Racecar Engineering August 2017

The toilets overflowed on to the track, causing the race leaders to spin off Considering the time spent in paddocks, it is not surprising that a fundamental part of racecraft is to locate and inspect the track’s conveniences as soon as you have finished the first job of collecting the garage keys. Most tracks have now caught up with the 20th century, and in Japan even the 21st, and most F1 level tracks now have toilets in each and every pit. But for a very long time toilets really lived up to the English epithet, bogs. So much so that any hardcore racer developed an iron bladder and granite bowels, knowing that when one left the hotel bodily functions would be locked-down until the return, and in the case of the all…

It was not unknown for Eric to disappear for a few days and then turn up with a wind tunnel model that he had crafted at home tucked under his arm My first love was aeroplanes, as a kid. Fast cars and racing cars were also on my radar but it wasn’t until I saw a picture in Autosport of the stunning, just-announced, Lola GT that racecars really took hold. It’s still amazing to me that 30 years later I became joint managing director of the company that produced the groundbreaking automobile that so grabbed my attention, working alongside Eric Broadley – its designer, Lola Cars founder and subsequently my co-managing director – who died in May. The Lola Mk6, to give the GT its correct model number, was the first ‘big-…

Society will demand a transition to what is called Transport-as-a-Service (TaaS) It may be unusual to write a column in this magazine that is nothing to do with motorsport. However, the subject of this piece does have massive implications for the technologies and businesses of racing, and I feel it is better for the readers of RE to make up their own minds about how it will ultimately affect them. The subject is a report titled: Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 – The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries, by James Arbib and Tony Seba. The authors are both academic specialists in the field of disruption technologies and have developed methods for modelling them. In applying these techniques to transportation and energy, they come to the conclusions…

‘We’re more competitive from a chassis point of view than we were last year’ There is something of a new feel around the McLaren F1 team in 2017, as there is within the wider McLaren group. For 35 years Ron Dennis led McLaren after it merged with his Project 4 Racing team in 1980. But just before the end of last season he was removed from his role at the top of the organisation by other shareholders in what some have described as a coup d’etat. With Dennis gone major changes have taken place all over the McLaren organisation. CEO Jost Capito has left after just five months in the job and long-term team manager Dave Redding departed the team shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, Zak Brown, McLaren’s new executive director, has made other…

From the outset of winter testing an array of small T-bar winglets started to appear on the rear of Formula 1 cars up and down the grid, and the McLaren is no exception, with a biplane solution linked at the outer end with a semi circular section. ‘It’s a bit of a silly thing, really,’ says Morris. ‘It’s annoying because everybody knew, so when the new rules were written, there’s a little box that was missed. When you’re moving all the boxes around, there’s a little box that wasn’t covered, which is that slot. Towards the end of last year, most of the teams realised it was there, and we actually went to the technical regulations meeting and said, “listen, we’ve missed a trick here, we just need to change one…

Here’s an insight into the mind of Neil Oatley, who was the chief designer behind five championship winning McLaren’s during the 1990’s and is now the director of Design and Development. ‘The quicker we can iterate, the faster we will be. One of my biggest challenges is to convert ideas into real parts in the shortest time available. In the ’80s, we used to manufacture one front wing a year and now we manufacture five completely new designs. It’s unlikely that the wing will remain the same from one race to another. Using rapid prototyping and 3D printing we can bring components to the car quicker.’ In January this year, McLaren joined forces with Stratasys, global leaders in 3D printing. Under this partnership Stratasys revamped McLaren’s suite of 3D printing solutions…