Innehållsförteckning för December 2017 från Racecar Engineering

The main objective was to reduce drag sufficiently to match the speed of the turbo cars on the straights It’s among the most successful of all F1 teams, yet Williams has never really been known for its obviously ground breaking designs. Instead, the team, founded by Frank Williams and Patrick Head in 1977, usually managed to improve and perfect an existing design or idea, though many times using novel ideas to achieve this behind the scenes. A great example of this was the FW07 raced by the team in successive evolutions between 1979 and 1981. It adopted the ground effect aerodynamics pioneered by Team Lotus but coupled with a much stronger chassis capable of handling the high aerodynamic loads attained. This resulted in the 1980 drivers’ championship for Alan Jones…

‘Our R8 LMS GT4 is clearly focused on the gentleman drivers’ There is an old saying among manufacturers involved in motor racing; a factory programme spends money, customer racing makes it. With the end of the R18 Le Mans programme, Audi was left with DTM and now Formula E, and its customer racing programme, which has expanded rapidly in the past two years. The rise of the TCR series around the world, for low-cost touring cars, has made the racing department more aligned with a production car environment, and it now delivers five cars a week to customers. GT3 is less intense, but no less profitable. And now Audi has entered the GT4 market, and can expect to see a further jump in the number of racecars it delivers with…

The key is developing the technology to be rugged enough to survive motorsport, but yet small and lightweight The racecars of today are without doubt data hungry. Each F1 car has over 250 sensors, logging approximately 1000 channels, which equates to a total of 30GB of data during a race weekend. Whenever the ignition is on, live telemetry is sent from the racecar to the pits at 5MB/sec, which is then distributed to the team’s engineers both at the track and at mission control, with the necessary channels also transmitted to suppliers. In the course of a one-and-a-half hour grand prix, a total of 10TB (1024GB) of data flows through this system, making a Formula 1 race the biggest science project on the planet during that time. The biggest challenge…

Products at ASI With the World Endurance Championship announcing a ‘super season’ in 2018/19, it seems that the winter has become even less sacrosanct. A full winter programme will be undertaken in 2019/2020, culminating at the Le Mans 24 hours in June. The argument for this arrangement, from the teams, is that there are more dates available for the series in the ‘off-season’ than during the traditional racing season, that used to run from March to October, and so scheduling is easier and transport can therefore be done cheaper. The decision made the suppliers sit up and take notice. When, for example, would tyre development take place, and when could new products be introduced? Part-way through a traditional season? From a purely logistical standpoint, this is a headache at best,…

It was all change for F1 fuel suppliers at the start of the 2017 season. ExxonMobil, a former partner to McLaren, switched to supplying the Renault-powered Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso teams with its Esso and Mobil 1 products. Meanwhile, BP-Castrol opted to supply McLaren and the Renault works team, while Total quit F1 in favour of the WEC. This supplier reshuffle came at very short notice for the teams, the oil companies and the power unit manufacturers, especially considering that the Renault power unit, which had been designed around products from Total, would suddenly now be running both Mobil 1 and BP-Castrol, while Honda, which had developed its V6 with ExxonMobil, would now also be using BP products. This switch came so late in the day, in fact,…

How does a protruding flat panel create an aerodynamic benefit? Splitters feature on many different types of racecars, usually on closed wheelers although variations on the splitter and devices that function in a similar way can also be found on open wheel racecars. Typically, though, we see them on saloons/ sedans, sports racers and GT cars, protruding forwards from the bottom of the front airdam/bumper. We have studied simple splitters on numerous occasions in Racecar’s monthly wind tunnel-based Aerobytes column. And we have covered some of the basics affecting splitter performance here, such as the length of the forward protrusion – longer splitters create more front downforce and usually do so with little or no drag penalty. So, splitters are incredibly useful and efficient aerodynamic devices that inevitably attract the…

Recently I was at the SCCA run-offs in Indianapolis and I was chatting to a colleague of mine who has not yet embrace simulation. His reluctance can be summed up with one key question: can he trust a tyre model? As he put it: ‘I know what the dampers and springs are, and within reason I know what the aero does. However, I only know about one per cent of what effects 99 per cent of the racecar, which is the tyres.’ This is a legitimate question, and it’s fair to concede that we in the racecar vehicle dynamics community have done a bad job of explaining what you get out of a tyre model and that you can actually trust what it is telling you. This is what we’ll…

Well-known race engine builder John Nicholson has died at the age of 75. The New Zealander founded Nicholson-McLaren Engines, which was renowned for its work with the Cosworth DFV in many categories, especially F1, where its units powered McLaren to two world championships (1974 and 1976). Nicholson was a race driver, too, with one F1 start to his name, at the British Grand Prix in 1975. He was also a successful powerboat racer. Carl Faux, the technical director of works Subaru BTCC team BMR, the outfit which guided Ash Sutton to this year’s championship crown, has left the organisation to take up a position with the newly named Walkinshaw Andretti United team in the Australian Supercars series – Andretti Autosport and United Autosports have bought into the existing Walkinshaw Racing…

‘In this business it is not just about building fast racing cars, it is about making them quick at every circuit’ Williams is the last independent team in Formula 1 with the owner’s name still above the garage door. It’s been around a while, too, and this year Frank Williams’ eponymous outfit celebrates its 40th anniversary – only Ferrari and McLaren have a longer continuous record in grand prix racing. Fittingly, the team has named its car FW40 to celebrate this anniversary (if tradition was followed it would be called the FW39). But the team’s anniversary year has not all been about looking back, it’s also seen significant upheaval at the team’s headquarters in Grove, England. Williams’ former technical boss Pat Symonds retired at the end of the 2016 and…

This set-up allows a certain level of redundancy in the driver controls, should any issues arise with the car’s electronics Cosworth’s Carbon Wheel (CCW Mk2) is a lightweight, FIA certified, 280mm carbon steering wheel designed specifically for professional motorsport applications. Incorporating a high resolution, fully customisable display this steering wheel has found its way into a number of series; it is part of the FIA LMP2 electronics package used in WEC and IMSA, for example. The 4.3in TFT display is complemented by a row of 10 shift lights and six alarm LEDs which can be customised for optimum driver feedback from both engine and chassis parameters. Dialed in Meanwhile, 10 fully programmable switches and six rotary dials allow for adjustments to be made by the driver at any time, accounting…

Throughout the process it’s always necessary to reiterate, going back through the calculations and layouts until satisfied We first looked at the new Brazilian Formula Vee project in the April edition (V27N4). It’s a fresh slant on the proven FVee concept, which it is hoped will reinvigorate the grassroots racing scene in Brazil, as well as providing a tough, cheap racecar that should be as at home on track days and at racing schools as it is at the races. In this feature we will be looking at the design process for this – and indeed any – new racecar project. The first step in any racecar design is to create a design brief, highlighting the concepts to be used, fabrication methods and – as the project in question was…

It all changed when racecars began to be fitted with transponders Keeping track of what is going on during a long-distance race has been a problem that has exercised the intellects of racing teams since the dawn of motorsport. In the ’50s, the task consisted primarily of instructing the drivers to go either as fast as possible or to a pre-defined pace that the team manager had calculated would be enough to go further than the competition, without putting unnecessary strain on the mechanical parts. Very often, in those days, no-one on the team would know the positions of the competitors’ cars, except by intuition, and even the race officials would sometimes take several hours after the chequered flag to unravel the lap chart and produce a definitive result. In…