Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i Racecar Engineering

Nicotine and caffeine have been my drugs of choice for a very long time now. Being a drug addict is not an easy life. I now have the effects of over five decades of smoking coming home to roost; my shortness of breath and yellow stained teeth attest to my stupidity in smoking. Another drawback is being forced to stand on the corners of buildings in the freezing cold or rain to satisfy the nicotine cravings. Racing has the same addiction. Tobacco appeared as the first major sponsors in the late ’60s, soon covering a big percentage of the grid, especially in F1. To my knowledge the first one to appear was in South Africa, in 1967. I will not mention any of the brands, they have damaged enough lives,…

Ferrari plays an active role in the Technical Working Group that is deciding the future of endurance racing – including the amalgamation of the top prototype class (see page 88) – and it says that it will review its racing strategy in the future once the landscape becomes clear. Currently the new GT3 regulations, set to come into force in 2022, will see the cars built to a technical rule book, and teams are looking at the possibility of the cars competing in the World Endurance Championship and at Le Mans. This would replace the GTE category, which currently features Corvette, Ferrari, BMW, Aston Martin and Porsche. In GT3 there are more than 10 manufacturers and Antonello Coletta, head of the Competizione GT department, believes this could pose a problem.…

IMSA’s philosophy is one of low cost and customer racing in its top class, but the manufacturers were pushing for a hybrid system It’s been a long time coming, but finally IMSA and the ACO sat down at Daytona in January to announce that their separate prototype classes would be brought together. This news was welcomed by all parties, including manufacturers, but then immediately the hard work started to meld these vastly different regulations together. This story goes back a long way. The ACO and IMSA were working together on a set of regulations that would have united their series before the ACO veered off course and introduced the Hypercar concept in 2018. At the time, Porsche and Toyota were indicating that Hypercar is what they wanted; extreme hybrid technology…

Sean Bratches has stepped down from his post as Formula 1’s managing director of commercial operations, citing a move back the US to be closer to his family as the reason for his departure. Bratches was one of a triumvirate of executives appointed when US firm Liberty Media bought F1 in January 2017, Chase Carey (chairman and CEO) and Ross Brawn (motorsports managing director) being the other two. F1 has said that Bratches will not be replaced. However, he will ‘continue to support the business in an advisory role from the US.’ Former ESPN executive Bratches’ role at Formula 1 was to focus on boosting its main revenue streams, specifically race hosting fees, sponsorship and broadcasting deals. Carey said of Bratches’ departure: ‘I want to thank Sean on behalf of…

In November Formula 1 announced that it was planning to go carbon neutral by 2030 and the initiative was welcomed by Jean Todt. This was an interesting position to take; could a sport that is by its very nature a luxury, as is all professional sport, stop being a drain on resources? The proposal announced focused on various issues, such as logistics and travel, not only of the teams but also on the fans travelling to and from the races. At the time, the hybrid powertrains used in the cars, which are producing incredible levels of thermal efficiency, were identified as a key technology that would help F1 reach this hallowed goal. In January 2020, the FIA and F1 became signatories of the United Nations Sport for Climate Action Framework,…

During the winter months, when motor racing action is scarce, some publications fill the empty news spaces with articles such as the ‘Top 50 Drivers of 2019’, claiming in-depth analysis from correspondents across the globe and ranking drivers from over 15 disciplines. It can be mildly entertaining to briefly scan and argue over– although best indulged in the pub with a few mates over beers. However, once any analysis extends beyond the top 10, it really becomes a pointless exercise. Apart from how to evaluate drivers from extremely different types of competition given the specific sets of skills required, does being number 47 versus number 48 have any meaning? Okay, such page-fillers are not to be taken seriously, even if they are presented as such, but it does lead me…

Our latest wind tunnel project car is the Escort RSR of Tim Foxlow, looked after by MEM Motorsport (a company well known in rally circles for producing, among other projects, the Proton IRIZ R5 WRC car). The Escort RSR is actually one of SHP Preparations’ creations, featuring a tubeframe chassis with GFRP Escort Mk 1 lookalike bodywork and, in this instance, a 2.5-litre Duratec engine with around 320bhp. This particular example is raced in a sports/saloon championship in northern England and Wales. Its owner/driver felt that it was possibly being held back by its aero package, and in some circumstances felt light at the front end. With that in mind we headed for the MIRA full-scale wind tunnel with a couple of less potent wings and some front end parts…

‘The challenge for us was to convince everybody that there is a benefit to having a tested solution’ With the introduction of significant improvements in safety standards the number of race drivers seriously injured and killed competing in the sport has hugely diminished. Over the past few decades, many new driver safety innovations have been introduced, from front and side impact structures to head restraints and the Halo. All these usually enable drivers to stay safe and walk away from even the worst of incidents. However, the innovations and standardisation of circuit safety in order to protect the spectators and track workers has been comparatively lacking. Crashes such as at Bathurst in 2015, injuring a marshal standing behind a fence, or Sophia Floersch’s accident at Macau in 2018 when she…

Williams has made two key technical appointments in the run-up to the 2020 F1 season with David Worner from Red Bull and Jonathan Carter, formerly of Renault, set to join the team. The signings come on the back of several departures last season, when high-profile names such as Dirk De Beer and Ed Wood, and more significantly then tech boss Paddy Lowe, left the team. Both Worner and Carter will take up their new posts in ‘the near future’, deputy team principal Claire Williams has said, with the former joining as chief designer, taking on the post vacated by Wood. Worner previously worked in the same role at Red Bull, a post he had held since 2014 – Williams also states he was ‘responsible for the Red Bull Racing/Scuderia Toro…

In the previous edition of Racecar (V30 N3), we tried to answer the question: how do we determine suspension spring rates and damping for a vehicle? To answer this, it was necessary for us to first define the purpose of the suspension. We looked at how the suspension plays an important role in improving the driver and passenger comfort, handling, aerodynamics, mechanical grip, vibration and transient response. With the purpose of a suspension defined, the next step was to select our spring and dampers. It was explained that to choose these it is necessary to first define the goals for the suspension system: driver comfort, tyre comfort, body control. We then closed the loop by discussing how you should define your goal based on the track scenario: bumpy or smooth…

From time to time you get a job that you think is going to go in one direction but it actually winds up going in a totally different direction. For example, recently a friend of mine asked me to conduct some simulation work to see whether it was worthwhile putting a limited slip differential (LSD) into a road course stock car punching out around 600bhp. We both reckoned that this should be a no brainer. But now I can see that we were massively wrong, for when I ran the numbers and put the simulations through ChassisSim it turned out that a locked diff was actually the way to go. We’ll be exploring why here. Key to the lock But before we get into the simulation results it would be…

Jeff Braun, the former CORE Autosport race engineer, joined the Era Motorsport LMP2 team for the opening round of the IMSA championship, the Daytona 24 hours, where he worked as its race strategist. His former team departed the series after a long and successful run at the end of the 2019 season. At the time of writing Braun was only committed to the Era squad for the Daytona event. Well-known US sprint car driver and one-time Indianapolis 500 racer Norman ‘Bubby’ Jones has died at the age of 78. Known for his engineering ability, after hanging up his helmet Jones built racecars, while he also managed Perris Speedway in California. In 2004 he returned to Indianapolis to work for Tony Stewart’s team. The US Championship Off-Road series has taken on…

The 2020s are set to be a memorable decade of change when new challenges also open new opportunities for business growth. In the meantime we are, at last, seeing questions being raised of politicians’ confidence in their electric battery solutions for automotive. These may face difficulties when their full life cycle, from the availability and extraction of raw materials to the final disposal of batteries, is better understood. They must soon explain their source for funding for the resources needed to deliver the extensive recharging infrastructure, for those they are now pressing to buy electric cars. Inevitable and considerable tax levies could be an unwelcome surprise for many. Motorsport accelerates innovative solutions so we can expect new business demands on the high-performance engineering community. These include calls for help on…