Innehållsförteckning för June 2020 från Racecar Engineering

The rapid response nature of motorsport, along with an abundant and adaptable supply chain… is exactly what the world needs right now The main positive that has emerged from the chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic has been unity. Whether it is people singing together from their balconies, clapping for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) or dancing in the streets at a time when everyone is forced apart, strangely the world seems closer together. It is no different in motorsport. Teams, drivers and suppliers across the world have been forced to ditch their normal racing routines and instead have been doing whatever they can to support the fight against Covid-19. Drivers such as Alexander Sims have been collecting personal protective equipment (PPE) and delivering it to the NHS trust.…

Audi’s R8 Le Mans Prototype set a new standard in endurance racing. The car won for the first time at Sebring in 2000, and that year went on to record the first of five wins at Le Mans. The legend grew with every race. Tom Kristensen, Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela won Le Mans three times together between 2000 and 2002, Audi drivers won the American Le Mans Series every year from 2000 to 2005 for Audi Sport North America, Team Joest and Champion Racing, and the European Le Mans Series for Apex Motorsport. The car looked unbeatable. The R8 firmly established Audi in endurance racing at a time when the sport needed the stability. From 1999, when six manufacturers competed, just three continued in 2000 including Cadillac, Chrysler through…

One of the most hotly debated, yet most misunderstood, subjects in racecar engineering is kinematics. If you want to start a brawl in a bar full of motorsport engineers, just suggest a discussion on horizontal roll centre location and then sit back and watch the sparks fly. Yet the crazy thing is, when you strip back suspension geometry to its basics, it is not only easy but remarkably straightforward to understand. The goal of this article is to lay this all out in black and smudge. At its core, suspension geometry does three very simple things. These are: • Control alignment (steer angle) of the tyre. • Control the camber of the tyre. • Regulate and control the forces applied vertically and laterally to the sprung mass and unsprung mass.…

McLaren In addition to building ventilator test equipment, McLaren Automotive have also designed bespoke trolleys that ventilators will be fixed to for use in clinical settings. Just like McLaren’s road and racecars, the trolleys had to be crash tested to ensure they complied with strict regulations. Meanwhile, the McLaren Composites Technology Centre has donated 100 face masks, 35 boxes of gloves and 30 overalls to the UK’s National Health Service. CRP Technology Italian 3D printing company, CRP Technology, has used its additive manufacturing expertise to produce several functional prototypes of valves for emergency respiratory masks. Termed ‘Charlotte valves’, these are similar to the ones Dallara has also produced (see p20) and can similarly be used to convert an off-the-shelf Decathlon snorkelling mask into a breathing aid. MathWorks To help companies…

‘From the beginning of the project, it was clear it was going to be a big global challenge’ While the world of Formula 1 and the World Endurance Championship have run hybrids since 2014, other series are looking to introduce the technology into their racing programmes in the next set of regulations. Thanks to Covid-19, those plans have now largely been delayed in all categories, but the entry level Formula 4 has already achieved their introduction. The story behind how this car came about is fascinating. The original intention of FIA was to run a F4 World Final, bringing together the best drivers and teams from the US, European and Asian Formula 4 series in a single shootout at the Macau Grand Prix in November. If this sounds familiar it…

‘The ultimate track day vehicles that a customer can use for 100 hours on track before it needs a rebuild or service’ James ‘Jim’ Glickenhaus and his eponymous company, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus (Cameron is the surname of his wife, Meg) have developed something of a reputation as the romantic, old school ‘garagistes’ of modern Sportscar racing. What started off as a project building an homage to the iconic Ferrari P3/4, the Pininfarina-redesigned, Ferrari Enzo-based SCG P4/5, has morphed into a company producing bespoke road and racing cars. The SCGP4/5 gave birth to a Competizione version in 2011, built around a Ferrari 430 which would go on to finish 12th and first in class in the 2012 N24. This was the first car to be badged as an SCG following a…

‘The risk was basically to tear up what we’ve done in the past few years and start again from scratch’ One of the major technical talking points of the 2020 grid has been Racing Point’s so-called ‘Pink Mercedes’. The team’s RP20 model was attributed this nickname at preseason testing because it appeared to be the doppelganger of last year’s Mercedes W10. But surely copying another team’s concept requires minimal expertise, and is therefore of little interest to Racecar Engineering? Not quite: The transformation from Racing Point’s traditional car concept to that of the more modern Mercedes-esque solution marks the team’s biggest engineering challenge to date. The Silverstone-based team has been through many iterations. Starting off as Jordan Grand Prix in 1991, the team was then sold to Midland in 2005.…

Thermal efficiency is a term that has been thrown around engineering circles for decades. While not necessarily immediately obvious in definition, it is one of the primary measures of internal combustion engine performance. Last month, Racecar Engineering explored the journey of efficiency, specifically within Formula 1 development, over the last years. Building on that, in this article we will explore the technical advancements in depth with the aim of understanding how they have advanced the combustion process to extract maximum energy from fuel. Being a hydrocarbon, petrol contains chemical energy that, upon oxidisation (combustion) is released as heat energy. The energy contained within the atomic bonds of a fuel is measured by the amount of heat released in its combustion, in joules (J), which establishes the link between the amount…