Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2019 i Racecar Engineering

If you are unfamiliar with the FIA World Rallycross Championship then allow me to enlighten you. Imagine merging the brutal environment of a rally with the chaos of a touring car race, add a jump in, and some drifting, and you are getting close. The 600bhp turbocharged Supercars punch 0-60mph (100km/h) acceleration times faster than F1, so the dash to the first corner becomes a six-way drag race. This is followed by six laps of hardcore racing on tracks where up to 67 per cent of the lap surface is dirt, while the other 33 per cent is asphalt. Then there is the joker lap, which is an alternative section of track that adds at least two seconds of lap time which every driver needs to complete once per race.…

During their traditional press conference at Le Mans on the Friday before the 24 hours the ACO and the FIA finally revealed that the future is hypercar. Both Toyota and Aston Martin are set to compete in this new top class and more manufacturers are expected to join at a later date – James Glickenhaus has also committed to the regulations and ByKolles has stated that it will withdraw from the WEC next year to focus on its hypercar for the 2020/21 season. All this was confirmed after months of wrangling, but the final regulations do feature some significant changes to those released in 2018, including the option for a manufacturer to build a non-hybrid prototype, or a road car. Hyper reality The regulations, which are to come into effect…

One of the most disturbing trends I have seen over the last couple of years has been the emerging view that dyno results, whether they’re for engine, tyre or aerodynamics, might be a fax sent from God Almighty himself. This is particularly apparent with recent graduate engineers, but also surprisingly effects a lot of senior engineers as well. As the principal of ChassisSim one of my main activities is getting correlation on a daily basis, and this puts me in a unique position to discuss this. After all, I have to deal with the fallout from this every day. To begin, dynos – whether they be engine, tyre or aero – are primarily comparative tools. Don’t get me wrong, they will give you a good idea on where the absolute…

Electric car racing is nothing new, indeed EVs were racing at Crystal Palace in London when Queen Victoria was still sitting on the throne, but in recent years it has certainly become ever more relevant. The automotive industry is heading to a future where all passenger cars will likely have some degree of electrification. In fact, some nations are moving to make it law that by 2030 all passenger cars sold must have either a hybrid or fully electric powertrain. This has, in part, led to hybrid vehicles being used in the two top categories of motor racing, Formula 1 and LMP1, and also the rise of the all-electric Formula E championship. Formula E started out as a purely one-make championship, but has more recently opened up a number of…

The current car is the quickest ever seen at Le Mans, having set an all-time fastest lap in 2017 of 3m14.791s Toyota is these days the last manufacturer standing in the LMP1 category of the FIA World Endurance Championship. Its programme is paid for by the company’s hybrid research and development department in Japan, but its actual development path has plateaued in the last five years as the manufacturer competition has slowly depleted, Audi leaving in 2016 and Porsche following it out of the door the year after. The three manufacturers tried to find ways to save costs, and elected to only renew chassis every two years, meaning that the TS030 introduced in 2014, and 040 in 2016 followed that pattern. However, with limited competition, the 050 has run since…

Toyota dominated the final round of the 2018/19 FIA World Endurance Championship as expected, finishing six-laps ahead of the first of the non-hybrids. However, the finishing order was not decided until the final hour, when a wiring fault meant the team changed the wrong tyre on the No.7 Toyota TS050 of Jose Maria Lopez. The Argentinian therefore had to complete a second slow lap with a punctured tyre, and make an extra pit stop that not only cost him his lead of more than two minutes, but also dropped him a minute behind the sister car in the final hour. The conspiracy theorists immediately claimed that the result was fixed in favour of Fernando Alonso, who would garner more column inches for a victory than Mike Conway, but in truth…

If batteries exceed their maximum temperature limits, which are usually around 80 to 90degC, then this triggers exothermic chemical reactions The concept of cooling for an internal combustion racecar is a familiar one. Ambient air flows into radiators within the sidepods, which reduces the temperature of the coolant flowing within those radiators. This coolant is then pumped around a closed loop system and absorbs heat radiating from the engine and other components. This now hotter coolant flows back to the radiators where it is cooled down, and the cycle begins once again. However, the top tiers of racing are now either hybrid or electric and consequently running high voltage batteries, motors and inverters. So how does the cooling system work on these hybrid and electric racecars? Heat is often the…

It looked like some sort of dark, Scandi April Fool joke. First there was Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl who refuses to attend school while politicians refuse to do something about a future that holds few prospects for her, and in April toured Europe by train to berate politicians and the Pontiff for their inertia in doing anything about climate change. Then, shortly afterwards, Swedish racing driver Stefan Johansson wrote a three-part article about the future of F1, advocating, among quite a few other things, 1400bhp Formula 1 engines. In fact, Johansson’s article was a fine, courageous and timely piece, reviewing very broadly the whole of F1’s potential future in respect of economics, technologies, relevance, regulated competition, sporting issues, entertainment and, of course, its effect on the rest of…

This car has taken on its own bold identity and no longer resembles a Juno, hence the name change A group of motorsport enthusiasts and professionals are currently building what could be described as the ultimate national-level sports racer in Auckland, New Zealand. The project is the brainchild of John Ryall, a successful Auckland businessman and passionate weekend racer. He has always yearned to build the ultimate sports prototype racer and compete in the New Zealand Sports Car Series. To this end he bought a Juno 2-litre Mugen Honda powered SSC car in 2014. This had about 250bhp, but that wasn’t really powerful enough. So Ryall set about ‘improving’ the racecar. When he came across the CFD expertise of David Higgins of Kinetic SIM and the composites skills of Gregor…

The GTE Pro category was always going to be the one to watch at Le Mans in 2019. With Ferrari, Chevrolet, Ford, BMW, Porsche and Aston Martin fielding factory-backed cars and 17 cars going for victory in a performance-balanced category, the race would come down to luck or guile. The speed range between the six different manufacturers was remarkably close; the Porsche was fastest over the 20 fastest laps with an average of 3m51.362, while Aston Martin was the slowest with 3m53.564s. Rule changes this year were designed to increase the potential for a good race. After the debacle last year – where cars were closely matched on track but a minimum refuelling time was mandated, as was stint length – organisers did away with some of these restrictions for…

Once the coolant, often water, has extracted the heat from the heat source, be that the engine, battery, motor or inverter, it then flows into the radiator through a series of thin channels or ‘tubes’. In between these tubes are rows of corrugated shaped internal fins. The heat from the fluid is then transferred through the tube wall and into the fins which then dissipates this heat to the oncoming and cooler air that flows through the core of the radiator. ‘Our tubes are either rolled or extruded tubes and some have walls as thin as 0.2mm. Whereas our fins can be as thin as 0.06mm,’ explains Andi Scott, senior engineer at PWR. ‘Once we’ve worked out the specification of the core, we will cut the tube and manufacture the…