Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Racecar Engineering

When performance figures are published, they’re often reduced to single metrics. This car generates x newtons of downforce. Or its drag coefficient is y. Useful for marketing departments, perhaps, but in engineering terms, such numbers are dangerously incomplete. Real aerodynamic performance is not defined by a peak coefficient; it’s defined by behaviour, such as how a car generates load, where it generates it, and how consistently that load is delivered as the vehicle’s attitude changes. A car might produce an enviable peak downforce in CFD or wind tunnel testing, but if that performance evaporates under yaw, pitch or crosswind, it’s irrelevant on the racetrack. It’s the difference between a car that behaves across a season and one that only performs on certain tracks; between a chassis that allows drivers to…

Sometimes, if you want to get across what something is, it’s best to say what it’s not. Take Competitive Safari, for instance. It’s not a race, in that cars run individually against the clock. It’s not a rally, in that drivers are free to go out on the course whenever they want to, within the overall timeframe. It’s not a trial, in that any competing car should be able to complete the course. And it’s certainly not a safari, though there might be the odd sheep nosing about. What you’re left with then is something very different to most modern motorsport disciplines, and perhaps the term that encapsulates it best is adventure. That said, it’s also a huge technical challenge, featuring extremely fast, often purpose-built racing machines, running on often…

‘We equalise based on a tightly controlled, homologated vehicle design. This ensures that any driver or team running any of the available car models has equal opportunity to win’ Perry Kapper, Supercars category technical manager Heading into the Bathurst 1000 in October, the 2025 Supercars Championship season has delivered eight race winners across six teams, with three different drivers taking turns leading the standings. The 24-car strong field has been separated by just one or two seconds in qualifying, with each race a frenzy of nose-to-tail-battles and overtakes. This impressive on-track competitiveness is no fluke, but a result of a comprehensive technical parity process that is unique to Australian Supercars. ‘We are a technical parity series, which means we don’t equalise based on the performance of a driver or team,’…

The British Touring Car Championship is having another crack at establishing its own support series for young drivers, in partnership with the Power Maxed Racing team. TOCA, the BTCC promoter, has announced plans to launch an as-yet-unnamed series for 2027 based on a new, bespoke car that will be suitable for drivers aged 14 and up. It had been on the hunt for a new organisation to develop its future junior championship car after ending its association with Dave Beecroft’s Chevron brand, which had built a hot hatch-style racer for 2026. Car specifications will be released ‘over the coming months,’ according to TOCA, which has published a rendering of a GT-style concept. Motorsport UK, the national governing body, has preliminarily approved the blueprint, with formal ratification still to be obtained.…

The 2025 season marks the end of an era. Since 2014, Formula 1 cars have been propelled by hybrid power units based on a 1.6-litre, turbocharged V6 with an MGU-K and an MGU-H. For a long time, it seemed as if this power unit era would be synonymous with Mercedes for, when the hybrid rules were introduced, the German manufacturer was a cut above the rest. Even a major change to the chassis rules in 2017 could not break the Daimler dominance. However, everything changed with the introduction of ground-effect cars for the 2022 season. The Mercedes era came to an abrupt end. After eight consecutive World Constructors’ Championship titles, it finished only third, behind Ferrari and a rampant Red Bull. From 2014 to 2021, the Silver Arrows won 69…

Since the start of the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar era in 2021, Toyota has been the standard bearer in terms of performance and team operation. In fact, the Japanese brand has pretty much carried the top class of the series since Porsche’s withdrawal from the LMP1 class at the end of 2017, winning numerous titles up to and including the Manufacturers’ Championship in 2024, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans every year between 2018 and 2022. However, the 2025 WEC season has been little short of a disaster for Toyota. The team is not in contention for either the Manufacturers’ or Drivers’ titles, was not a threat to Ferrari at Le Mans, and in Brazil mid-season saw both its cars finish three laps down on the winning Cadillac…

Through 1949 and into 1950, Ferrari and Alfa Romeo were locking horns in the grand prix corrida with their highly boosted 1.5-litre racers. Swilling vast quantities of alcohol-based fuels to make power and keep cool, these supercharged machines had to make several pit stops to complete a 300-mile race. Meanwhile, the unblown 4.5-litre Talbot-Lagos were going through non-stop. Though their long-stroke sixes were far from state-of-the-art, France’s Talbots showed that displacement could still make a race winner, if it was exploited with the latest technology. France’s Talbots showed that displacement could still make a race winner, if it was exploited with the latest technology A driver whom Enzo Ferrari esteemed, Parisian Raymond Sommer, had driven both the unsupercharged 4.5-litre Talbots, the early 1.5-litre supercharged grand prix Ferraris and, before the…

The car used in the GB3 Championship is getting a ‘significant performance boost’ ahead of its second season, according to series promoter MotorSport Vision (MSV). The Tatuus MSV GB3-025 was introduced to the UK-based series in 2025 with the goal of better preparing young drivers for Formula 1 by increasing power by 30bhp, upping downforce by 35 per cent and implementing a DRS system. The car has already proven quicker than its MSV GB3-022 predecessor. The pole time at Brands Hatch GP was 0.819s faster this year, while at Spa-Francorchamps it was 1.216s faster. However, with the consensus that even more performance could still be extracted, an update programme was launched for 2026. Measures to improve reliability have also been taken. The package comprises a ‘heavily revised engine’ from Mountune,…

Williams’s transformation from sporadic point scorer to podium finisher is remarkable because of how quickly it has occurred. The Grove-based team had been largely underwhelming in the first three seasons of the ground-effect rule set, which started in 2022 and concludes at the end of this year. Prior to the current season, its best result in that regulatory era had been seventh. However, in 2025, it has equalled, or matched, that result eight times, including a third place for Carlos Sainz in Baku. The team exceeded expectations by leapfrogging the teams it had spent prior years trailing, and breached the 100-point mark for the first time since 2016. Williams scored 84 points in seven years (at 149 grands prix) but needed only 16 races to surpass that amount this year.…

The splitter is noticeably higher in the centre compared to the old version, suggesting more airflow under the car to better feed the rear diffuser BMW has not had the most successful endurance racing programme with its M Hybrid V8, which made its debut in 2023. Although the car has won three races in the United States, including a one-two at Road America in August, its first FIA World Endurance Championship victory is pending. It arrived in the WEC one year after its US debut, so is a year behind most of its opposition in terms of development, and clearly still has a lot of catching up to do. This is the second performance upgrade package BMW has introduced to the car, the first being to update the braking system…

‘It’s not supposed to be about making a perfect car, and they probably weren’t the best road racers. It was supposed to be about showcasing the best drivers’ Ray Evernham Who is the best race driver today, regardless of series? An impossible question to answer you might think. But what if there was a series where the greatest drivers in the world all competed together in the same cars to see who really is the top dog? The idea is not new. The Race of Champions has been doing exactly that since its creation in 1988, and other series have staged one-off events. Before the ROC, though, the International Race of Champions (IROC) created a multi-race series in the United States that ran annually for 30 seasons from 1973-2006 (with…

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is not expecting to have hydrogen-fuelled cars on the grid until 2028 at the earliest, but this doesn’t mean similar machinery is not already out racing. In August 2025, the Forze IX, a hydrogen-electric prototype based on an ADESS LMP3 car, made its debut in a Supercar Challenge round at Assen in the Netherlands. The milestone had been a long time coming; the group behind it from Delft University of Technology (DUT) unveiled the concept more than three years ago, in January 2022. It was far from a perfect weekend, as the car ran with only one of its two fuel cells fitted and failed to finish both races. However, for a team made primarily of students on a gap year between Batchelors and…

The FIA and Siemens have entered a multi-year partnership that will see the German technology company continue to provide the global motorsport federation with digital twin software. The deal will see Siemens providing the FIA’s engineers with its Xcelerator software portfolio to help with racecar design. The FIA is responsible for setting the technical rules for most racing categories and issuing homologations to cars that have been built to those rules. Siemens Xcelerator includes Designcenter NX software, which the FIA will use to create digital twins of racecars on which performance simulations can be carried out. The idea is to reduce the need to produce physical prototypes, which the FIA says will bring environmental benefits. The federation has already used Siemens software to generate more than 14,000 CAD parts in…

The FIA has laid out its plans for its management of the leading series in rallycross, including a switch back to internal combustion engine cars in the top class. Since 2024, the FIA World Rallycross Championship (WRX) has featured a so-called ‘Battle of Technologies’ in which electric cars compete directly against ICE-driven machinery. That came after two seasons with EVs only. However, from 2026, electric racers are set to be dropped completely. This, according to an FIA statement, is designed to ‘simplify the competition, strengthen the grid and deliver the spectacle fans around the world have told us they value most.’ Simultaneously, the world championship will become the FIA European Rallycross Championship, consisting of a six-round calendar on one continent. The last two WRX seasons have already taken place entirely…