Racing Formula One is like being inside a fighter jet that’s zipping through impossibly winding roads at 322km/h. There’s a lot going on. Piloting a powerful race car through the twisting roads requires a steering wheel that can control and handle all those changes on the fly. It also makes for a steering wheel that doesn’t look like a wheel at all.
This video annotates all the button pushing adjustments that are being made by the driver on the fly during a race, and it’s pretty wild. Even if you’re not aware of what’s exactly going on, it’s obvious that racing Formula One is very, very different from taking your parent’s car for a spin around the neighbourhood. The steering wheel has all these colourful buttons, wild switches, and mysterious knobs. It’s almost like playing an arcade game. Like a really, really hard one.
Jalopnik highlighted some of the buttons in a F1 steering wheel before, and they include:
Buttons
BB- / BB+ — Brake-by-wire management (adjusting the brake balance down / up) OT — The ‘overtake’ button
N — Neutral
+10 / +1 — Multifunctional switches, located in an optimal position
Radio — Activated the driver to engineer radio
DRS — Operates the DRS flap
Limiter — Engages the pit lane limiter
Marker — Used to identify a point of interest in the data as indicated by the driver
PC/R — Confirms pit entry by sending an automated alert to the garage. This allows the crew to prepare for the arrival of a car, regardless of whether it’s been indicated on the radio that the driver is coming in