Innehållsförteckning för May 2017 från Racecar Engineering

‘First we had to get the shape of the new production car in good time, then we had to scale it. But that was the easy bit’ In 2012, ITR, the promoter of the DTM, forged a deal with GTA, the promoter of Super GT, in order to unify the technical regulations of DTM and GT500. This agreement aimed to cut costs for both classes and ultimately create a new top level global racing category called Class 1. But things have not gone to plan, or schedule, and the two series have yet to fully merge. However, there have been some moves toward unification in recent times. Both GT500 and DTM have used the same basic package of control parts, including the transmission, brakes and the monocoque, and the same…

Onroak was expecting approximately 15 sales per year, yet in just 18 months it has delivered 80 Ligier LMP3s When the ACO conceived of the LMP3 class to bridge the gap between LMP2 and CNclass machinery, many in the motorsport industry applauded the move. And among those happy to see the emergence of this new ‘baby prototype’ was French motorsport powerhouse Onroak, which soon got to work on a new car for the class. The car that emerged was the Ligier JS P3 – loosely based on its bigger pre-2017 LMP2 class brother, the Ligier JS P2. Benoit Bagur, manager of Onroak’s LMP3 project, remembers that while the concept of the new category made sense for the market, It also fed directly into a gap for the French manufacturer. ‘The…

The main advantage is reduction of unsprung mass, improving the ability of the wheels to follow road irregularities QUESTION My father has been racing short track dirt oval for the past 20 years in South Africa, and I have just recently built him a new car running single piece wishbone independent front and rear. As I understand it, anti-squat is like longitudinal anti-roll, which we can use to control rear bite. However, ‘power anti-squat’ comes from the differential centre and ‘geometric anti-squat’ comes from the locating linkage angles. I guess some power anti-squat is also transmitted via the stub axles. On an independent suspension the two are separate; we only have geometric anti-squat to adjust. I designed the car with zero anti-squat and anti-dive. Anti-squat will create very unpredictable wheel…

For their substantial size and cross sectional area, stock cars leave a much smaller wake than would be anticipated There are many things NASCAR could be accused of, but resting on its laurels is not one of them. With a raft of safety and performance related changes in 2017, the season is off to a great start. On the aerodynamics side, there are two major thrusts for this season that began last year: improving lift-off performance of all three national series race vehicles, and focusing on track specific improvements to racing quality. Both are focused on drivers and fans – in one case, keeping them excited about typically difficult tracks for NASCAR to race on, and the other to keep them safe when things go wrong on track. Both have…

Composite components now account for 85 per cent of a modern F1 car, yet only 20 per cent of its weight. The majority of these parts make up the exterior of the car and are usually the first to make contact in a crash, so teams need to be prepared with an assortment of spares. Composite parts also see the most development during and between races, as the aerodynamic set-up is continually adjusted to exploit the characteristics of each track. Quite often in the European races, data from Friday running will be used to develop composite parts and will be delivered to the track on Saturday. Therefore, increasing the accuracy and reducing the time of designing, analysing and manufacturing composite parts is essential to staying competitive. Products such as Fibersim…

‘The primary aim of a Formula 1 car suspension is to optimise the aerodynamics, despite what the rule makers would like us to believe’ Whenever a major new rule set is introduced in F1 it creates opportunities in terms of technical innovation, but also possibilities that those innovations will fall foul of the rule makers. Unsurprisingly, this has already started in 2017, with a number of areas open to different interpretations. During winter testing there was something of a flurry of technical directives from the FIA to the F1 teams, and it continued right up to and through the Australian Grand Prix weekend. The most widely reported of these related to the suspension systems used on many of the cars, which have for some years been increasingly designed to suit…

When Audi Sport quit the World Endurance Championship, and its sister company VW quit the WRC, at the end of the 2016 season it left the Audi competition department in something of a state of turmoil, and a major restructuring was needed, with Deiter Gass replacing Wolfgang Ullrich, who retired as the head of the department. ‘It is a bit early to understand the feeling within the organisation,’ Gass says. ‘Obviously there was a lot of disappointment after the WEC announcement and that lasted a while. But over the last three months we have been restructuring. We call ourselves Audi Motorsport now, and operate within Audi Sport. ‘Internally we have been called that for some time. In a big company you have to attend a lot of meetings to get…

It was less than five hours into the 2012 Le Mans 24 hour race. Anthony Davidson’s Toyota TS030 hybrid LMP1 car attempted to overtake one of the AF Corse Ferrari 458s, and was hit by it in the rear left suspension. The Toyota slewed sideways and took off. After a combined end-over-end and roll, the car landed on its left rear corner and slid head-on into the tyre barriers. Davidson extracted himself from the car, but only made it on to the sidepod before realising he had injured his spine, and then decided not to move further. It transpired that he had crushed vertebrae T11 and T12, just above the interface between the thoracic and lumbar sections of the spine. While it was not clear which of the series of…

Torque comes in very low for a diesel engine, but this does make the Countryman easy to drive in very difficult circumstances Peugeot’s domination of the 2017 Dakar Rally may have garnered the headlines in early January, but X-raid’s performance with the new Mini Countryman F60 was also a worthy effort. In a carefully crafted opening chapter for the latest Mini John Cooper Works Rally, Orlando Terranova and co-driver Andreas Schulz took sixth place, albeit almost two hours off the winning pace. Speaking just prior to the South American adventure X-raid CEO Sven Quandt, a former rally raid competitor himself, made it clear that neither he nor Mini were expecting an easy ride, but that getting to the end was a priority. ‘To finish the race is number one –…

‘I’m not a racing driver and anything I’m doing in the car is totally different to going for the last two tenths of a second or battling wheel to wheel,’ says Patrick Morgan. ‘But I can draw some comparisons. It accelerates harder than an F1 car of the same era, and as a manual sequential gearbox you have to take your hand off the steering wheel, which is noticeably more difficult than with an older H-pattern F1 car, as the steering effort is so high. The sequential box is, however, much easier to use than the H-pattern in the 1990 Penske I also have. ‘The drivability of the engine is excellent, much better than I expected. There is some turbo lag but it’s largely masked by the superb mid-range of…

‘It won’t be long before the whole car is made digitally first, before any physical assembly’ What is the first thing you do in the morning? The modern answer is most likely ‘check my phone’. Today’s diverse array of social media platforms and their ability to bombard you with endless notifications, messages and information is persuading us to develop a technological twitch. The daily developments on these social media platforms mean that news travels faster than ever before and that people are now more connected, interactive and digitally accessible. This shift in lifestyle offers huge potential for any developing industry and explains why companies will be spending over $35bn globally on social media advertising this year. However, this worldwide social network cannot only be used to promote products and services,…

‘There is an incorrect perception that there is quite a simple and magic formula that you just feed in to a machine and out pops a complex part’ Time and cost are two words that are inexorably linked when it comes to engineering in any technical discipline, but particularly in the world of motorsport. But when you involve a third word in this mix, weight, then a mystical spell is cast, and this explains the growing interest in the highly advanced and ever evolving sphere of additive manufacturing (AM). One ambitious and leading exponent of additive manufacturing capability, skill and delivery is the FIT Group. Based in Lupburg, Germany, the company was founded by its charismatic and visionary leader Carl ‘Charlie’ Fruth back in 1995. Since those early days of…

It’s clear that the idea of a joint DTM and Super GT race is still very much on the table, with the 2019 season the target The 2017 season sees the Super GT championship in Japan going in to something of a new phase. It has adopted new aero regulations following the same overall dimensional changes and aims as the DTM series in Germany (see previous feature) and this has resulted in a rebalancing of power in its premier GT500 class. The introduction of the new regulations has seen TRD switch to the new Lexus LC500, while Honda has also switched to a new model, although less obviously. In 2014 Honda used the NSX Concept car as the basis of its GT500, but now the production model is on sale…

Toyota presented its 2017 Le Mans challenger, the TS050 Hybrid, as Racecar was closing for press. It made its track debut at the pre-season test at Monza and will race in the World Endurance Championship this year. The car has a new 2.4-litre V6 engine with a higher compression ratio compared to the 2016 unit, while the MGUs have been reduced in size and weight. The front splitter height has been increased by 15mm in combination with a narrower rear diffuser in line with new regulations. The suspension geometry has also been optimised to accommodate the new tyre regulations which sees a reduction in the number of sets available during a WEC race weekend.…

‘This restoration was a challenge because of the number of parts missing, and the condition of some of the parts that were there’ If you’re going to renovate an Indy car it might as well be one of the best, so the choice of the iconic Penske PC-23 as a project is not surprising. But for former IndyCar engineer Patrick Morgan there was a little bit more behind the decision than that; this was not all about the car’s performance and its winning history, there was also a very tangible emotional attachment, too. For Morgan, his ties with the PC-23 (called a Champ Car in period) actually go back to 1994, when he was just 15. After school he would help out at the business of his Dad, the late…

This is a slogan found on the walls of the engineering offices of one of the most innovative Formula Student teams; Team Delft: ‘If it’s not in CATIA then it doesn’t exist.’ ‘It’s really true,’ says Pietro Areso Rossi, Delft’s team manager. ‘Until you import a part into the main assembly in CATIA, you have no concept of how that part will actually work on the real car. We use CATIA as the most up to date and realistic documentation of the entire car until we have a physical assembly in our workshop.’ Delft has been at the forefront of the electric car competition in Formula Student since 2011 and the combustion competition previous to that. It has worked with Apollo to develop its unique tyre design, is famous for…

Having been the principal of ChassisSim Technologies for some years, and having worked as a race and data engineer across many different formulas, I have had a unique front row seat on how simulation has been applied in motorsport. It’s fair to say that the world of motorsport has always had a love/hate relationship with lap time simulation. Also, with the emergence of driver in the loop simulation, it would appear lap time simulation has run its course. This is most decidedly not the case, and we’ll be discussing this in depth in this article. To frame this discussion let’s look at how lap time simulation came to pass and how it was rolled out. Lap time simulation, in particular pseudo static lap time simulation, started to emerge in the…