Innehållsförteckning för April 2022 från Racecar Engineering

Performance is a multi-faceted word in Formula 1. It can be associated with lap time, driveability, top speed, tyre degradation, downforce, power unit output and efficiency, overall reliability, component stiffness, aerodynamic drag, resource efficiency in cost, time, energy and much more. ‘The IT team here at McLaren is a lean group, but our role is to ensure we provide platforms, technology and tools that the various teams within the Formula 1 group need to be as efficient as possible’ Edward Green, head of commercial technology at McLaren The various areas of performance can all influence each other, so measuring depends on the data collected and the type of analysis undertaken. Each Formula 1 car carries around 300 sensors, which collectively produce 1.5 terabytes of data throughout a race weekend. For…

GT racing has taken its next step into the future with the introduction of the GTD Pro category into the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar series this year. The category allows professional teams and drivers to compete in GT3 cars, and it replaces the GTLM class, which was for the immensely popular GTE cars in the US. The GTD Pro class ran for the first time at the Daytona 24 Hours at the end of January, and it was contested by no fewer than eight manufacturers, including four who were involved in the now-defunct GTLM category. It helped that each of the manufacturers already had GT3 versions of their cars running in customer hands. All, that is, except Corvette. Once the announcement was made that GTLM was finishing in the IMSA series…

For John Travis, it was a sideways step as he now puts all the lessons learned from his years in motorsport into his new passion, electric motorboats. With the majority of current EV technology focussed on the automotive sector, he noticed nobody was designing and manufacturing systems to help reduce C02 emissions of leisure boats. ‘A lot of people were just dropping automotive systems into boats that were not designed for this type of duty cycle. Our system uses a cascade motor system, rotary engine range extender and an optimised energy management system to ensure maximum range and efficiency.’ The Furyan F35 also utilises a monohull built from flax fibre, as being trialled in motorsport to reduce manufacturing emissions by 75 per cent over GFRP and 90 per cent over CFRP.…

In mechanical systems, vibrations and oscillations occurring due to external energy inputs are an inevitable reality. Thankfully, through a multitude of physical phenomena, this kinetic energy is converted into heat and sound energy. If this fundamental process didn’t occur, our world would be a very different, and resonating place. Viscous damping is one such process that sees kinetic energy dissipated through the friction generated by the relative movement of molecules within a fluid medium. Within powertrain components such as gearboxes, such processes are considered parasitic – a source of inefficiency we would like to do without – but one area in which we do harness viscous damping to our advantage is in the suspension system. To a racecar, the suspension system’s main objectives are to manage weight transfer around the…

The most aerodynamically influential part of the 2022 Formula 1 cars is the all-new floor, marking the return of ground-effect cars to the sport The 2022 Formula 1 World Championship cars turned a wheel for the first time at the Circuit de Cataluña on 23-26 February this year. It was here the new era of the sport began, and the teams got to grips with their new machinery, designed to all-new chassis and aerodynamics regulations. The 2022 technical rule book defines a specific flow field and wake pattern for the car’s aerodynamics to follow – a vast departure from all generations of Formula 1 before it. The rules also limit the number of aerodynamic devices teams can put on the car. Because of this, teams are forced to be more…

The 2021 FIA World Endurance Championship saw the debut of the Hypercar class, comprising a two-wheel-drive car built by Jim Glickenhaus’ team and a four-wheel-drive hybrid from Toyota. In 2023, LMDh cars will also be eligible to race in the WEC, and in the American IMSA series, with a two-wheel-drive hybrid. It therefore makes sense to look at the available data from 2021, and make a comparison between the two very different configurations. After a season of racing, both the understanding of the rules and the lap time simulation tool the author coded and used to analyse LMH cars performance has improved significantly and this, together with the data collected during 2021, enables a much better understanding of the real state of play in this new class. Key parameters With…

Ford has confirmed it will build a GT3 version of its Mustang for the 2024 IMSA WeatherTech series, but the car has yet to be homologated for competition anywhere in the world, and has already proven controversial among the European teams and series. The Mustang will feature a 5.0-litre Coyote V8 taken from the manufacturer’s road car range. The engine will be developed by M-Sport in the UK, the rally specialists which also developed and ran the Bentley Continental GT car in the Blancpain Endurance Series. The new Mustang will be built by Multimatic, but currently does not meet the minimum price point set for GT3 cars. The FIA’s own requirements are that the entry-level production car has a minimum price of €70,000, set to include cars such as the…

Known as the ‘World Cup of Motorsport’, A1GP began in 2005 / ’6 with a racecar based on a Lola B05/52 chassis, powered by a 3.4-litre Zytek V8, and clad in a stylised bodywork and aerodynamics package that led to it being dubbed, not altogether unkindly, ‘the Batmobile’. It produced ferocious racing and partisan crowds wherever it travelled, which, in turn, attracted future F1, WEC and DTM drivers and engineers to the international one-make series. By the 2007 / ’8 season, it regularly delivered what F1 was lacking at the time – overtaking and spectacle. After three seasons of events, in which nations rather than teams and drivers competed against each other, and with what later transpired to be somewhat curious finances bubbling beneath the surface, a decision was made…

‘All of the cars are slightly different, where we’ve taken the regulations and adapted the architecture to how we want to best present our cars for overall performance’Chris Williams, technical director at M-Sport Rallying changed forever as the 2022 WRC season got underway in Monte Carlo. Since the genesis of the sport, competing cars have always been based on production bodyshells. Even in the radical days of Group B, the cars used limited run road car chassis. Though large chunks of the last generation WRC machines were chopped out to make room for rear differentials, and outer skins stripped away and replaced by carbon or Kevlar, they were still showroom models underneath. The new era of Rally1 may look similar to last year, with pumped-up, steroid-fuelled version of the Yaris,…

Porsche has continued to test its new LMDh Prototype that the German manufacturer will debut at the Daytona 24 Hours in 2023. However, delays to the hybrid system components, including the MGU-K and the battery, suggest the car has been testing without the full system. The Porsche programme is run by Penske Motorsports, and the car completed more than 2000km at Barcelona in February. ‘The focus of the test runs was to set up the systems, develop the tyres and optimise the interaction between the V8 turbo engine and the hybrid elements as described by the regulations,’ read the press release from Porsche. ‘The successful tests in Barcelona were an enormously important step,’ said Thomas Laudenbach, vice president of Porsche Motorsport. ‘During the first laps on our test track in…