. Physically, a grand prix car is not particularly big – its size and dimensions are tightly restricted by the regulations. The maximum width is 180cm, while length and height are dictated by other parameters – typically, though, cars are about 450-460cm long and 95cm high. Minimum weight, including the driver, is 605kg – about half that of a small, everyday car such as a Honda Civic (minus any passengers). There is a whole host of cutting-edge technology packed into a fairly small area.

“We have to tailor our approach to the different types of circuit,” Paul says. “Monza and Monaco, for instance, have very different cooling requirements. It’s easy to keep things cool at Monza, where air passes through the car at high speed, but less so at Monaco or Hungary, where cars are running relatively slowly and the ambient temperature tends to be quite hot. You constantly have to change parameters to suit the circumstances. At Abu Dhabi, for instance, the circuit was as dusty as anything and we had to be careful not to drag lots of rubbish though the car’s radiators.”

There are few – if any – industries that can rival F1’s pace of development, especially during a season such as 2009, when a set of new aerodynamic regulations came into force. From the first race onwards, it was common to see team members bringing new parts onto aeroplanes as hand luggage.

“The pace at LG is a little less frantic for us,” Pierre says, “but like any good F1 team we at LG continue to develop and improve products once they are launched. We introduced our first Dust Compression Technology system in 2007 and by the end of 2008 our second-generation version was ready to go into the shops. We are always looking to improve our performance.”

Noise For all that they are similarly pragmatic, there is one key area in which the worlds of F1 and LG will forever be divided: noise. The pitch of an engine turning at 18,000rpm is part of the sensory overload that adds to the excitement of every grand prix weekend. It’s a tradition that racing cars should sound as good as they look, but such things don’t work in every application. “For us,” says Pierre, “it is very important to keep noise levels down and some of our suppression technology also features in LG dishwashers and washing machines.”

Technology Transfer This concept of technology transfer is widespread. The LG bagless vacuum’s compression technology demonstrates this perfectly between LG products. For example, it integrates a multilayered filter located at the motor’s outlet and operates in three stages. The first layer is composed of carbon particles that trap pollutant substances and gas into their honeycomb structure. This stage removes the odors to keep the home atmosphere fresh. Originally, this kind of filtration was developed and integrated within refrigerators for odorless cabinets.

The second layer is an Epa filter working like a very fine sieve, trapping the particles that are less than 0.3 microns in size therefore eliminating allergens, such as mites, and residues of pet fur. This is a prominent feature of LG vacuum cleaners, but it is also used within the air purification systems, such as LG dehumidifiers.

The third layer kills bacteria via its antibiotic coating. This kind of coating is composed of silver ions and was originally applied on to the walls of LG’s refrigerator products for improved hygiene.

The concept of technology transfer extends equally to motorsport. Some F1 innovations filter onto the road car market, a prime example being the electronic fuel injection system that Honda developed for its racing engines in the late 1980s. Similarly, tyre manufacturers use lessons learned in grand prix racing to improve their road-car ranges: the two realms might be diametrically opposed – one tyre is designed for 30 laps, the other for 30,000 kilometres or more – but the development of new materials and construction methods can be beneficial to both.

Manoeuvrability It goes without saying that balance and manoeuvrability are core ingredients of any successful racing car, although these are achieved in different ways. “We change whatever we need on the Red Bull f1 cars car from circuit to circuit,” says Paul. “The greatest contrast is probably Monaco to Monza. At Monaco you want every last possible ounce of downforce on the car, to help you maximise performance through the constant twists and turns, and you accept the drag penalty that comes with it. At Monza you are dominated by the need to generate high speed on the long straights and you do everything you can to reduce drag, hence the smaller wings and so on. The downside of reducing downforce is the fact we don’t go around the corners so quickly – the whole process of changing the car’s speed and direction becomes more difficult. It doesn’t give the driver such a large margin for error, shall we say.”

Racing cars can be fine-tuned endlessly to suit different circumstances – but such luxuries do not extend LG’s vacuum cleaner technicians. That does not, however, diminish their desire for manoeuvrability.

“It is a key part of our product design brief,” says Pierre Bon of LG. “Some of our consumers live in flats, others in houses and naturally this means dealing with various situations. Even in apartment blocks, where the rooms are dimensionally identical, the furniture arrangements will differ, so our vacuum cleaners need to be adaptable to a wide range of circumstances and must be as manoeuvrable as possible. They must be easy and comfortable to use. How will it react to changes of direction, for instance? We spent a lot of time looking at this and fitted a free-moving wheel below the vacuum cleaner. This helps to maintain stability and enables the machine to follow you everywhere. It is something we introduced a while ago and not many vacuum cleaners have it. There are many bagless vacuums on the market and the quality varies hugely in terms of manoeuvrability, but user-friendliness is something LG always builds in. It is essential that our vacuums are well balanced and easy to carry.”

Paul from Red Bull Racing adds: “Everything has some kind of inertia, doesn’t it? A supertanker takes five or six miles to stop at sea, yet Red Bull’s F1 car takes only 100 metres to stop from 300kph. You wouldn’t expect a vacuum to do 300kph around your house, but it would be an awful pain if you got it started and it flew straight through your patio door… It has to be manoeuvrable so you want to keep your weight down. That way, the inertia’s low and so is the force required to get it to change direction.”

Control In F1 terms this theme is probably best epitomised by the steering wheel – a small, £30,000 jewel that incorporates a bewildering array of functions, from drinks bottle and pit radio to temperature gauges and a scroll-down menu that enables drivers to change various parameters, including engine performance.

It is here that Pierre draws some unexpected parallels.

“There are many surprising elements on an F1 car,” he says, “but we at LG have one of our own and I’m particularly proud of it. I think our vacuum cleaner’s handle is ergonomically brilliant. All the controls are contained within – it has lots of buttons, although not quite as many as an F1 steering wheel. All the functions can be controlled from here, including the level of suction power.

“This is actually quite important, because many people buy a vacuum, set it to full power and never touch the switch again. Maximum suction is not suitable for all situations, though – you don’t want to use it on a carpet, for instance, or the material will stick to the vacuum and you lose efficiency. People then think they have bought a very poor vacuum cleaner, but in truth they are just using it badly. With all the controls in one place, people have no excuse. It is more efficient in terms of both performance and energy-saving to regulate the vacuum for different settings, just as you might adjust engine performance on an F1 car to suit changing situations during the weekend – if you need to save fuel during a certain stage of the race, for instance.

“Some people assume grand prix drivers keep their feet hard down on the throttle at all times, but of course it is nothing like that at all. Driving is a much more subtle art and I would say people need to take the same approach with their vacuum.”

It’s a common philosophy for two ostensibly contrasting worlds that I now have a better understanding of, and a better appreciation for why LG is well suited to be Technology Partner of Formula 1.