Formula 1 steering wheels have come a long way. They used to be just for turning the car but now they are SO MUCH more. But how did we get from massive wooden steering wheels to sculpted carbon fibre units with more computing power than your laptop? Let’s walk through the steering wheels from every era of F1.
It may seem funny to us now, but wheels weren’t the first choice by car manufacturers for the apparatus to turn their vehicles. They started off with a lever that looked like a joystick you would play video games with in the 1990s (if you can remember that). Luckily, they thought of a different way of doing it and the steering wheel was born. There was nothing flashy about the F1 steering wheels of the 1950s – they were literally lifted from the road cars at the time.
They were LARGE, some reaching over 40cm in diameter. That’s similar to what you would find on a van or a truck, and were made out of aluminium for the inner wheel and timber for the rim. They looked beautiful, but this wooden rim did cause some issues, as drivers complained of getting splinters while driving.
The cars of the 1950s didn’t have power steering so the large diameter was necessary for the driver to get the leverage they needed to get the car going where they wanted it to. The thin tyres of the day didn’t provide much grip either so the drivers spent most of their time sideways.
— see video above —
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