Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från Racecar Engineering

The thorny issue of performance balancing continues to evolve in 2024 as the IMSA organisation, which runs the IMSA Sportscar Championship in the US, has taken a completely new approach to balancing its GTD category cars. GTD is the name IMSA gives to its arena for GT3 vehicles and is split into two classes: GTD Pro for all-professional driver lineups and GTD for pro-am crews. GT3 cars race in various series around the world, and all have to fit within performance windows set by the FIA, which owns the intellectual property for the category. These performance windows balance lift, drag and power, and the combination of these elements brings the cars to a reasonable level of competition with each other. Given that the racecars come from production models, there are…

TECHNOLOGY – COMMUNICATION Moving to a new team presents unexpected challenges that must be overcome before you can contribute to the goal of making a racecar go faster Over the course of my career, I have had the good fortune of working with several teams. Some good, some not as good. There can be many reasons for moving between teams, from career advancement to the desire to work with another type of car. Other times it is a matter of necessity, whether it be because the team has lost its budget and is shutting down, or because someone else has decided that your time with the team has come to an end (is that a polite enough way to say you’ve been fired?). All the above situations have presented themselves…

No Formula 1 team adapted to the championship’s 2022 regulations overhaul better than Red Bull Racing, which swept the Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles with the dominant Red Bull RB18. The team won 17 out of 22 races, topping the table by 205 points ahead of Ferrari, leaving its rivals wondering how on earth they could close the gap that had opened up. By the end of the second year of ground effect racing, the gap was even bigger. The RB18 was Red Bull’s answer to the regulations in its first form, but the RB19 built on that strong foundation and went on to statistically surpass its predecessor in 2023. The difference between Red Bull and the second best team, this time Mercedes, more than doubled, to 451 points. The team…

Events at the Qatar Grand Prix in October 2023 sparked debate about driver safety in high temperature conditions. Williams driver, Logan Sargeant, retired from the night-time race as he struggled with ‘intense dehydration’, having been ill with flu during the week. Other drivers were visibly exhausted as they stepped out of their cars. Wheeling an F1 car for 300km under high gforces is hard enough, but Qatar – where track temperatures remained above 36degC for the duration of the race – demonstrated that extreme ambient and surface heat can escalate driver discomfort into a potential safety risk, even for some of the world’s fittest individuals. That such a situation can occur in F1 means the danger is present on all levels of the motorsport pyramid. The normal human core body…

Few drivers could claim to have bettered the likes of Stirling Moss, Roy Salvadori or Tony Brooks, but Archie Scott Brown, a fearsome competitor in sportscars, did just that. Clearly the equal of his peers, Scott Brown only took a single grand prix start, at Silverstone in 1956 (he was due to race at Monza that year and ran one practice session, drawing praise from none other than Juan Manuel Fangio, but the Italian racing authorities would not let him enter the race). The reason he was denied entry? Scott Brown only had the use of one hand, a condition he’d lived with from birth (just one of the consequences of his mother contracting rubella during pregnancy). During his childhood, he underwent a host of operations on his legs, which…

Hot on the heels of its creation of the World Drivers’ Championship in 1950, the FIA turned its attention to sportscar racing. Endurance races like Le Mans and the Mille Miglia were acknowledged as great classics, but no championship linked them in a manner that might excite both racing fans and participants. That changed for the better in 1953 with the FIA’s establishment of the World Sportscar Championship. Rightly enough it was for car makers, not drivers. Here was fresh inspiration for the world’s builders of sports racing cars: Jaguar, Aston Martin, Cunningham and Mercedes-Benz took notice. In the new trophy’s first season, 1953, points were awarded for finishes in the Sebring 12 Hours, Mille Miglia, Le Mans 24 Hours, Spa 24 Hours, Nürburgring 1000 Kilometres, Tourist Trophy and Carrera…

There are a huge number of people who want to get involved in motorsport on the technical side, but jobs are scarce, and it’s very difficult for a beginner to find a place on a race team. One way to become involved, and also burnish your CV, is to help with smaller outfits on a voluntary basis, which is a great way to get experience. But what if you could tinker with a vast array of different racecars at a wide range of meetings? Wouldn’t that be something? It is something, and it’s called scrutineering. What’s more, the clubs that run championships and the British governing body, Motorsport UK, are crying out for volunteers to train as scrutineers right now, and there is a set procedure for someone to become…

IN BRIEF Hankook has won the tyre contract to supply the FIA World Rally Championship from 2025. The manufacturer will replace Pirelli and the deal will be for three years. Teams competing in the WRC will be allowed a maximum of three new hybrid units per season in 2025 and 2026, fitted to the Rally1 cars that are entered to score points in the Manufacturers’ Championship. The move to reduce the number is to satisfy the FIA on cost and sustainability. A ‘battle of technologies’ system has been approved by the FIA WMSC in the World Rallycross Championship, where electric cars will compete against ICE-powered machines on an equal basis. At time of writing, no further details were released on the mechanism for balancing the cars. Tyre company, Hoosier, has…