Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Racecar Engineering

Much of the lap time improvement has come from reducing the weight of the racecar In recent years, racing on the Nurburgring Nordschleife has become something of a trend among manufacturer teams, which is perhaps not surprising considering how much production car testing and evaluation is undertaken on the legendary circuit. This trend has seen a number of manufacturers building and developing ‘Ring specials which tend to only run in the Veranstaltergemeinschaft Langstreckenpokal Nurburgring Endurance Racing Championship (VLN), or even just in the annual 24 Hour race held on the 25km course. Toyota is one brand which, in 2016, will have a significant number of new designs at the ‘Ring, including a curious crossover coupe called the C-HR, which we will look at in detail in a future edition. The…

The basic parameters are V8 power with low downforce and big tyres Formula 5000 is a category from a bygone era. But with the advent of Formula Thunder 5000, this once famed single seater formula may be about to come to rumbling life once more. But why? One reason is that in today’s motorsport world it is not unusual to see drivers fall off of the single seater ladder and into various sportscar racing categories – particularly GTs – and one-make championships, such as the Porsche Carrera Cup. In Australia it is no different, with numerous drivers taking to V8 Supercars or its support and junior classes. While this is a fact of life for some, Chris Lambden – a former motorsport magazine publisher and also a V8 Supercars commissioner…

‘Our commercial needs required us to have an international programme as soon as possible to support the international brand’ Volvo’s full works entry in to the World Touring Car Championship has been on the cards for some time. The Swedish manufacturer has contested the European Touring Car Championship and flirted with the WTCC for a while, even running a season-long programme in 2011 with its C30 model. However, it has now committed itself to a full assault with a two-car entry for this season, having developed its S60 saloon for the series. The route to the WTCC has been a convoluted one for Volvo, starting with it buying the Polestar brand and turning it into its high performance division. Polestar will now also be responsible for motorsport, and will mediate…

The experimental test pilot was, for many years, the almost exclusive preserve of the aviation industry, in motor racing the approach was to simply drop in one of the race drivers and hope for the best Motor racing has a long history of following in the footsteps of aviation, from the obvious carry-overs like wings, wind tunnels and monocoque construction, to perhaps less apparent tools. It is a process which is ongoing as the industry finds new things used initially in the development of aircraft that are now core to competition car design; CFD is a very good examples of this. At the dawn of the Cold War, a hut at Cranfield Aerodrome, then a Royal Air Force base, bore the words Learn to Test – Test to Learn. This…

The £357m Circuit of Wales development is on hold after the Welsh Government said it would not underwrite the public sector investment that has already been secured, although the company behind the track is adamant it will still go ahead. Circuit of Wales, which has been confirmed as the future home of the MotoGP in the UK, confirmed that financing was in place and that the last planning hurdles had been negotiated at the end of last year. The project, which is based upon developing infrastructure as much as the 3.5-mile circuit itself, had secured funding from private investors, chief amongst them insurance firm Aviva. However, in April the economy minister in Wales, Edwina Hart, announced that the Welsh Government now considers the project too risky for it to underwrite,…

Roborace, the series for autonomous racecars which is set to hit the track later this year, has announced that its driverless cars will be equipped with ‘engine’ technology from Nvidia. Nvidia will supply the series – which will support Formula E in its third season, which kicks off in the autumn – with its Drive PX2 device, which it says is the world’s most powerful ‘engine’ for in-vehicle artificial intelligence. Drive PX2 can fuse data from 12 cameras, as well as lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensors, the California-based company tells us. This allows algorithms to accurately understand the full 360-degree environment around the car in order to produce a robust representation, including static and dynamic objects. Its two next-generation Tegra processors plus two next-generation discrete GPUs, based on the Pascal…

Volkswagen has released an image of its next generation Polo R, which is to be built to the new-for-2017 WRC regulations. While VW says the final car may well look ‘substantially’ different to the car shown, it adds that the image does give a ‘taste of things to come’. The new regulations will mean more powerful and faster WRC cars, and the new Polo is set to have roughly 60bhp more than the current car (318bhp), while it will also be lighter, wider, and will feature more aerodynamic appendages. Next year’s increase in performance is to be achieved by widening the air restrictor from 33mm, as it is at present, to 36mm, while an electronic centre differential will also be allowed from 2017. The most visually striking changes will be…

A new range of lightweight throttle body kits has been launched by Jenvey Dynamics. Called TBU45, they are an enhanced version of the firm’s popular TB45 bodies, and they are the first release from its new ‘Ultra-Light’ range – which benefits from a 43 per cent weight reduction compared to the original TB45 units. Jenvey’s new TBU45s will be sold alongside the existing TB45 kits, and include a new throttle linkage design, which is lighter, made of less components and easier to assemble. The reduction in the throttle body weight has been achieved through Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and by using a design that incorporates extra bracing to ensure reduced weight is complemented by extra strength. All Jenvey Dynamics’ throttle bodies are designed, tested and manufactured in-house using modern CAD…

Top-level open wheel racing has only really existed in Japan since 1973, when Formula 2000 was launched. That morphed into Formula 2 in 1978, and then Formula 3000 in 1987, and then it became Formula Nippon. Over the years this series in its various guises had produced a wide range of top drivers and engineers, including F1 World Champions and Le Mans winners. In 2010 the Series organisers, Japan Race Promotion (JRP), appointed former Honda F1 boss Hiroshi Shirai as CEO and he set himself and the series a bold new mission to increase the performance of the cars and to raise the profile of the series internationally. In the past Formula Nippon had been a derivation of F3000, but under the leadership of Shirai the series began to take…

‘I think it’s important to say that with the HR-414E and the Formula 1 V6 projects the focus for both is on combustion, especially combustion speed’ In 2014 Super Formula and Super GT introduced a joint engine rulebook called the Nippon Race Engine, or NRE. The idea was agreed by the three main Japanese automobile manufacturers, who all wanted to focus on improving overall efficiency while following the global trend for downsized, direct-injection turbocharged engines. Inspired by the concept of the FIA appendix engine, also known as the Global Race Engine (GRE), the new rules mandated a turbo direct-injection, 4-cylinder, 2-litre unit. But unlike the GRE concept the new Japanese regulations offered a lot more technical freedom and did not rely on air restrictors to govern performance, instead the rule-makers…

Jules Goux won the 1913 Indianapolis 500 with a 13-minute margin over his closest rival, Spencer Wishart. In terms of technology the Peugeot racecar used by the young Frenchman, and particularly its engine, was also miles ahead of its competition – and it would set the standards for engine design for decades to come. Originally developed for the 1912 French Grand Prix, the large Peugeot ‘four’ featured twin overhead camshafts, actuating four valves per cylinder. Following the debut victory in the all-important French Grand Prix, the 1912 vintage factory-owned car was subtly modified to comply with the regulations and then shipped to the United States, chasing the lucrative $20,000 price for a first place finish. Goux was one of a total of six European drivers that had travelled across the…

Tyres are everything in motor racing, and nowhere is that more true than with driver-in-the-loop simulators. Getting a decent model of the rubber used on any given car is crucial to the simulator delivering decent results, and for most this is still an area of significant research. ‘Tyres is the tricky thing,’ Hartley says. ‘Understanding the rubber on the road is something of a dark art, that is always a bit of work to get right. The technology to model tyres is getting there but still needs time. Things like the thermal model, the track surface and so on, that is all getting better but it’s a process.’ Tyre war In some series where there is still a tyre war, such as Super GT, understanding that tyre performance can have…

The Williams F1 squad is reaping the rewards from its successes over recent seasons and it has now reported it returned to making a profit last year. Williams made a £0.2m profit in 2015, a big improvement on the loss of £31.5m it reported for 2014, and this has been put down to increased Formula 1 revenues after two highly successful seasons, Williams finishing third in the constructors’ standings in both 2014 and 2015. Thanks to its successful 2014 campaign it was paid £125.6m in 2015, up £55.4m on the £70.2m it received from F1’s £700m commercial rights fund in 2014, which was based on its results in the 2013 season. Williams tells us that the improved results are primarily due to this hike in its commercial rights payments, but…

Chevy has unveiled a new body kit for its Brazilian Stock Car challenger, the Chevrolet Cruze, a car which has not actually been launched in Brazil yet – Chevrolet says its race campaign is part of a worldwide thrust to promote the model. The car is now more visually aggressive than its predecessor while the bodywork had been designed to be a little bit more slippery in a straight line, an area in which Chevrolet had lagged behind rival Peugeot in recent seasons. ‘This shows the confidence Chevrolet has in Stock Cars’, GM marketing director Samuel Russell said. ‘It is part of a global strategy to promote the future generation of the Cruze worldwide. In Brazil, the option [we have taken] for the Brazilian V8 Stock Cars is due to…

One thing about Nissan, it’s never afraid to do something just a little bit different; like the GT-R LM front-engined LMP1, or putting gamers into racecars, or now, shattering the speed record for drifting by getting a Nissan GT-R NISMO to hang out its tail at 189mph… The high speed drift took place on a 3km runway at Dubai’s Fujairah International Airport. The car was developed by Nissan and GReddy, but there’s not much detail about its prep, save for the fact that the power was increased to 1380bhp and all of this was sent to the rear wheels. The car was driven by Japanese drifting champion Masato Kawabata, who managed to slide it at an angle of 30 degrees at 189.49mph, smashing the existing record of Polish driver Jakub…

Simulator company Cruden has announced it is offering a complimentary version of its open architecture Panthera simulator software. The new version, Panthera Free, can be run on a single desktop computer with most vehicle models. Users will be able to run simulations, modify and expand vehicle models, add interfaces to hardware and use custom cars and tracks. Panthera Free uses the same open physics integration technology and state-of-the-art rendering engine as the licensed version that is used by automotive OEMs and motorsport companies. It shares all of its desktop simulation relevant features. It will be supplied with Panthera ePhyse, an external physics module for Matlab Simulink that allows easy integration with many vehicle models, and Cruden’s Simulink vehicle model, CSVM-Lite, is also part of the package. In terms of rendering,…

Toyota lined up for the World Endurance Championship in 2016 with an all-new car, the only one of the three manufacturers to deliver a new engine, chassis and hybrid system in a single step. It has been an extraordinary development cycle, one that saw major decisions taken as late as June last year, leaving the team with precious little time to sort out one of the most complex types of cars in motor racing today. The TS050 is the third generation of LMP1 hybrid produced by TMG from its base in Cologne, Germany, and it is by far the most ambitious and powerful of them all. The team had a performance advantage during its title-winning season in 2014, and had made improvements for its 2015 car, but was caught by…

Whether or not there are regulatory constraints on aspects of rear wings such as configuration, dimensions or location in a given competition category, there are often still freedoms that enable optimisation of a wing. Even if the wing profile(s) are stipulated, it may be that how the wing is deployed can be explored to advantage. We examined a range of parameters on a 300mm chord high downforce single-element rear wing on a single seater model in our December 2015 issue (V25N12), including angles, spans, fore/aft location, height and the number of tiers. In this article we have again used ANSYS CFD-Flo to look at a dual-element wing that utilised the same profile as that single-element wing for its main element, with a cambered flap, all scaled to the same 300mm…

Recently I was having a discussion with a colleague of mine who is involved with Formula 4. After talking over some quick metrics on the car I casually asked what logging they were running. When he told me it was limited to driver inputs and no damper pots, a torrent of short and sharp four letter words ensued describing the utter insanity of what I had just learnt. However, it did get me thinking. One of the biggest misconceptions in this business is that data logging is expensive. This is total nonsense, and we are going to outline the channels you need to log and show you what you can do with them right here. Data protection Before we begin, though, I need to address the utter insanity of the…

Jaguar Land Rover’s plan to buy Silverstone has been put on hold after a late counter offer from Ginetta owner Lawrence Tomlinson was received, despite the fact that BRDC members have narrowly voted for the JLR deal. The BRDC (British Racing Drivers’ Club) is the owner of the British Grand Prix venue and its members were asked to vote on an offer from motor giant Jaguar Land Rover to buy the circuit in April. However, while sources say 54 per cent voted in favour of the deal, this has not been taken as a clear cut result and the board is now said to be considering the implications of the narrow ‘for’ vote. Indian-owned JLR’s bid for Silverstone was complicated by Tomlinson’s decision to pitch for the track just before…

Nissan luxury brand Infiniti has launched its F1 engineering search for the third successive year, although with a change in its involvement in Formula 1 the race team partner will now be Renault rather than Red Bull. This year Infiniti is offering six places as its prize in its Infiniti Engineering Academy scheme, and each lucky – and talented – winner will spend six months at the Infiniti Technical Centre for Europe (in Cranfield, UK) and also a further six months at the Renault Sport Formula 1 team based in Enstone, also in the UK. So far six global Infiniti regions are participating in the 2016 competition: China, Europe (including Russia), Canada, Mexico, Asia and Oceania, while the Middle East and the US could still be added to this list…

CFD provider Convergent Science has clinched a technical partnership deal with NASCAR powerplant builder Roush Yates Engines. Convergent Science, which is well-known in motorsport for the work it does with Ilmor on Chevrolet’s IndyCar engines, will provide its Converge CFD package to the Mooresville, North Carolina-based engine builder, which will then use it for the design of its future race engines. Doug Yates, president and chief executive officer at Roush Yates Engines, said: ‘Their [Convergent Science’s] continued passion to push the technological boundaries and constant pursuit of innovation perfectly aligns with Roush Yates Engines’ vision and direction.’ Rob Kaczmarek, director of global marketing at Convergent Science, said: ‘We are delighted to be partnering with one of NASCAR’s largest and most respected engine builders. Our dedication to bringing our customers the…

Alcon has released a new six-piston two-piece forged aluminium caliper which is called the CAR89. This product is currently being used on Pat Doran’s RS200 hillclimb car, which will be run at the Goodwood Festival Of Speed, and on Robb Holland’s TCR racer, as well as in the China Touring Car Championship. The caliper is hard anodised and features stainless steel pistons, a recessed external pipe and bleed screws, and weighs in at 3.1kg. It suits disc diameters of between 355mm to 390mm, with a thickness range of 32 to 36mm and pad thickness choice of 18mm or 25mm. www.alcon.co.uk…