Auto123.com - Helping you drive happy

F1: Golf adopts Formula One technology

|
Get the best interest rate
Khatir Soltani
From team press release

Williams F1 announced today that it has entered into a unique license agreement with Williams Sports, a US golf equipment company.

Combining Williams F1’s engineering capability with the established golf club design and production experience of the team at Williams Sports, will create a partnership that will advance golf club designs to a new level in 2010 and beyond.


The purpose of the partnership is to inject Williams F1’s Formula One technology into the design and manufacture of Williams Sports’ golfing equipment.

The initial areas of technical partnership are in the aerodynamic profiling of golf club shafts, ferrules and heads, and the application of composites and alloys materials science in club design. With current limitations on modern golf club design, aerodynamics and materials are now the most important aspect of research and development for advance golf products.

Both aerodynamics and carbon fibre composite technology are core Formula One competencies. Aerodynamics is the key performance differentiator in Formula One.

Alongside traditional experimental disciplines such as wind tunnel testing, the sport leads the aerodynamic predictive discipline of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model the drag and downforce characteristics of their race cars.

The sport has also pioneered the application and use of low weight, high strength carbon fibre since the 1980s, developing race cars that withstand ten annual penetration, static and dynamic crash tests to ensure driver safety while not compromising performance.

Along with carbon fibre, several other materials that are critical to the performance of the race cars will be featured in the line of Williams Sports products. The clubs will feature tungsten inserts that will be used for fine-tuning of weight distribution, which is a process used in Formula One.

Initial CFD analysis has shown that the aerodynamic profiling of a top surface trip and diffuser geometry to the underside of a driver head, does, under control conditions, lend the club a smaller wake and improved pressure recovery. The net gain for the golfer is a reduced loss of swing energy in addressing the ball and a more stable head angle better enabling a clean and directional ball strike.

In simulations, the Williams Sports’ FW32 driver demonstrated 19% less drag force and an 11.5% decrease in drag coefficient as against a similarly specified TaylorMade Burner driver.


photo:Williams
Khatir Soltani
Khatir Soltani
Automotive expert
  • Over 6 years experience as a car reviewer
  • Over 50 test drives in the last year
  • Involved in discussions with virtually every auto manufacturer in Canada