In most sports the equipment is the same for everyone. In F1 every team builds its own, which is why the championship is really two contests happening at once.
A constructor is a team that designs and builds its own car. That is not a formality — it is the rule. You cannot buy a finished F1 car from anybody. If you want to race, you build.
A team is several hundred people — aerodynamicists, designers, machinists, mechanics, strategists, truck drivers, cooks — spread across a factory that runs all year. The two cars that appear on Sunday are the visible end of about nine months of work by people whose names you will never hear. The drivers are the smallest part of the operation and the only part on television.
Eleven teams are on the grid this season, two of them names that had never entered a Formula 1 championship before: Audi and Cadillac.
Ferrari is the one that has been here from the start: it has entered every season since the championship began in 1950, and no other team can say that. Others have appeared, won, run out of money and vanished. A new team takes years to become competitive, because you are not just building a car — you are building the factory, the wind tunnel programme and the several hundred people who know how to use them.
Every team builds its own chassis, but not every team builds its own engine. Some are works teams: the car manufacturer owns the team and makes the engine in-house. Others buy an engine from one of those manufacturers and design their car around it. Buying is cheaper and perfectly legal, but it means the people who supply you are also racing you, and you will never have your engine any earlier than they do.
Fans follow the drivers' table. The factory follows the other one. A team's finishing position in the Constructors' Championship decides how much prize money it receives, and that money decides how many upgrades it can afford, which decides where it finishes next year. Move up two places and you can fund the parts that move you up two more. Slip back and the same machine works against you.
There is also a spending limit. Teams are not allowed to spend beyond a set figure each season, which was introduced to stop the richest teams simply outspending everyone into irrelevance. It is the reason a mid-sized team can now build something that beats a giant, and it is the single biggest change to how F1 works in the last twenty years.
Because the team scores both cars' points, a team would rather finish third and fourth than first and tenth. That is where team orders come from: a team telling one driver to let the other past, because the maths of the constructors' table says so. Drivers hate it. It is also, coldly, correct.