Racecar Engineering March 2017

The engineers will be passionate people who seek elegant solutions A well-known cliche is that someone who has a hammer will see all problems as nails. It is also known as the law of the instrument, Maslow’s hammer (or gavel), or the golden hammer. The upside of this is that presumably it will be spot on in solving any nail problems. But engineering is about extracting the most efficient way of doing something from what you know, with the equipment you have, within the time you are allotted and the budget you are given. Being an engineer seems to bring out the critic in you about anything you use or even see, as you always think of a better way to do it. The habit of looking at things that surround you and…

The established odds say that it will be business as usual in Formula 1 this season, with the top three teams re-exerting their superiority Here we go again. When the current power units were announced for Formula 1 in 2014, drivers were predicting that the levels of torque and power would make the cars hugely difficult to control beasts. So much so, it transpired, that a 17 year-old kid, albeit vastly talented, could step directly from a single season in Formula 3 into a grand prix car and immediately challenge some of the best in the business, as Max Verstappen did. This time around there has been much to-do about how the chassis changes for 2017 will ‘destroy’ the drivers physically. F1 people have short memories; it’s not so long ago that…

Already the DPi cars have shown performance that is approaching LMP1 speeds of six years ago Mazda’s long history in endurance racing has taken its next step with the introduction of a 2-litre turbocharged engine and stylised bodykit on a Riley Multimatic chassis – which is basically a complicated way of saying that it has debuted its new Daytona Prototype International, the RT24-P. The 2017 Daytona Prototypes are the first of a new breed of US sports racing cars, with stylised bodywork fitted onto the new LMP2 chassis. They are also fitted with engines from a manufacturer. Cadillac, Mazda and Nissan let their production car designers loose on the bodywork styling, knowing that the kits would be balanced in the wind tunnel, so outright performance was of less importance (see page20). The…

‘I’m not good at partnerships but in the end we said yes, let’s do it, let’s go in together’ When the tender for LMP2 2017 was put out, there was a clear message from IMSA – one of the four chassis manufacturers would be from North America. It was perhaps no surprise that the tender went to two of the most established and respected companies in North America, Bill Riley’s eponymous concern and Larry Holt’s Multimatic company, although how they came together was more haphazard than might have been expected. ‘It all started when they started talking about a new car,’ says Riley. ‘I was going to the meetings, as did Multimatic, and we had worked with them on the Viper programme. We didn’t want to go up against Multimatic, and I…

There was no baseline data, no track data, nothing on which to base the Balance of Performance, and IMSA’s season starts in January while the WEC begins in April When the new regulations for LMP2 were announced, there was an immediate problem identified by the ACO. While the category was, for them in Europe, the WEC and the Le Mans privateer class, in the US it was the main category and IMSA already had interest from several manufacturers, including Mazda and GM. So, would manufacturers allow their cars to be raced by privateers, or would they want to have professional drivers, and an input into the design and running of the car? In the end, it was agreed that this would be the global prototype category as originally envisaged but, while the…

Many have called on Porsche to ditch the 911 in favour of the Cayman for GTE, but the company considers this model its standard-bearer Porsche’s latest Le Mans GTE car has finally stepped on to a similar platform to its rivals, with a rear to mid-engine layout that allows not only better weight distribution, but also better aero, which in turn allows it to exploit fully the new regulations. It is the first time since 1998 that Porsche has entered a mid-engine 911 – the last one was driven to overall victory that year at Le Mans by Allan McNish, Laurent Aiello and Stephane Ortelli, which was, incidentally, the last overall win at Le Mans for the Mezger engine. Going up against the turbocharged Ford and Ferrari that were built to the…