Every year the Williams Formula 1 team spends more than £100m ($130m; 114m euros) trying to make two cars go round a racing track as fast as possible.
Ignore the adrenaline-fuelled appeal of wheel-to-wheel racing, and it might all seem rather pointless. Yet the technology developed in the white heat of competition can turn up in some surprising places.
The materials and techniques used to build Williams' F1 cars, for example, are now being used to make an altogether different type of transport – for new-born babies.
The Babypod 20, as it is known, is a sleek, lightweight box with a sliding transparent lid and a heavily padded interior. It is designed for transporting infants who are critically ill, whether by car, ambulance or helicopter.
It looks pretty basic, but is the result of an intensive development process. The material used in the design is carbon fibre, the same remarkably strong material used in F1 cars.
The pod is being built by Williams Advanced Engineering, a sister business to the Formula 1 team, based at the same UK site in Grove, Oxfordshire as you can see in this Online Marketing Video.
The firm has been working on the new design alongside Advanced Healthcare Technology (AHT), a company that has been building transport systems for babies for a number of years.
Carrying new-born babies from place to place is not easy.
They need to be kept at a constant temperature and protected from vibration and noise, while being monitored closely by medical staff.
In the past, incubators were used. But these are heavy, cumbersome devices, that require an external electricity supply and often dedicated vehicles to carry them as well.
The Babypod was initially developed by AHT as a lightweight and more practical alternative. Williams was then called in to develop a new, more advanced design.
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from http://baltimoretech.org/news/f1-tech-for-babies/
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