Ever taken apart an old hard drive? Or looked at the bits of the one you smashed before the cops broke in? They're full of beautifully machined little parts. I have a box of them somewhere I keep meaning to do something with. Rob Ryan, a technologist at Western Digital, actually did do something. He built an F1 car.
Sure, it's a scale model and not a full-sized F1 car, but that doesn't diminish how remarkable it is. Ryan had a huge advantage for someone looking to build a model F1 out of hard drive parts in that he worked somewhere where he had pretty much unlimited access to scrap hard drives.
The car is wired with functional LEDs that can display different patterns via some custom controller coding, and the "driver's head" is motorized and can move.
If you look carefully, you can see all kinds of interesting decisions of what parts to use to form what bits of the F1 car: drive motor hubs for the wheels (tires are made from some fancy resin called Delrin), actuators make the front wing, "anti-discs" make the side body and main intake scoop, motor parts make up the drivetrain — it's full of amazing details.
Look At This Amazing F1 Car Made From 250 Hard Drives