Innehållsförteckning för April 2019 från Racecar Engineering

A recent trip for a racing assignment was enlivened by a departure from the usual boring and annoying battle to get to the destination. This usually just demands a lot of forbearance, and a tight control on your urge to kill or at least painfully maim sundry fellow passengers, or the security agents trying to get hold of your footwear. Worst of all are the kids infesting the aisles, that is when they are not screaming at a pitch that makes you fear for the integrity of the portholes, or kicking the back of your seat, ignored by their parents. But this time a medical emergency on board forced yours truly and 448 fellow passengers to spend 20 hours stranded in Sri Lanka, not at all our intention. Yet maybe…

Shortly before the opening test the Formula 1 teams were all sent a technical directive which aimed at cracking down on what could amount to cheating using the fuel system. ‘The rules say that there are supposed to be no additional areas where fuel can be stored, either in the low pressure side or the high pressure side,’ Renault’s Nick Chester explains. ‘We are now limited to 0.25 litres of fuel maximum in the high pressure side, outside of the safety cell, and we used to be allowed two litres. Also you are not allowed any little volumes or restrictors which might allow you store and recharge. Its made it clear what is allowed.’ The suggestion here is that teams were building up excess fuel beyond the fuel flow meter…

There is a new Supercars ECU for 2019, which now has a lambda controller built in. This seeks to control fuel usage by checking exhaust gas quality, instead of mandating in-line fuel consumption devices or sensors, as is the case in Formula 1. ‘We are trying to help the teams protect themselves from themselves by introducing lambda control,’ says Adrian Burgess, head of motorsport at Supercars. ‘All the teams try and run the engines as lean as they can in order to maximise the distance between fuel stops while still maintaining as much power as possible. They make all sorts of expensive remedial kit in order to cope with the consequences of running a large V8 engine as lean as possible.’ When the engine runs lean it runs hot, so…

Q On the current WRC cars, I see the MacPherson strut is tilted very much back at the top and forward at the bottom. I think this must be bad for anti-dive. Is it to get longer suspension travel? But then again, that should have been possible to obtain with a more upright strut, correct? THE CONSULTANT A I think this is about increasing travel, along with some related considerations. One might think these suspensions have a huge amount of caster and trail. However, that’s not the case. Both the upper strut pivot and the ball joint are required to be in stock location, per the rules. Generally, the control arm will incorporate some provision to move the ball joint fore and aft for caster adjustment, and we can use…

John Wickham is to retire from Bentley Motorsport, a company at which he has enjoyed two stints, including being team director during its winning Le Mans assault in 2003. Wickham has also worked in Formula 1 in the past, leading the Spirit team in the 1980s, and before that he helped run the Surtees Formula 2 operation. He has also worked as a race team manager in the BTCC, Formula 3, F3000 and A1GP. Chip Ganassi Racing co-team manager Scott Harner has left the IndyCar champion team and joined AJ Foyt Racing, where he has taken on the role of vice-president of operations. Harner had worked at CGR for over 25 years, starting out as a truck driver and fabricator. In his new role he will work closely with team…

Dr Robert Hubbard, the engineer behind the life-saving HANS device, has died at the age of 75 after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Hubbard was a professor of materials science and mechanics at Michigan State University up until his retirement in 2006. He had completed his PhD on the mechanical properties of the skull bone while working at the University of Michigan Highway Safety Research Institute. During the 1970s he worked for General Motors, where he did research into road crash injuries and also developed crash test dummies. He was, then, well placed to develop HANS (which stands for head and neck support), and was prompted to do so after his brother-in-law, IMSA racer Jim Downing, lost his friend Patrick Jacquemart after a crash in 1981. Hubbard and Downing…

I wonder if, like me, all the recent Formula 1 car launches have left you a bit underwhelmed and even glassy-eyed over their focus on the aerodynamic detail, some parts of which are no bigger than a cigarette packet? To the aerodynamicists involved and probably to those who are aero nerds all this may be manna from heaven. However, as so much of it is variations on a similar theme it can even wash over the heads of those who are keenly technically-minded. To the more casual followers of Formula 1, it must appear rather ‘same as, same as’; this year’s designs look much like last year’s and – apart from the bigger tyres and of course the front wing – not that much different really even from the season…

In the last two Slip Angles we defined what key performance indicators (KPI) are, and how using the steering wheel angle signal to create KPI such as steering smoothness and steering integral will help you better understand driving style and vehicle balance. OptimumG engineers usefully use these data analysis techniques on a day-to-day basis in racing series such as WEC and ELMS, Supercars in Australia, Brazilian Stock Car, and the Blancpain GT Series. And you can too. If you haven’t read the previous articles, try to check them out (January and March issues), as they will help you get the most from this month’s piece, as some of the important definitions and calculations were included in these. Braking good The goal of this series of articles is to highlight the…

In the late ’80s, there was nothing that could touch the housing market and there was nothing that could touch the rise of the yuppies. Their world was of Filofaxes and Porsche 911s. Young people with little understanding had more money than they could cope with, and believed the good times would never end. They did, and with it went the car market. It was not only the normal cars that went west with the setting sun of the financial world, it was particularly the supercars. For various reasons, including economic, the Jaguar XJ220, Bugatti EB110 and Aston Martin Virage flopped. Out of the ashes rose the BPR series, and 10 years later Stephane Ratel’s FIA GT Championship accommodated McLaren, Porsche and Mercedes, but there was not the appetite for…

Dr Mark Handford, who has worked on racecar aerodynamics for more than 25 years, including spells with Benetton, Jaguar and Tyrrell in Formula 1, and Lola Cars, Swift and Newman-Haas Racing in IndyCar, gave Racecar his assessment of the Arrows A2. ‘For many, many years Formula 1 teams have gone to great lengths to get their cars as far under the minimum weight limit as possible and then put the weight back in as ballast positioned as low on the chassis as possible. Unfortunately, the Arrows A2 was heavier than the minimum limit so that approach wasn’t an option for the team. If you have a racecar that is overweight and has a high cg, then it’s an uphill battle. ‘Porpoising is usually the result of the underbody stalling. If…

While the fastest cars in UK Time Attack’s top Pro Extreme class continue to be the potent Mitsubishi Evos and Subaru Imprezas, there appears to be a slow and possibly inexorable shift towards smaller, lighter cars across the other top classes. So how long will it be before the Pro Extreme class is won by one of the nimbler machines? In anticipation of this possibility, in this and the next two issues we look at two smaller, lighter but successful competitors on the UK Time Attack scene; a Caterham R400 that won the 2018 Super Lap Scotland Pro class championship, and a Noble M12 RSR that won the 2017 Club Pro 2wd class in UK Time Attack and came second in 2018. In our previous examination of UK Time Attack…

‘From a brand point of view what can we race that has a world presence? The WEC does that’ What’s in a name? When it belongs to a three-time Formula 1 world championship winning driver, a four-time F1 driver’s championship-winning team, and also happens to be your own, then you would have to say quite a lot. That’s the reason why David Brabham, son of former champion Sir Jack and a successful driver in his own right – winning Le Mans in 2009 and reaching Formula 1 – fought so hard to protect the use of the family moniker, even taking the matter to court. With the court case resolved in Brabham’s favour in 2012 the next step was to find something on which to put the illustrious name, and…

Rob Smedley has joined Formula 1 in a consultancy role, with a brief of helping to demystify F1 technology for the benefit of race fans. The former head of vehicle performance at Williams, a post he left at the end of last season, will work alongside F1’s managing director of motorsports Ross Brawn. The pair have previously worked together at Ferrari, where Smedley was Felipe Massa’s race engineer from 2006 to 2013, while before that he was an engineer in the test team. Explaining his new role, Smedley said: ‘It’s about trying to get a coherent message in terms of the technical side of Formula 1. How the events unfolded, why people have made certain decisions, and putting that out across the various different platforms, and hopefully telling a better…