Formula 1 and IP – Why F1 and Patents Don’t Mesh

Hi everyone,

As the new Formula 1 (F1) season is fast approaching, the first race of the season being on March 20th, I was curious about how F1 handles IP. This curiosity is derived from the innovation that F1 exhibits each season. For those that do not know, each year each F1 team has to develop a new car based on the guidelines going into that season. This year is particularly special as this season we are going to see the most radical change in guidelines in years. F1 is all about finding the grey areas in the guidelines to develop technology that will give you an edge as every hundredth of a second could mean the difference between winning and losing. On the line is not just pride but teams are compensated by F1 at the end of the season based on their position in the standings. Where a team places can make a difference of 10s of millions of dollars, which of course would make the team more competitive going into the next year as they’d have more funding. Teams definitely have trademarks in their brands but revolutionary F1 technology is often not patented. Teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing this technology and do not patent it but rather try to keep their innovations as trade secrets – why is this so? You may think it sounds ridiculous that a company would spend that amount of money to develop technology and not patent it. This is the case because the governing body of F1 has actually said that if a team attempts to patent technology and enforce it, that technology would be banned. If a team patents a design and implements it, the other teams will simply vote it out via the FIA Technical Working Group. The logic here is that if one team develops technology that blows the competition out of the water and then patents it, the racing (which is the whole purpose of F1) would suffer. No one wants to see a race for second with one team dominating. It is a bit funny to write that as Mercedes has actually been dominant from 2014-2021, their driver’s championship streak finally came to an end last year when Red Bull finally won (in a very controversial fashion). Mercedes’s run of dominance is attributed to great drivers, a great engineering team (with some well-kept trade secrets), and a massive budget but not patents. Another reason for the lack of patents in F1 is patenting technology takes time. Cars are updated throughout the year from race to race, if something works it stays, if it doesn’t the team could potentially change it. The patent process is often lengthy and would not keep up with the pace of an F1 season or radical changes in development from year to year.

Despite not patenting the technology in F1, teams that are often owned by major car manufacturers often implement the technology they develop for their F1 cars into their road vehicles. It’s unclear how or if this technology gets patented for road car use but it is definitely cool to see that innovation show some utility on larger scale. An example of such a technology is paddle shifters developed in the 80s and now incorporated in many cars around the world. There are many more examples and I have attached a few articles below for everyone if they would like to learn more about F1 and IP or about the innovations that have made it into road cars.

Thanks for reading!

-Amit Chandi

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1-technology-has-supercharged-the-world.6Gtk3hBxGyUGbNH0q8vDQK.html 

https://blog.ipleaders.in/driving-force-behind-intellectual-property-formula-1/ 

https://www.iposgoode.ca/2021/05/formula-1-living-in-a-patent-free-world/#:~:text=Strict%20patent%20rules%20would%20essentially,keep%20the%20playing%20field%20level.%E2%80%9D

https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/interactives/special-feature/f1-trickle-down-effect.php