F1 Steering Wheel Cost: How expensive are F1 Steering wheels?

F1 Steering Wheel Cost: How much does it cost to have an F1 steering wheel in a Formula 1 car and how does it work.

A Formula 1 car steering wheel at first glance looks highly complicated and certainly, it is. An average F1 steering wheel consists of a total of 25 buttons and switches and, of course, the clutch and the shift paddles.

Thus, this makes it clear that F1 steering wheel is a complicate task and would be attracting huge investment. To give a perspective, a single F1 steering wheel takes almost 80 hours to make.

Over the course of the season, a single F1 driver uses 3 or 4 steering wheels, which surely would increase the utilization of resources. So how much does F1 steering wheel cost?

F1 Steering Wheel Cost

It is not possible to give an exact single figure for an F1 steering wheel as every team develops their own wheels, hence their cost could vary, but an approximate figure, as per the sources is around $90,000.

And as above mentioned that a driver uses 3-4 steering wheels across the season. Thus, it takes the overall cost to around $270,000-360,000.

How do they work

Apart from obviously changing directions of a car, Formula 1 steering wheels handle a lot of complicated stuff. As mentioned above that an average steering wheel has around 25 buttons.

Five of those buttons and switches change the brake settings of the car: the driver can shift the brake balance from the front to the rear or vice versa, to optimise the brake balance for an individual corner, change the amount of engine braking or adjust the brake migration, which is a dynamic change of the brake balance depending on how hard the driver brakes.

Another three switches control the differential – the amount of torque transfer between the rear wheels – for the entry, the apex and the exit of a corner.

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The rest of the buttons and switches have a variety of different purposes, from adjusting the settings of the Power Unit to changing the data that is displayed on the screen, activating the radio or the pit lane speed limiter.