In 2020, a Formula 1 team was fined €400,000 and lost 15 championship points over a component most spectators never see: a brake duct.
Just four years later, another Formula 1 team began applying high-temperature 3D printing to manufacture brake cooling ducts using carbon fiber reinforced PEEK, replacing a complicated carbon fiber lamination process with additive manufacturing.
The reported results? 68% lower production costs, 66% shorter lead times, and 86% fewer technical drawings.
And coincidentally, the 2026 Formula 1 United States Grand Prix is happening this very weekend, October 23–25, at Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas. With Formula 1 returning to the United States, it’s a fitting time to examine one of the less visible engineering innovations changing how race cars are manufactured.
Because this story isn’t really about replacing carbon fiber with plastic. It’s about eliminating tooling, accelerating design iterations, and understanding when an advanced thermoplastic like PEEK actually justifies its cost.
Why Are Formula 1 Brake Ducts So Important to Aerodynamics and Performance?
On a typical road car, a brake cooling duct is relatively straightforward. Air enters through an opening in the bumper and gets directed toward the brake rotor or caliper to remove heat.
On a Formula 1 car, things are considerably more complicated.
Formula 1 carbon-carbon brake discs can experience temperatures exceeding 1,000°C under extreme braking conditions. These discs contain numerous internal cooling passages, and engineers must carefully manage how air enters, circulates, and exits the brake assembly.
But cooling the brake disc is only part of the equation.
Brake duct assemblies also manage airflow around the calipers, influence wheel rim temperatures, affect tire thermal behavior, and control aerodynamic disturbances around the wheels.
That means a brake duct performs several jobs simultaneously:
- Brake cooling: Directing airflow through the brake discs and around the calipers.
- Tire temperature management: Influencing heat transfer through the wheel assembly.
- Aerodynamic performance: Managing airflow through and around the wheel region.
- Track-specific optimization: Balancing cooling requirements against drag and airflow efficiency.
A duct optimized for Monaco isn’t necessarily the best design for Monza. Different speeds, braking zones, ambient conditions, and aerodynamic configurations can require different solutions.
The shape of the duct directly influences performance. That’s why teams invest significant engineering resources into components that can appear deceptively simple.
Why Did Racing Point Lose 15 Championship Points Over Brake Ducts in 2020?
To understand why brake duct manufacturing matters so much, go back to the 2020 Formula 1 season.
Racing Point introduced the RP20, a car that closely resembled the championship-winning Mercedes W10 from the previous year. The resemblance was so obvious that the paddock nicknamed it the “Pink Mercedes.”
Studying competitors’ designs was not inherently against the rules. Formula 1 teams have always examined rival cars and incorporated publicly observable design concepts.
The problem was that brake ducts had become listed team components under the 2020 technical regulations.
Listed components had to be designed by the competing team rather than sourced from another constructor.
Racing Point had legally obtained Mercedes brake duct designs during 2019, when the component classification allowed it. However, the subsequent use of Mercedes-derived rear brake duct designs in 2020 violated the new design requirements.
The resulting penalty was substantial: €400,000 and 15 Constructors’ Championship points.
Racing Point ultimately finished fourth, only seven points behind McLaren in third. Without the deduction, the championship standings would have looked different.
The broader engineering consequence was clear. Teams needed to take responsibility for brake duct design and development, even when sourcing other permitted components from partner organizations.
How Did Racing Bulls Replace Traditional Carbon Fiber Brake Duct Manufacturing With 3D Printing?
That regulatory environment created a significant manufacturing challenge for teams such as Racing Bulls, the Faenza-based Italian team previously known as Minardi, Toro Rosso, and AlphaTauri.
Although Racing Bulls can use certain components supplied through its relationship with Red Bull, brake duct designs fall within the category of components requiring independent development.
Traditionally, these ducts have been manufactured from laminated carbon fiber composites.
That sounds reasonable until you consider their geometry.
Brake ducts incorporate complex internal passages, vanes, splitters, thin walls, and curved airflow channels. Producing these shapes through traditional composite manufacturing can require multiple molds, sacrificial cores, separate laminated sections, curing operations, and precision bonding.
A typical production sequence might involve:
- Designing the complete brake duct assembly.
- Designing and machining the required molds and cores.
- Laying carbon fiber composite materials into those molds.
- Curing the composite structures.
- Removing sacrificial cores from internal channels.
- Bonding multiple sections together.
- Performing dimensional inspection and final assembly.
Every individual component, mold, and interface introduces additional engineering documentation, manufacturing time, and potential assembly variation.
And when the aerodynamic department changes the design, much of that work may need to be repeated.
In 2024, Racing Bulls entered a technical partnership with Italian industrial 3D printer manufacturer Roboze to explore a different production method.
Rather than beginning with a low-risk bracket or cosmetic cover, the team selected a demanding application: brake cooling ducts manufactured from carbon fiber reinforced PEEK.
How Does the Roboze ARGO 500 Print Formula 1 Brake Ducts From Carbon Fiber PEEK?
The project used Roboze’s ARGO 500 HYPERSPEED industrial additive manufacturing platform and carbon fiber reinforced polyether ether ketone, commonly called CF-PEEK or Carbon PEEK.
The high-temperature printing platform described in the project is capable of nozzle temperatures reaching approximately 550°C and chamber temperatures around 180°C.
These thermal capabilities are important because PEEK is a semicrystalline engineering thermoplastic that requires carefully controlled processing temperatures to achieve consistent performance.
Unlike ordinary PLA or PETG, PEEK typically requires substantially higher extrusion temperatures and careful thermal management during printing.
Maintaining elevated chamber temperatures helps control cooling rates, reduce temperature gradients, and mitigate internal stresses that can cause warping, delamination, or dimensional distortion.
With additive manufacturing, the engineering process changes substantially.
Instead of designing individual molds and composite layups, engineers can develop the airflow geometry in CAD, analyze the design, prepare the build, and manufacture the part directly.
Internal features that previously required multiple bonded composite sections may be consolidated into fewer printed components or potentially a single structure.
This is one of additive manufacturing’s strongest advantages: part consolidation.
How Does Design for Additive Manufacturing Improve Complex Racing Components?
Eliminating molds doesn’t mean that engineers can ignore manufacturing constraints.
Successful high-temperature 3D printing requires Design for Additive Manufacturing, commonly abbreviated DfAM.
DfAM involves adapting a component’s geometry, orientation, wall thickness, internal features, and mechanical load paths to the capabilities of the selected additive manufacturing process.
For a brake cooling duct, this can include:
- Adjusting overhang angles to reduce support requirements.
- Using smoother transitions instead of abrupt geometric changes where appropriate.
- Optimizing wall thickness for stiffness, print stability, and weight.
- Orienting the part to account for directional mechanical properties.
- Ensuring internal channels can be printed and cleaned successfully.
- Reducing separate components, bonding interfaces, and fasteners.
There are limits. Internal passages still need to be printable, unsupported spans can be problematic, and layer orientation influences strength.
But compared with traditional molding, additive manufacturing can remove several major design constraints, including mold parting lines, draft angles, and the need to extract rigid tooling from complicated internal passages.
For a racing team, the real benefit becomes apparent when the aerodynamic department requests another iteration.
Instead of designing and manufacturing new tooling, the team can modify the CAD model, validate the changes, and produce another version.
That can dramatically increase the number of design iterations a team can evaluate within the same development window.
How Much Did 3D Printing Reduce Racing Bulls’ Brake Duct Manufacturing Costs?
According to performance figures published by Roboze for the Racing Bulls brake duct application, the additive manufacturing process delivered substantial improvements over the previous manufacturing approach.
| Manufacturing Metric | Reported Reduction |
|---|---|
| Technical drawings required | 86% |
| Production costs | 68% |
| Production lead times | 66% |
Source: Roboze Motorsport case study.
These figures illustrate why additive manufacturing can be valuable beyond simply reducing the cost of an individual part.
Consider the 86% reduction in technical drawings.
Every mold, core, separate composite component, and bonded interface can require additional design documentation and manufacturing instructions. Consolidating the assembly reduces the number of items that engineers need to document and manage.
That means less time spent preparing manufacturing drawings and more engineering capacity available for developing the race car.
The 68% reduction in production costs and 66% reduction in lead times are equally significant. They suggest that eliminating tooling and assembly operations can outweigh the higher raw material cost associated with advanced thermoplastics.
One qualification matters: these percentages are supplier-reported project results, and a complete public cost breakdown or absolute time baseline is not provided. They should be evaluated as outcomes of this specific manufacturing application, not universal savings that every PEEK printing project will achieve.
Why Is Carbon Fiber Reinforced PEEK Used for High-Temperature Motorsport Parts?
PEEK is already among the highest-performing engineering thermoplastics available for industrial fused filament fabrication.
It offers a compelling combination of chemical resistance, elevated-temperature performance, mechanical strength, and relatively low density.
For motorsport applications, those characteristics can be particularly valuable around oil, fuel, brake system fluids, and elevated operating temperatures.
Adding chopped carbon fiber reinforcement changes the mechanical and thermal behavior of the polymer.
For example, representative values discussed for 3DXTECH materials show the following comparison:
| Property | Unfilled PEEK | CF-PEEK |
|---|---|---|
| Tensile modulus | 3.7 GPa | 8.1 GPa |
| Heat deflection temperature | 140°C | 265°C |
Values are representative material comparisons from the referenced product discussion. Actual results depend on grade, fiber loading, test method, specimen preparation, and printing conditions. They should not be treated as universal specifications for all PEEK filaments.
The tensile modulus comparison shows why fiber reinforcement can be useful when a component must maintain its geometry under mechanical load.
At 8.1 GPa versus 3.7 GPa, the cited carbon fiber formulation has more than double the tensile stiffness of the unfilled material.
And for an aerodynamic duct, dimensional stability matters. If a thin wall distorts or deflects significantly, the internal airflow geometry may change.
The higher reported heat deflection temperature is also valuable, although HDT is a standardized short-term measurement under a specified load. It is not the same as continuous operating temperature, nor does it mean a CF-PEEK component can withstand direct exposure to a 1,000°C brake disc.
Carbon fiber reinforcement can also reduce shrinkage and improve dimensional control during the printing process, helping manufacturers achieve more repeatable results with challenging semicrystalline polymers.
Carbon Fiber PEEK vs. Glass Fiber PEEK: Which Is Better for Racing Applications?
Carbon fiber PEEK is not automatically the best option for every high-temperature component.
Glass fiber reinforced PEEK offers another useful engineering choice, particularly where electrical behavior or material-specific design requirements make carbon fiber undesirable.
Representative glass fiber PEEK formulations can achieve tensile modulus values around 7.3 GPa, approaching the stiffness of some chopped carbon fiber PEEK grades.
Glass reinforcement can also improve dimensional stability and reduce warping relative to unfilled PEEK.
However, these materials are not directly interchangeable. Electrical resistivity, density, fiber loading, mechanical anisotropy, thermal behavior, and chemical compatibility should all be evaluated.
For components near electronics, engineers should pay particular attention to electrical properties. Carbon-filled grades may be conductive or static dissipative depending on formulation, while appropriate glass-filled grades can preserve much higher electrical insulation.
The correct material depends on the actual requirements of the part, not simply which formulation has the highest tensile modulus.
Are 3D Printed Carbon Fiber PEEK Parts Stronger Than Laminated Carbon Fiber?
Here’s an important distinction that often gets lost when discussing carbon fiber 3D printing.
Chopped carbon fiber reinforced PEEK is not the same material system as continuous-fiber laminated carbon composites.
In filament-based CF-PEEK, relatively short carbon fibers are dispersed throughout the thermoplastic polymer.
In traditional carbon fiber laminate manufacturing, continuous fibers can be arranged in carefully selected orientations to carry structural loads extremely efficiently.
As a result, a well-designed continuous-fiber composite can offer superior specific stiffness and strength in its primary load directions compared with chopped-fiber FDM components.
Printed thermoplastics also introduce concerns such as layer bonding, build orientation, creep, porosity, and local defects.
So the claim that a 3D printed brake duct is inherently stronger or lighter than a laminated carbon fiber version should be treated cautiously unless supported by equivalent geometry, loading, and testing data.
The decisive advantage of printed CF-PEEK may not be maximum strength-to-weight ratio.
It may be the ability to produce a sufficiently strong, thermally capable component much faster, without repeatedly manufacturing expensive tooling.
For Formula 1, getting a validated improvement onto the race car sooner can be more valuable than removing the final few grams of mass.
Can a PEEK 3D Printed Brake Duct Survive Formula 1 Brake Temperatures?
Formula 1 brake discs can exceed 1,000°C, but that does not mean every part of the surrounding brake duct assembly experiences the same temperature.
Temperature varies substantially with the component’s location, airflow, radiant heat exposure, nearby hardware, and operating conditions.
The reported Racing Bulls application involves brake cooling duct components, not a claim that thermoplastic material is being placed directly against the hottest surfaces of the brake disc.
That distinction is critical.
For a high-temperature thermoplastic part to be considered suitable, engineers need to understand the actual service environment, including:
- Maximum sustained material temperature.
- Short-duration thermal exposure during braking events.
- Radiant heating from discs and adjacent components.
- Mechanical loading at elevated temperature.
- Vibration, fatigue, and thermal cycling.
- Chemical exposure and dimensional tolerances.
Material selection should be based on those operating conditions and validated through testing.
PEEK is an excellent material for many demanding thermal applications, but it is not a universal replacement for metals or continuous-fiber composites in the hottest regions of a braking system.
What Other Motorsports Applications Benefit From High-Temperature 3D Printing?
What makes this Formula 1 case study particularly useful is that the manufacturing logic extends well beyond the F1 paddock.
GT3 teams, time attack builders, Formula SAE students, and independent motorsport engineering shops face many of the same challenges, just with different budgets.
Components frequently need to withstand elevated temperatures, maintain accurate geometry, and undergo design revisions.
Potential applications for high-temperature additive manufacturing include:
- Brake cooling inlets and selected duct assemblies.
- Air intake and ventilation components.
- Aerodynamic test pieces, canards, and winglets.
- Underhood brackets and mounting hardware.
- Sensor enclosures and instrumentation mounts.
- Fluid-system support components and protective covers.
- Custom fixtures and manufacturing tooling.
Consider a race team developing a new brake inlet.
With traditional composite manufacturing, building five variations could require significant tooling, layup, and assembly work.
With additive manufacturing, engineers can modify and print multiple designs without producing a dedicated mold for every geometry.
That means more physical parts to evaluate, faster feedback from testing, and more opportunities to improve performance before the next event.
Some printed parts may be suitable for direct end use after validation. Others can serve as prototypes before moving into continuous carbon fiber, metal, or another final production process.
Either way, the development cycle becomes more flexible.
How Can the Vision Miner 22 IDEX Bring Carbon Fiber PEEK Printing Into a Race Shop?
One of the misconceptions surrounding PEEK and other advanced thermoplastics is that printing these materials requires a massive industrial manufacturing facility.
High-temperature equipment is necessary, but capable systems are increasingly accessible to smaller engineering organizations.
The Vision Miner 22 IDEX is designed for high-temperature thermoplastic production in engineering labs, machine shops, research facilities, and manufacturing environments.
Its relevant capabilities include:
- 500°C-capable nozzles for processing demanding engineering thermoplastics.
- Actively heated build chamber reaching up to 100°C on the V4 platform.
- 350 × 350 × 450 mm build volume for larger engineering components.
- Independent dual extrusion for flexible material and production workflows.
- Open material compatibility for appropriately qualified third-party filaments.
- Support for advanced polymers including PEEK and selected reinforced engineering thermoplastics.
The 22 IDEX does not duplicate the complete thermal processing envelope of every higher-temperature industrial PEEK system. Its chamber temperature, toolpath settings, material grade, component geometry, and validation requirements must be considered when determining whether a particular CF-PEEK part is suitable for production.
But for organizations that need to prototype or manufacture demanding thermoplastic components in-house, it provides an opportunity to shorten development cycles and reduce dependence on external tooling and production vendors.
That has implications far beyond motorsport, including aerospace, defense, automotive engineering, robotics, and industrial manufacturing.
Learn more about the Vision Miner high-temperature 3D printing solutions and discuss whether the 22 IDEX is an appropriate fit for your application.
Why Faster Manufacturing May Matter More Than the Material Itself
The most important lesson from Racing Bulls’ brake duct project isn’t that every carbon fiber component should suddenly be replaced with 3D printed plastic.
It’s that manufacturing strategy can be as valuable as material selection.
Carbon fiber reinforced PEEK is expensive compared with ordinary printing materials. It requires capable equipment, controlled processing conditions, and meaningful engineering validation.
For simple components that don’t need its capabilities, that additional cost may not make sense.
But when a component operates near significant heat, depends on precise geometry, and needs frequent redesign, the economics can change considerably.
Eliminating molds, reducing bonded assemblies, and accelerating iteration can create value that greatly exceeds the raw material cost.
Formula 1 is a particularly good demonstration of that principle because the difference between a successful and unsuccessful development program is often measured in how quickly engineers can turn new ideas into validated hardware.
With the United States Grand Prix taking place in Austin this weekend, it’s worth remembering that some of the most significant advances in racing happen far away from the cameras, inside manufacturing departments and engineering workshops.
Sometimes the fastest way to improve a race car isn’t to make a component lighter. It’s to make the next version faster.
And that’s exactly where high-temperature additive manufacturing is beginning to prove its value.
Explore High-Temperature 3D Printing With Vision Miner
Working on a component that needs to withstand heat, maintain tight tolerances, or undergo rapid design changes?
Vision Miner specializes in industrial high-temperature 3D printing equipment, materials, and application development, including PEEK, PEKK, ULTEM, and fiber-reinforced polymers.
Visit visionminer.com to discuss your application and determine whether additive manufacturing is the right approach.