Latest Blog Posts

• Ford Ecoboost tech details

  Chris Pickering - Thursday 2nd February 2012

  Yesterday we spoke about the newly-unveiled 1-litre three cylinder Ecoboost engine from Ford. It's not a race engine, granted, but the fuel economy and specific output generated by this little unit exemplify where the car industry is heading at the moment and hence where motorsport will be compelled to follow if it is to appear relevant.

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• Turbo downsizing - improving the breed

  Chris Pickering - Tuesday 31st January 2012

  It struck me a while back that there’s something of a quiet revolution going on in mainstream automotive powertrain design. The turbo-downsized engines we started to hear about a few years ago are very much here now. The example I used in this blog last year was the Ford Focus – one of Europe’s best selling cars and then downsized to just a 1.6-litre turbo engine (without even the option of the traditional 1.8 and 2-litre naturally aspirated units). But now Ford has gone one better.

• Generation why?

  Chris Pickering - Friday 27th January 2012

  There was a lot of talk about Generation Y at the World Motorsport Symposium recently. For the uninitiated, this is apparently a strange alien species that’s obsessed with new media and electronic gadgetry, and comes with what Wikipedia refers to as ‘a neo-liberal approach to politics and economics’. Whatever that is.
  
  At times the implication in some of the symposium comments appeared to be that this lost generation is populated by vacuous youths incapable of sustaining an attention span of more than 30 seconds and utterly unwilling to get involved in anything mentally taxing. They’re far too easily distracted by popular culture to get off the sofa, and they certainly wouldn’t consider dirtying their finger nails with any hands-on work.
  
  So who exactly are they? Well, according to the internet – an invention whole heartedly embraced by Generation Y we’re told – it encompasses anyone born after 1980. This causes me some concern as I was born in 1983. But rather more importantly, it also includes Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Felipe Massa, Fernando Alonso and most of the remainder of the F1 grid, not to mention a fair share of the race engineers and mechanics out there.
  
  Of course, you could argue that the young people who are still watching or participating in motorsport are the minority and the rest are far more interested in other things. And you’d be right. After all, there must have been more teenagers and 20-somethings lining up to see the Beatles and the Stones in 1966 than there were scrabbling to get a view of Jimmy Clark.
  
  Similarly – and I have this on good authority speaking to older members of the Race Tech team – the majority of people chose to get their road cars serviced by mechanics rather than shimmying underneath themselves back in the sixties too. Rose-tinted spectacles aside, we weren’t really a nation of mechanics, all fiddling with the carburettors on our Minis or uprating the brakes on our A35s.
  
  So at least part of what we have isn’t evidence of the current youth generation changing its ways, but simply the age-old tendency for them to be frowned upon by their elders. Not convinced? Try Googling the comment attributed to Socrates a couple of thousand years ago about the attitudes of young people. And that was committed to parchment before even Bernie Ecclestone was around.
  
  So with that in mind, perhaps it’s time for the motorsport establishment to stop banging its walking stick on the ground and consider the real issues. Firstly, I’d say, a lot of top level motor racing – at least that on four wheels – has become boring. The turbulent air from endless bits of aerodynamic addenda makes it almost impossible for following cars to overtake in many classes, while the much reduced slip angles favoured by modern tyres and aerodynamics hide the drivers’ skill far better than that of their forebears sawing at the wheel as they grappled with primitive suspension systems and anaemic-looking crossply tyres.
  
  At the end of the day motorsport remains a sport; a hugely multi-facetted one perhaps, with an intoxicating blend of science, human interest and action, but still a sport. And the most successful spectator events have always been those that provide the best atmosphere and the most intense periods of competition.
  
  So firstly we need to re-instate the drama in top level motor racing. We need to remove any aerodynamic obstacles to overtaking, continue the work being done on KERS and DRS-type systems and consider things like success ballast to even out the field.
  
  Next – hopefully – come the spectators. Racing needs to be physically and financially accessible. Casual fans don’t want to travel half the length of the country and sit in a traffic jam for 2 hours when they’re paying £145 per person.
  
  Compared to these more fundamental issues I actually think the environmental concerns are relatively small fry. But there’s no doubt that it would help if you could explain to some of the more ‘right on’ sponsors that your turbo-downsized or hybrid-equipped racecar is actively furthering environmentally-friendly research as it goes round the track.
  
  Ultimately, though, it all comes back to excitement. The rise of things like downhill mountain biking and boardercross isn’t due to the lack of tailpipe emissions or the fact they produce little noise, it’s rooted in the 2 minutes of intense excitement. The competitors are visibly on the edge of control as they plunge down the slope, sliding round the corners and flying through the air over the jumps. In the case of the latter, contact is frequent and elbows are considered a perfectly acceptable means of achieving this. In short, it’s all good, old fashioned fun.
  
  If you assume that motorsport is fundamentally less exciting to new fans in general, then that also goes a long way towards explaining the ageing demographic. People have always shown a loyalty to the things they grew up with, while new fans – old or young – are harder to win over. So perhaps we can’t blame smart phones, social media or a lack of mechanical aptitude in Generation Y. Perhaps the real reason lies a lot closer to home.

• Gearing up

  Chris Pickering - Tuesday 17th January 2012

  It was with just a hint of a sadistic smile that Quaife’s new Head of Design Steve Prentice approached Editor Kimberley and I at the MIA reception in Birmingham last week. As a bit of fun, he explained, they’d set up an FEA challenge based around a gearbox application they were currently looking at. The idea was that visitors to the stand would be given an early iteration of the design in an attempt to see who could get closest to the optimised part.
  
  It all revolved around a helical gear drive intended for an electric vehicle transmission. Because of this layout, Steve explained, there were not only the usual forces arising from the meshing of the teeth, but also an axial force produced by the helical cut. This was causing the tip of the gear to bend inwards, distorting the overall shape, and the challenge was to reduce this deflection. The sub-optimal version of the design we were given had a total deflection of 0.254 mm and the target level was 0.065 mm. After a quick 101 on Solid Works we were off.
  
  The gear had been modelled using a profile shape that had been revolved to form the solid, with lightening holes and gear teeth added afterwards. Thanks to the marvels of modern CAD, all the major dimensions and radiuses of the profile shape could be modified in plan view and instantly transferred to the 3d solid. To someone like me who hasn’t used CAD software since university, a decade ago, it was a revelation.
  
  The basic constraints were that the inner and outer diameter of the gear had to remain fixed, along with the geometry of the teeth. We also needed to maintain straight lines on certain points of the design to ensure it could be machined successfully. Beyond that, the design was pretty much free. It started off broadly I-shaped, with the lower part of the profile revolving to make the hub in the centre of the gear, while the top section became the outer edge. Looking at the FEA deflection plot, it seemed that most of the deformation took place at the edge of the gear, near the contact point, so my first response was to widen out the top of the I to create a broader ridge around the outside of the gear. Next came increased thickness for the centre of the part and larger radiuses at both ends.
  
  And so we reached the bit I used to dread. Meshing parts largely by hand and then waiting for 20 minutes at a time for them to solve on the huge desktop work station (or more likely crash in the process) was the bane of my life, and it rapidly put me off the idea of doing anything involving computer aided engineering. These days, however, a similarly sized part meshes automatically, goes through to the solver unimpeded (providing you’ve ticked the correct box) and the whole process takes about two minutes on an off-the-shelf laptop.
  
  The first iteration roughly halved the maximum deflection, but there were still signs of the gear flexing considerable around the PCD of the holes. The solution was obvious – fill in the holes. These days it’s a one-click operation to suppress the feature and return the model to its un-drilled state. Want to beef up the thickness of the main part? It’s an equally simple matter of clicking on the dimension shown on the screen and increasing it. Within minutes the third iteration was progressing through the solver. Once it appeared on the screen we hastily clicked on the deflection plot. Steve looked mildly shocked. Not only had the deformation reduced significantly at 0.060 mm, it now undercut that of the in-house design, as did the stress level.
  
  By this point I was getting addicted. I wanted to reduce the deflection further and get the weight – which had crept up during the process of the development – back down to its previous level. Unfortunately, however, time was running out and we had to call it a day. But the last thing I heard it was still the most successful iteration of the design and maybe, just maybe might make its way into the finished part. ‘The Race Tech Gear’ has something of a ring to it, I think.

• Weathering the storm

  Chris Pickering - Monday 16th January 2012

  Rumour has it that there’s a recession on at the moment, but you’d have been hard pushed to tell at the Autosport show last week. Wandering the halls, it wasn’t just the sheer number of people – well up on last year we estimated – but the comments coming from the stands that caught out attention.

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• Six Wheels on my Wagon

  Andy Swift - Tuesday 3rd January 2012

   

• Brave New World

  - Sunday 27th November 2011

  I am probably guiltier than most of spending a little too much time looking back to motor racing’s past than forward to its future. That said, I am constantly fascinated and amazed by technological developments in terms of aerodynamics, drivetrain efficiency and safety. We live in an era of incredibly exciting racing motorcars – you only need to watch a modern F1, LMP or DTM machine at close quarters to confirm that.
  
  However, I was recently struck by some poignant words in that long-standing publication Motor Sport from colleagues Doug Nye and Nigel Roebuck on their recollections of racing around the ‘old’ Spa Francorchamps. This was a road course in the traditional sense; a race circuit so fast and so dangerous that even man with a constitution as strong as Brian Redman failed to sleep the night before piloting his Porsche 917 around there. Roebuck eloquently described the unerring commitment of the very best guys around there in Grand Prix cars, specifically the fearsome Masta Kink, in 1970. Never has an automotive challenge so articulately demonstrated that old cliché “to separate the men from the boys”. One can only imagine how the likes of Jackie Stewart psyched themselves up over the course of a weekend at Spa until they were entering the Kink with just the slightest lift off the throttle in qualifying. This was an age when racing remained a deeply perilous endeavour.
  
  And so it was with these thoughts in my mind that the F1 circus of 2011 dropped into Abu Dhabi, hot on the heels of the inaugural Indian Grand Prix. As someone who retains enormous enthusiasm for the faded grandeur of Monza, Spa and Suzuka, I was suddenly struck by something of an epiphany: Grand Prix racing in the 21st Century actually looks right in Abu Dhabi. Lacking in history and passion it may be, but the huge boats, the amazing architecture, the floodlights highlighting the aerodynamic intricacies of the cars, the multi-coloured macadam run-offs...Suddenly all Bernie’s work at Paul Ricard – as undeniably bizarre as it looked at first – makes sense. In the context of other-worldly technology, unprecedented corporate involvement and the presence of the international jet-set, Formula One seems to work in Abu Dhabi.
  
  As I write this, the start of the Brazilian Grand Prix is approximately six hours away. It is never less than moving watching Formula One at Interlagos. The epic topography so different to a modern Herman Tilke track, the fading concrete perimeter walls and that incongruous backdrop of Sao Paulo to frame the famous circuit...In Formula One terms, this is racing in the raw. It may lack the glamour of the Middle East, but the sound of tribal drums and horns filling the arena as the cars leave the pits never fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
  
  While we will all grow accustomed to the appearance of racing in developing markets – and should actively encourage it – we must never forget where the sport came from. As long as we can still see the gladiators going to work around Spa, Suzuka and Interlagos, Grand Prix racing will retain its soul.

• Juke-R update

  - Wednesday 23rd November 2011

  While we’ve been jetting off to the PMW exhibition and busily preparing ourselves for the American shows next month work has also continued apace on RML’s Nissan Juke-R project.  We posted a video on the beginnings of the project a few weeks back, but here are the subsequent episodes taking us up to the verge of testing.

• Sir Juke

  - Thursday 20th October 2011

  This video from Nissan has caught our eye recently. It’s all about the Juke-R concept; not a competition car as such – at least not yet – but it’s a suitably curious device to warrant inclusion in Race Tech.
  
  Motorsport specialist RML has been drafted in to turn the cutesy crossover into something altogether more serious. Out goes the emissions-friendly 1.6-litre turbo and in goes an R35 GT-R’s 530PS 3.8-litre twin-turbo V6, along with its four-wheel drive system and a rather chunky roll cage.
  
  There may be a degree of wishful thinking at work here, but although the Juke-R is intended as a road-going concept at present the roll cage is fully FIA-approved and we can’t help thinking it would make a great basis for a Dakar car or possibly even point the way towards a smaller engined WRC contender. We can but hope.
  
  Click below to watch the video.

• Unlimited Racing - Kind of...

  - Monday 10th October 2011