Racecar Engineering December 2015

The Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, was supposed to have said: ‘The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night.’ In this he was alluding to the often Machiavellian way things are discussed and negotiated when laws are being made, and it also applies to the commissions of most racing series that elaborate the rules, technical and sporting. Rules are brought into just about every human interaction, for disparate reasons. In business, in society, even in warfare, there are ways and means defined about how to behave, catering to the innate sense of fairness that seems to be part of our psyche. Any sporting endeavour, given that it is a fundamentally artificial construct, to mimic real life, either…

Tucked away in Bedfordshire, England, just off the A1 is one of those jewels of engineering fascination that happily still exist in our highly-commercialised digital world. Called the Shuttleworth Collection and based at Old Warden aerodrome, it holds an amazing assortment of historic aeroplanes, largely original and dating from the earliest days of flight up to the 1950s. Many of them can be observed being restored and maintained to the highest standards. Wonderfully, most of these aircraft regularly take to the air from the grass strip to give public displays. It also contains a variety of interesting aero engines, from rather crude Edwardian-era devices through mighty WWII multi-cylinder motors to the first examples of jet propulsion. Sanity check What, you may be wondering, has this to do with Racecar Engineering? Well, in his…

The Honda NSX. One of those rare examples where a manufacturer launches a competition car before the production car is actually completed and on sale. Indeed, as the new production ready Honda NSX made appearances at motor shows around the world in 2015, the racing version was already most of the way through its second season of race action. Launched in the summer of 2013, the Honda NSX Concept GT was built to Super GT’s new-for-2014 technical regulations, which were aimed at the eventual unification of the GT500 class with DTM. This included the use of a Japanese-built version of the DTM’s single design monocoque and component lists. But these rules did not suit Honda. DTM mandated the use of a front-engined rear-wheel-drive sports or touring car, but Honda simply did…

It is the most reliable car of the 2015 F1 season and despite its distant third position in the constructors’ championship, at the time of writing, it is also one of the fastest. Work on the Williams FW37 started before its predecessor the FW36 had even turned a wheel, despite the arrival of the new rulebook last season. But as soon as the strengths and weaknesses of the 2014 car were understood, those lessons started to feed directly into the development of the 2015 model. ‘The notion for the FW37 was to look closely at the FW36 and its performances,’ says Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds. ‘We then went about recognising what had worked well and identifying and resolving the areas that we felt needed to be improved. The desire…

The ‘MC’ in Kelsey MC2 stands for ‘mad creation’. Yet while the concept of a self-built mid-engine high spec rally car might be considered just a little left field, the project itself is actually a triumph of pragmatism and good old fashioned New Zealand ingenuity. The Peugeot 207-based car is the brainchild of Alex Kelsey, an unassuming 22-year-old Kiwi who likes building things – and then likes to go on to build other things which are better, and faster. Kelsey’s father owns a quarrying and contracting business in the Coromandel, an area of the North Island of New Zealand, which is a cross between 17 Mile Drive and Martha’s Vineyard, and is the home of the NZ Leadfoot Festival. Richard Kelsey was a successful rally driver in his youth and Alex…

FIA Formula 4 racing will arrive in the US in 2016 with a 15-race professional series organised by the SCCA across five venues. The F4 United States Championship will join FIA Formula 4 championships already established in Australia, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, northern Europe and the United Kingdom, with other new championships to be launched in Mexico, Southeast Asia and Spain. Each market has its own technical partners and in the US it is Crawford Composites that won the tender for the new series, with Honda providing its K20 C1 2.0-litre engine – which will produce the FIA-mandated 160PS (158bhp). The car Crawford will produce is widely based on the FL15 that the company made for the Formula Lites series, which was its first full car since 2009. But there are aero…