Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 i Racecar Engineering

What is perhaps the most unlikely car in GT racing is set for another strong season in 2017 The finale of SRO’s Intercontinental GT Challenge last year was held at the Sepang Circuit in Malaysia. Among the smattering of FIA GT3 specification Audis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and Aston Martins was a strange interloper, a Toyota Prius. This was no Uber driver having taken a very wrong turn somewhere. No, this was one of two highly potent GT300 specification mid-engined rear-wheel-drive Toyota Priuses built for the Japanese Super GT championship. Super GT’s second tier class GT300, so called as the cars are supposed to produce around 300bhp (though in reality they are substantially more powerful), is open to three distinct types of car, each with their own set of regulations. The…

‘It’s not like a circuit car; you have to think that this car will be driven on gravel and on rough roads’ Hyundai became the fourth of the four manufacturers currently involved in the World Rally Championship to chalk up a win with its new 2017 regulations Hyundai 120 Coupe WRC in Corsica in April – which means four different car makers were victorious in the first four events. But while this is great news for the WRC, after years of Volkswagen dominance, it was also a real shot in the arm for the Alzenau, Germany-based Hyundai Motorsport operation. However, the win was perhaps not entirely a surprise for Hyundai – or even its rivals at Citroen, M-Sport Ford and Toyota – as the new car had already shown well.…

It is something of a truism that the sessions we run in the MIRA full-scale wind tunnel for our monthly Aerobytes column generally produce at least as many questions as answers. This can be because, more often than not, our sessions are the first time that the subject cars have been aerodynamically investigated, and there just isn’t time to examine everything on inevitably lengthy wish lists. And some modifications are just not practical to carry out in a relatively short wind tunnel session. The key to maximising the benefit of time in the wind tunnel is to run through a slick programme of easy adjustments to gain the maximum knowledge from those precious few hours. So it’s useful to be able to bring other tools to the party in order…

Performance-wise Ginetta is looking to balance against the LMP1 hybrid cars, but with less than a tenth of their budget British firm Ginetta announced in January that it will launch a new LMP1 car that will be available for customers, and is eligible for the non-hybrid category at the Le Mans 24 hours in 2018, and the WEC. The company is planning to supply three two-car teams, each of the chassis powered by the Mecachrome turbocharged V6 engine that is derived from the new for 2018 Formula 2 (previously GP2) engine. Despite losing out on the tender to become one of four LMP2 chassis manufacturers in 2017, Ginetta maintained a relationship with the ACO, having launched its LMP3. Then, when the new non-hybrid regulations were announced, it decided on the…

‘The ground underneath Bloodhound will become fluidised and the car will be locked on course by aerodynamic forces’ I have recently been considering the steering systems on Land Speed Record vehicles. Like Thrust 2, Bloodhound uses a rack and pinion steering unit. The unit in Thrust 2 was an Adwest built for buses, but with the length and stroke modified to suit and the power boost removed to increase steering feel. A steering ratio of 25 to 1 was chosen for Thrust 2 that gave good results with both rubber tyres and solid wheels. Thrust 2 had a 60/40 weight distribution that put a static weight of 4800lb on the front wheels. Peak speed on Thrust 2 was 650mph, about 350mph slower than the projected top speed of Bloodhound. However,…

Student engineers wishing to enter the Infiniti Engineering Academy, the talent search programme that offers the lucky winners paid work placements with the Renault F1 team, will need to get their skates on as the 20 May deadline is fast approaching. This will be the fourth successive year for this unique recruitment programme, which, in Infiniti’s own words, ‘provides a money-can’t-buy, fully supported, life changing career opportunity for seven world-class students’. The academy offers seven engineering students the chance to work both at the Renault Formula 1 outfit and at the Infiniti motor company itself in a 12-month placement split between the two. Infiniti’s scheme has already proved successful in launching engineering careers, with Former Academy Engineers William Priest and Daniel Sanham both securing full time roles with Infiniti and…

The Toyota Mark X is a rather unremarkable luxury saloon. It features rear-wheel-drive or 4wd depending on the exact trim level chosen by the customer. It does not stand out in a crowd. Currently the car is only available in Japan and only via the Toyopet dealer chain. At a stretch you could see it being adapted for use in VLN but certainly not GT racing. However, that did not seem apparent to Takayuki Hiranuma, the general manager of the Toyopet chain in Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo. In 2013 he launched a new racing team staffed entirely by mechanics from his service centres, believing that the best way to prove the abilities of his staff was to have them take part in motorsport while he could also take advantage…

The new for 2017 regulations were intended to inject a little more drama in to the sport. But it should not be forgotten that it’s not just the cars and the drivers that build the narrative in rallying, it’s the events themselves, too. Take this year’s Rally Mexico. The ambient temperatures on its high altitude stages were not as high as previously, yet all the top teams, apart from Citroen, suffered with over-heating engines. The first six miles of Friday’s opening 34.11-mile El Chocolate test were slow and twisty, while the road also rises to the highest altitude of the entire Mexican event: 2746m (9009ft – Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, peaks at 4435ft). These thin air conditions caused high engine temperature warnings for the majority of new World Rally…

QUESTION I recently learned of the CERV II experimental vehicle that GM created back in the ’60s. It was a rear-mid-engine sports racing car that had all four wheels driven, using two 2-speed transaxles, both with torque converters. The front transaxle was driven from the front of the engine. The engine was on-centre and there was no transfer case and no driveshaft alongside the engine. What do you think of this idea? Also, what are your thoughts on how to do all-wheel-drive for a powerful racecar that runs at high speed on pavement? THE CONSULTANT This car still exists. Zora Arkus-Duntov was heavily involved with it. The idea was to produce the car with and without drive to the front wheels. The transmissions were manual 2-speeds, but with torque converters,…

To simulate the behaviour within an engine accurately, the CFD has to overcome more complex challenges than those found in general aerodynamics The Sahara Force India F1 Team filed a request to the FIA to modify the Sporting Regulations in favour of CFD last year. ‘What we have today is a wind tunnel-biased formula, and what we are looking for is a CFD-biased formula,’ explained Bob Fernley, its deputy team principal. ‘We believe that in the foreseeable future – in three years or a bit more – there is a possibility that CFD could become the primary or only aero programme.’ Although this was a strategic move to save millions on renting a wind tunnel, it does also demonstrate the importance of CFD. For a team who finished fourth last…

‘I think it is an exciting project for us. Technically we worked with the ACO to develop the LMP3, and you could have said that could not have been a success. We saw sense in the business model, and we developed 15 cars. We worked hand in glove with the ACO to develop that category, but there are technical regulations that are open to everyone who wants to race in it. The ACO and the FIA say that the [P1] regulations are also fixed for a number of years so we are just working to build a car to those regulations, which seems to be a straight-forward job. ‘Those will be fixed and there are technical working groups for LMP1, and we are part of LMP1. When you put your…

‘Our downforce last year was clearly too low, but we have been able to step up and we have more now’ On paper, it looks as though the Toyota TS050 has merely been through an update process; the monocoque is held over from last year, and it still runs with a 2.4-litre twin-turbo engine. However, this LMP1 car is anything but a simple update. Although the engine retains its capacity and architecture, it has a completely different lean burn characteristic. The gearbox, too, is completely new, as is the front and rear suspension. The battery is designed to run with less cooling in mind, and therefore less drag, and the whole car has been optimised to accommodate new aero and tyre regulations. In fact, the only thing that was missing…

About 90 per cent of the parts for the MRT06 were completed when the team entered administration Before the 2010 season the FIA opened up the F1 entry list and four brand new teams entered the sport. Seven years later and every one of them has collapsed. USF1 never really got going, HRT collapsed at the end of the 2012 season and Caterham failed at the end of 2014. The last of this group of new teams, Manor F1, closed its doors in January 2017, but not before it had completed the design of a brand new car. The team had been rescued from administration at the start of the 2015 season and looked to have a hopeful future. A small squad was put together blending youth and experience and…

The only major piece of bodywork that’s set to be retained is the floor The first full-scale version of IndyCar’s new-for-2018 universal bodywork package was expected to be revealed soon after Racecar went to press, and with it the series will present a vision for the future that is firmly rooted in its traditions. It’s also a vision that rejects the limited visual appeal that has plagued the series since the Dallara DW12 chassis arrived in 2012. Take one look at the current car in its manufacturer-based ‘aero kit’ guise and it’s hard to see past the clutter: bulbous rear wheel guards, anti-wheel interlocking devices, and metres of carbon-fibre eccentricities in the form of flicks and ramps, and wings stacked upon wings, has ruined the basic beauty of the open-wheel…

One of the most challenging areas of race engineering is how to deal with non-linear motion ratios. The reason it’s such a very vexing question is because a lot of the assumptions and formulas that we use for linear springs go flying right out the window once non- linear motion ratios get introduced. Fortunately, there is a way through the jungle, and we are going to discuss some techniques to help you not only to understand non-linear motion ratios, but also to use them to specify the lateral load transfer you are after. Before we begin it would be wise to take a step back and consider the role lateral load transfer distribution at the front plays in race engineering. To make things simple we will focus on a symmetric…

‘The system was designed to recognise when a racecar is not performing to its full potential’ The continuing Balance of Performance (BoP) saga in the WEC has taken its next step as the ACO and the FIA have released more details of the automated system. Race by race, data will be fed into an algorithm that is available to all teams, allowing them in effect to check the BoP. Needless to say, this has led to a whole new world of complaints, although overall teams and manufacturers seemed to be in favour of the new system. Opposition took two forms; one was that this was confirmation that the ACO and FIA had no control over the BoP in 2016 as suspected, and the other was that the success of the…