Racecar Engineering June 2016

The initial steps of the Roborace process will be entertaining If you were around Interstate 15 just before Barstow, near the California-Nevada border, on March 13, 2004, you might have remembered a quote from Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. ‘We were some place around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: “I feel a bit light-headed; maybe you should drive . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy…

It is more important to increase the competition, particularly now that the Porsche, Toyota and Audi entries amount to only six racecars in total The snow on qualifying day of Silverstone’s opening round of the 2016 World Endurance Championship excused my spending more time in the garages than usual. However, it also further highlighted to me the skills of the crews that prepare and run these sophisticated LMP cars, in particular the private LMP2 teams Such is the technology employed in these machines, even without hybrid complication, that most teams will have the benefit of engineering support from the suppliers of both their chassis and their engines. The days of operating an endurance racing car in major events with half-a-dozen people in total are long gone. Nonetheless, perhaps hearteningly, at this expensive…

Toyota lined up for the World Endurance Championship in 2016 with an all-new car, the only one of the three manufacturers to deliver a new engine, chassis and hybrid system in a single step. It has been an extraordinary development cycle, one that saw major decisions taken as late as June last year, leaving the team with precious little time to sort out one of the most complex types of cars in motor racing today. The TS050 is the third generation of LMP1 hybrid produced by TMG from its base in Cologne, Germany, and it is by far the most ambitious and powerful of them all. The team had a performance advantage during its title-winning season in 2014, and had made improvements for its 2015 car, but was caught by surprise…

Much of the lap time improvement has come from reducing the weight of the racecar In recent years, racing on the Nurburgring Nordschleife has become something of a trend among manufacturer teams, which is perhaps not surprising considering how much production car testing and evaluation is undertaken on the legendary circuit. This trend has seen a number of manufacturers building and developing ‘Ring specials which tend to only run in the Veranstaltergemeinschaft Langstreckenpokal Nurburgring Endurance Racing Championship (VLN), or even just in the annual 24 Hour race held on the 25km course. Toyota is one brand which, in 2016, will have a significant number of new designs at the ‘Ring, including a curious crossover coupe called the C-HR, which we will look at in detail in a future edition. The Japanese firm’s European…

Top-level open wheel racing has only really existed in Japan since 1973, when Formula 2000 was launched. That morphed into Formula 2 in 1978, and then Formula 3000 in 1987, and then it became Formula Nippon. Over the years this series in its various guises had produced a wide range of top drivers and engineers, including F1 World Champions and Le Mans winners. In 2010 the Series organisers, Japan Race Promotion (JRP), appointed former Honda F1 boss Hiroshi Shirai as CEO and he set himself and the series a bold new mission to increase the performance of the cars and to raise the profile of the series internationally. In the past Formula Nippon had been a derivation of F3000, but under the leadership of Shirai the series began to take on a…

When the Dallara SF14 was first created it was designed to accommodate a hybrid power unit. Both Honda and Toyota pushed for hybrids to become part of Super Formula, Honda planning on using a system from Zytek in England, while Toyota could have used its own THR technology. The concept had been for the motors to remain a fixed specification but for energy storage to be free, as Japan has a number of major battery and capacitor suppliers such as Panasonic who were reportedly interested in going racing. The Zytek system was tested on the old Swift chassis, but over the years the hybrid plans of Super Formula have fallen by the wayside. ‘The SF14 was designed to accommodate a hybrid system but I don’t think it will happen, because of…