They have been welding down the manhole covers in the streets of Monte Carlo this week in preparation for Sunday’s grand prix, noisy evidence of the massive downforce exerted by Formula One cars as they reach speeds in excess of 180 miles per hour. Unless secured, the covers would be sucked out of the ground.

The mind-boggling statistics associated with today’s F1 cars – capable of accelerating to 100mph and back to a standstill again in under four seconds, while their tyres rotate more than 2,400 times a minute at top speed and reach optimal performance only above 100 degrees centigrade – make it easy to forget that their designers are competing less with each other than with the rule book.

Martin Whitmarsh, chief executive of McLaren, explains the technical challenge: “We start with a set of technical regulations, some of which you might consider arbitrary. In other areas they have evolved as a consequence of the need to keep the performance of the vehicles both within reasonable limits of safety and the limits of what the driver can control for an hour and 45 minutes.”

Whitmarsh makes the point that an F1 car is not designed to go as fast as possible but to reach optimal performance while adhering to precise technical rules, not only for the safety of the drivers but also to ensure competitive racing that is fun to watch. “Without these restraints,” he says, “the larger teams might develop cars that were 10 seconds a lap faster than the smaller teams and you would not have much of a sporting spectacle.”

As it is, at the Spanish Grand Prix last month, Kimi Raïkkönen’s Ferrari took pole position with a qualifying time of 1 minute 21.813 seconds while Takuma Sato’s Super Aguri brought up the rear of the grid with 1 minute 22.3496 seconds, a difference of just over 1.5 seconds – a blink of an eye for ordinary mortals, an eternity for F1 professionals. According to the magazine F1 Racing, in 2006 Ferrari spent $406.5m while Super Aguri parted with just $57m.

Even within the artificial constraints set by the rules, however, F1 cars and drivers have to contend with forces unknown to other sports. “What differentiates an F1 car from other land vehicles,” says Whitmarsh, “is not its zero to 60mph time or terminal velocity but the fact that when the driver hits the brakes at the end of the straight he is experiencing a peak of deceleration of up to five times gravity (5G). In the corner, he will experience lateral forces approaching 5G. It is significant and severe and an aspect of F1 performance that, when viewed through the long-distance lens of a television camera, does not necessarily come across.”

To counter these forces, the chassis must be strong, exceptionally stiff and very light – a F1 car at a minimum 605kg weighs about half as much as a small family saloon. The steel and aluminium of conventional road cars have given way to carbon composites, cloth-like materials that can be moulded into the elegant shapes demanded by the aerodynamicists before being baked rock-hard.

The actual shapes of the front wing, the rear wing, the diffuser and the barge boards are determined by computer simulation and wind-tunnel tests. The rear wing forces the rear wheels to the track and determines the car’s cornering speed while the diffuser and barge boards are responsible for the smooth flow of air over and through the car. The barge boards, in fact, create vortices, rotating parcels of air which create low pressure zones, and therefore downforce, at their centres. This is a clever engineering solution to the challenge of finding extra downforce within rules governing wing size and structure.

Engine development has in effect been frozen until 2013 to keep a cap on costs and this has highlighted the importance of aerodynamics in seeking a competitive edge. Every team has either to build a wind-tunnel at a cost approaching $50m or rent a facility. Engines are supplied by motor manufacturers BMW, Ferrari, Honda, Mercedes, Renault and Toyota: the rules say they must be normally aspirated 2.4 litre V8s weighing no more than 95kg and running at a maximum of 19,000rpm.

Although actual engine development has been frozen, from next year constructors have been encouraged to introduce kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) to improve F1’s environmentally friendly credentials. These are systems which store waste energy from braking either mechanically or electrically and feed it back to the power train. The rules governing the design of these systems have purposely been left wide and free to encourage innovation. The British companies Flybrid, Torotrak and Xtrac have already been commended for their version based on an advanced lightweight flywheel mechanically connected to the vehicle driveline.

Tyres are provided by one manufacturer, Bridgestone of Japan, inflated using a nitrogen-rich, dried-air mixture to pressures of 1.24 to 1.37 bar (18-20 pounds per square inch). The casing is constructed from polyester and nylon which provides some vertical flexing while remaining stiff in other directions to ensure a uniform contact patch on the track.

The composition of the tread is a mixture of 10 different substances including natural rubber, styrene and butadiene. Varying the composition results in tyres of differing stickiness. Nevertheless, without the benefit of the downforce provided by the wings and chassis it would be easy to spin the wheels and lose control of the car.

Electronic aids such as traction control which have made life easier for the drivers are being or have been banned and the consequences in terms of closer, more exciting racing have already been seen in the first few races of the season. But each team is continually honing its package of chassis, engine, suspension and tyres.

Individual improvements can be tiny. Mysterious slots in the nose cone of the Ferraris caused some excitement earlier this year but chief designer Nikolas Tombazis played down suggestions that they could be race winners, worth two seconds a lap.

Whitmarsh puts the rate of improvement in perspective: “We will during the course of this year hopefully develop our vehicle by 0.1 or 0.2 of a second of lap time for every grand prix we go to.”