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I can answer some of that. I design and build stamping dies and aluminum molds and many people do not understand what goes into the work itself. They cannot understand that a simple mold for a hubseal for a semi-truck costs US$45,000. The material for the entire die probably only cost US$4000, all of the rest goes into the design and labor of building the die. All of the die is built using equipment that ranges in price from US$15,000 to $300,000 and they represent a lot of overhead as well as the pay for the skilled worker, usually in the US$12.00 to US$18.00 dollar an hour range. Our shop rate is $US50.00 an hour for die work, and it doesn't take long for the hours to add up when the tolerances are very close and everything must have a ground surface and polished to a certain micro-finish. Imagine how many hours it would take to polish a piece of steel that has been heatreated to a mirror finish by hand, when you are using jeweler's rouge for the final rub out. I have seen molds require over 80 man hours to polish it alone. That doesn't include the building of it as well.
For every part of the race car you see made in carbon fiber, there is a buck or pattern that it is layed up in. These require construction and a new one is usually requred if the parts are to be modified like we see commonly done on race cars all the time. New engine covers, new wings, etc, all require a new pattern or the modification of the original one.
The machined bits of the car are all made from billet pieces of material, meaning a solid piece of steel/aluminum/titanium/magnesium, and the pieces that are cut away are scrapped. These parts are not molded and require multi-axis machining centers that cost up to US$1 million dollars. I know that CART/IRL/F1 front uprights are all cut from billet material on a Wire EDM machine like the ones I run. These machines are very expensive to own and operate. But they also can hold 0.0003 of an inch tolerance and do not impart stress on the component. Then all of the parts are heat treated or stress relieved and then cryo-treated for wear and structural integrity. After all of this is done, every part is x-rayed and magnafluxed for cracks and interior defects. Then the car is assembled and shipped to the teams as a roller chassis, which includes the gearbox and various kits for road course and oval setups.
Also, during the season, the chassis manufacturers are constantly working with the teams to upgrade the chassis and making evolutionary bits as per their contract with the team. Research and development time is very expensive, along with wind tunnel time, and computational fluid dynamics time on supercomputers. There are so many hours involved in building and optimizing the chassis, that is why the manufacturers spend the entire season working on next year's chassis, or they couldn't get it done in time.
Another aspect is the electronic engine management suite and telemetry pots required to monitor the 30 or more channels of info. The cost of custom written software and specially tailored measuring potentiometers and other sending units can get astronomical as well. Electronic components only get cheap when you can make them in million quantites, not in tens. Managing an engine that spools beyond 14,000rpm cannot be a cheap task at all.
I checked out the sight you mentioned and they do build a nice aricraft, but it is a much simpler device than a racecar, and is made up of quite a few less pieces than a modern open-wheel race car. That doesn't mean it isn't as good, because their aircraft are multiple world champions.
I would love to be one of the guys who builds race cars, to be able to say that my car was the one that won the championship. The hours and hours that the manufacturers and teams put into honing the race car to its finest performance probably requires more dedication than any of us realize.
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