But the military comparison is far more than allegorical, as many racecar engineering firms have made big strides in the defence sector.

In part three of Beyond the Racecar, discover how the UK motorsport industry challenged and improved some of the British Army’s technologies.

At first glance, the motor racing and defence industries might not seem to have that much in common.

After all, the purpose of a racecar is to drive as fast as possible, over a given course, for as long as required, while the primary objective for military vehicles is to deliver tactical advantages on the battlefield that do not necessarily include speed.

Look a little deeper, though, and there are a number of disciplines in motorsport – most obviously an ability to innovate and problem solve at pace – that can have a positive effect on defence programmes.

Crossing the divide

As the CEO of B2B marketing agency, Chamois Consulting, Jamie Clarke has a number of client companies that have crossed the divide between motorsport and defence.

It was in the 2000s, however, while working in procurement in the British Army and then joining defence company, Supacat, that Clarke first witnessed how motorsport companies could make a positive contribution in the defence arena with their involvement in urgent operational requirements (UORs) for UK armed forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘Basically, the MoD [UK Ministry of Defence] had problems in Afghanistan with all sorts of kit because it was being used in ways it was never designed to be used,’ Clarke explains, noting that a particular issue arose with the introduction of the Jackal patrol vehicle in 2008.

‘Jackal had an extra nearly two tonnes of armour put onto it, and it was never designed to carry two tonnes of armour. If you then reduced your payload by two tonnes, that was okay, because you replace payload with armour, but obviously the guys weren’t doing that.

‘So they were running around in a seven-tonne truck at 11 tonnes with all their battlefield payload on and then wondering why the brakes were failing, and they were having to basically change the brake pads every day. They were just crumbling and falling apart because they were running the trucks so heavy.

‘UORs meant it needed to be developed quickly,’ Clarke continues, ‘but most defence engineering companies can’t operate that quickly, and the key part we found was that motorsport, as an industry, recognised the so-called requirement to cross the start line. Meaning you can design the very best solution in the world in the motorsport industry but, if you are three seconds late, you’ve missed the start, and it’s no use whatsoever to anybody.

‘The motorsport industry, as a sort of collective organisation, is used to working to strict deadlines, but most companies are not.’

In the case of the Jackal’s braking problem, a rapid solution was provided by braking system specialist, Alcon Components, which at the time was largely focused on motorsport.

‘They basically came in and re-designed the whole braking system, bespoke to the vehicle, delivered, tested and certified very quickly indeed,’ Clarke recalls.

‘They replaced the discs, calipers and pads, and they put a twin-caliper solution onto each hub on the front axle, so you effectively doubled the braking system, but the efficiency and the reliability was multiples of that.’

Bridging the gap

Such fixes to British Army equipment might well have continued to proceed on an ad hoc basis if it were not for the Labour government of the time appointing Lord Paul Drayson as the UK MoD’s defence procurement minister in May 2005.

A renowned petrolhead, Lord Drayson likes to drive fast and find solutions fast, so he inevitably felt frustration, and then disdain, when confronted by the somewhat glacial pace of MoD procurement processes.

Nick Wills, who is now defence development director for the Motorsport Industry Association (MIA) but was serving as the commanding officer of the British Army’s Armoured Trial and Development Unit when Drayson was appointed, notes that when appointed Drayson was also serving as president of the MIA, so a link already existed from motorsport to defence.

As Wills recalls, Drayson ‘had a conversation with Chris Aylett, CEO of the MIA, saying, “Well this is crazy. I can be at the Nürburgring, doing some tests on my car. I can find there’s a cooling issue and ’phone up whoever and tell them I’ve got a cooling issue, and then, a week later, they’d have completely re-designed the whole cooling system and I’ll be testing it at Brands Hatch. While as minister of defence procurement, I feel like I wouldn’t even get the phone answered in three weeks, so what can we do?”‘

Wills then describes what he characterised as ‘the most dysfunctional lunch you could ever imagine in the House of Lords’ where, on one side of the table sat the CEOs of major defence companies such as BAE Systems, opposite race team directors and other senior figures from motorsport.

From that initial meeting, and a subsequent series of showcases, where representatives from defence and motorsport gathered to discuss the problems at hand, the MIA’s Motorsport to Defence (M2D) initiative was launched in 2007, aimed at helping motorsport companies engage with the defence industry and maximise the business opportunities between the two.

A symbiotic relationship

The M2D initiative is not simply about helping the British Army with its mobility problems in times of need; it is designed to develop a truly symbiotic relationship between the two industries.

‘We’ve worked with multiple motorsport companies to help them into defence,’ says Clarke says of his clients at Chamois, ‘because they’re starting to recognise that motorsport is a fairly chunky, hard sector to be in – low volume, high price, difficult specs that vary – whereas defence tends to be longer term, slower programmes, but with higher volumes and better revenue. It can put a real slice of security into the business plans for these motorsport companies.’

‘At the bottom line, it’s the same laws of physics, it’s just making sure you’re answering the question,’ adds Wills. ‘Motorsport engineers are competitive engineers: they really want to do stuff better than someone else.

‘Generally speaking, if you’re a tier one or tier two supplier and you’re still in business, it’s because you’ve delivered on time; you’ve done what you needed to do. So what you get is a supply chain very focused on time and quality delivery, with competitive engineers at the bleeding edge of materials technology.’

In some early M2D cases, in fact, it was a lack of latest-generation technology in defence platforms and suppliers that led to motorsport companies being called in to provide optimised solutions.

Wills recalls one situation when, as part of one of the M2D showcases, a couple of specialised motorsport cooling companies were taken up to a BAE Systems armoured vehicle production site in Telford and asked to look at a radiator.

‘They took one look at this radiator, which was essentially 1950s bus technology because no one had really challenged it before, and the charge air cooler for the turbo. Literally, two weeks later, they came back with something that was 50 per cent better in efficiency for the radiator and 75 per cent better in efficiency for the charge air cooler.’

Composite crossover

Even though the technology in the latest defence platforms tends not to suffer any more from using such obsolete components, the motorsport industry still has technology and capabilities that are either not resident in the defence sector or are only just beginning to be. This has led to motorsport companies firmly establishing themselves within the supply chains of numerous defence platforms.

As a leading composite manufacturer for the motorsport industry, for example, West Sussex-based Global Technologies Racing (GTR) makes a large quantity of the major composite components required by a significant number of Formula 1 teams.

At the same time, the company’s GTR Composites division makes the carbon composite seat backs for Martin-Baker ejection seats, composite aircraft components for the AW101 Merlin helicopter, composite housings for flotation and life raft systems on the Sikorsky S-92 and has produced most of the composite-protected crew pods for the British Army’s Foxhound patrol vehicles.

Williams, which has a 50-year pedigree in F1, established Williams Grand Prix Technologies last year to offer a range of capabilities in the areas of platform dynamics, advanced materials, simulation and modelling, instrumentation and data analytics, and high-performance AI and machine-learning computing outside racing, with defence a key part of the company’s plans.

Incorporated in September 2019, the Silverstone-based Digital Manufacturing Centre (DMC) has moved its state-of-the-art metal and polymer additive manufacturing (AM)-based engineering expertise beyond motorsport to a number of other sectors.

In September 2024, DMC joined armour manufacturer and vehicle integrator, NP Aerospace, in working on Project Tampa: the MoD’s initiative to exploit the potential of introducing AM, otherwise known as 3D printing, into its supply chain.

Project Tampa is a five-million-pound initiative designed to explore how AM can be used to print parts for weapons and other military equipment on demand, reducing excessive lead times for parts to be delivered, and even potentially allowing parts to be printed in theatre, shortening the UK armed forces’ overall logistics chain.

The technology also has the potential to improve platform availability among legacy military vehicle fleets by 3D printing obsolete parts. As an example of its capabilities, DMC has already shown it can rapidly produce parts for the rear step and door latch assemblies of the British Army’s Mastiff and Ridgeback vehicles.

This year, Alcon (the company behind the Jackal braking system fix) is celebrating 15 years of providing braking solutions into the defence and security sectors. The company’s business in these fields has grown by 500 per cent during that time, with its defence customer base alone now including BAE Systems, QinetiQ, Patria, Supacat, JLR, Babcock and Jankel.

In June 2024, Alcon announced its latest generation, full service, brake-by-wire technology to the defence sector, offering a range of bespoke and off-the-shelf braking solutions for both autonomous and crewed defence and security vehicles.

Automotive engineered

Shoreham-based engineering firm, Ricardo, which was founded in 1915, has a long heritage of straddling both the defence and automotive / motorsport industries. In the 21st century, the company worked on motorcycle engines for BMW, as well as engines for McLaren supercars and F1 machinery.

In 2010, the MoD selected the Ocelot, a vehicle developed by Ricardo and US company, Force Protection, to replace the British Army’s fleet of Snatch Land Rovers, while the Foxhound protected patrol vehicle, which entered service in 2012, was automotive engineered by Ricardo under contract to General Dynamics UK.

Ricardo has also worked with other militaries around the world. In November 2021, it was selected by South Korea’s STX Engine to develop a clean-sheet power unit for use in heavy duty military vehicles such as the K9 self-propelled howitzer.

Ricardo also established a dedicated business called Ricardo Defense for its work in the United States. In 2020, Ricardo Defense teamed as a strategic partner with GM Defense and won a contract to provide the latter’s Infantry Squad Vehicle to the US Army. It also received a US Army contract to install its Dismounted Soldier Communication System on three brigades of M88 armoured recovery vehicles.

The Ricardo Defense offshoot was sold to Proteus Enterprises and Gladstone Investment in late 2024 for US$85 million.

In 2015, what was then Williams Advanced Engineering, now Fortescue Zero, was awarded a contract by General Dynamics UK to bring its F1-bred technologies and capabilities to provide a core infrastructure distribution system for the British Army’s family of Ajax tracked armoured fighting vehicles (AFV). The company used its F1 expertise in data analytics and systems integration to provide the Ajax AFV family with an advanced electronic architecture.

WAE also worked with BAE Systems on at least two defence projects. In 2018, they linked up to explore collaboration in a range of areas, including virtual and augmented reality, aerodynamics, lightweight materials and battery technology that could power solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and more.

Then, in 2020, WAE and BAE explored how battery management and cooling technologies from the motorsport industry could be exploited to deliver efficiency and performance gains in the design of future combat aircraft.

Shropshire-based casting specialist, Grainger & Worrall, which has a global customer base that includes several F1 teams as well as Tesla, Lucid, Porsche, McLaren, Maserati, Bugatti and Aston Martin, offers innovative casting expertise to produce lightweight, motorsport-quality castings in both aluminium and compacted graphite iron.

That expertise is now deployed on a range of large-scale military sand-casting projects, including production of tank turrets, engines, gearboxes and driveline technologies for military applications.

Rapid deployment

Since its incorporation in 2000, Oxfordshire-based precision fabrication and thermal management system specialist, SST Technology, has gained a reputation for developing and supplying exhaust systems, heat shields and thermal management solutions for motorsport disciplines including F1, IndyCar, touring cars and sportscars, as well as rallying.

Now, the company’s experience with thermal management technology, together with expertise in the design and manufacture of complex exhaust and pipework / ducting systems, is making significant inroads into the defence market.

Lifeline Fire and Safety Systems, a market leader in motorsport fire suppression systems, has also diversified into the military market.

The Coventry-based company has taken its racing-focused systems and further developed them to provide crew compartment fire suppression for British armoured vehicles such as the Warrior – a tracked infantry fighting vehicle – for which the time from initial enquiry through to development, manufacturing and appearance in action was just six months.

Lifeline’s involvement in defence started with supplying fire suppression systems for the British Army’s Mastiff protected patrol vehicles when they were first deployed to Afghanistan in the 2000s.

More recently, the company was selected to provide the fire suppression systems for the British Army’s future fleet of Challenger 3 battle tanks.

While the UK arm of US company, Moog, is known for supplying miniature actuation systems for F1 machinery, its actuation and stabilisation systems are today being used for multiple military applications, including turreted weapon systems, ammunition handling systems, precise missile steering mechanisms and near-silent actuation on submarines.

Adapted technology

Banbury-based motorsport and advanced engineering group, Prodrive, which has a rich heritage in rallying and sportscar racing, has also established a footprint in the defence sector in recent years.

As well as engaging in a programme to investigate and develop a chassis / suspension system for 8×8 military vehicles, in May 2010, the company announced it had adapted the torque control technology used by Subaru in the FIA World Rally Championship to give military vehicles increased capability over rough terrain, while at the same time making them easier and safer to drive.

Lastly, Swiss mechatronics solutions provider, Stäubli, which has a UK arm based in Telford, has found that the fluid and electrical connectors it has developed to withstand the rigours of motorsport are equally applicable to a wide range of defence platforms.

The long list of motorsport-to-defence crossovers is, of course, not comprehensive.

Research for this article, for example, confirmed more than one instance where UK prime defence contractors are currently working with motorsport companies on major platform and weapons programmes where the details of the projects could not be discussed in the public domain.

Conclusion

As the MoD strives in its endeavours to make UK defence procurement more agile and responsive, both in the incorporation of new technology and the addressing of future operational demands, it will no doubt continue to benefit from the expertise and capabilities that the UK’s front-running motorsport industry has to offer.

Meanwhile, companies whose original footprint and interest was firmly placed in the motorsport sector will continue to find benefit from the alternative lines of revenue the defence industry has to offer.

The post Which Motorsport Companies are Involved in Defence? appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

Part two of Beyond the Racecar uncovers how motorsport engineering companies were integral to the launch of a bold, new electric powerboat championship.

They may be worlds apart in terms of the surfaces they race on, but there has been crossover between four-wheel motorsport and boat racing for many years.

In the 20th century Henry Segrave, Malcolm Campbell and Donald Campbell set outright speed records on both land and water. Kaye Don, an accomplished racing driver, achieved the latter.

In 1958, Briggs Cunningham, the American sportscar constructor and driver who twice finished fourth at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won the America’s Cup as a skipper. There was also the original ‘Flying Finn’, Timo Makinen, a three-time Rally GB winner who triumphed in the inaugural Round Britain Powerboat Race in 1969.

More recently, Formula 1 technical expertise has filtered into sailing as Mercedes engineers have imparted their wisdom to the INEOS America’s Cup team. Last year, a new electric powerboat series called E1 held its inaugural season with some familiar faces.

Sanctioned as a world championship by the UIM (Union Internationale Motonautique – powerboat racing’s equivalent to the FIA), E1 is the latest string in the bow of emission-cutting series chaired by Alejandro Agag, coming after Formula E and Extreme E.

Being water-based, it is further removed from its four-wheel siblings in many ways. But motorsport engineering and working processes were vital in getting the new series up and running.

All-star line up

E1 held its first race off the coast of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in February 2024. That formed the start of a five-round season contested between eight teams, all of which were fronted by famous faces from the wider worlds of sport and entertainment.

Team investors included seven-time Superbowl champion Tom Brady, 22-time tennis Grand Slam winner Rafael Nadal, ex-Formula 1 driver Sergio Pérez and actor Will Smith.

The multi-lap races were contested over approximately 8km between up to four boats. Driving crews consisted of one male and one female pilot, who took turns to compete. The format, with its qualifying stage leading to semi-finals and a grand final, was designed to be easily understood by racecar and general sport fans alike.

All E1 teams are given the same, 7.3m long watercraft, the RaceBird, developed by British marine start-up, SeaBird Technologies, which counts Agag as one of its investors. Capable of 93km/h (50knt) on its hydrofoils, the vessel is powered by a 150kW Helix electric motor feeding off energy released by a 518V, 35kWh Kreisel Electric battery.

Both companies will be familiar to Racecar Engineering readers for their motorsport involvement, as will McLaren Applied, which provides the electronics and control software. SeaBird integrated these systems, and the powertrain, into the boat, which was designed with input from marine specialist, Victory Marine.

Motorsport connections

While Agag is the recognisable face of E1, the person at the helm on a day-to-day basis is chief executive, Rodi Basso. An ex-Ferrari and Red Bull F1 race and performance engineer, Basso rifled through his motorsport address book to help put the tools in place for E1 to launch.

‘There is a personal element of comfort zone,’ explains Basso. ‘Before launching the championship, I was very much in the world of electronics and data intelligence.

‘Given the specific requirements of the boat, I went very straightforward to suppliers and partners I knew I could trust in terms of delivering in a short time and matching our key performance indicators. In the marine industry, there is no supplier of these fields at the level of automotive and motorsport.’

That is not to say the series was naïve enough to ignore marine specialists for certain areas where their capabilities could be beneficial. Marine companies were central to the design of the foil and outboard, both alien components to racecar folk. Navico provided specialist navigation equipment and course charts through its Simrad and C-MAP brands.

The E1 powerboat is, therefore, an amalgam of motorsport and marine specialists, with the former taking a leading role in the powertrain and vehicle control departments.

Woking-on-Sea

Considering Basso’s past role as McLaren Applied’s motorsport business director from 2016 to 2019, the Woking-based company was perhaps an obvious partner to sign, though its selection came after a review of several candidates.

McLaren Applied is supplying its VCU-500 control unit and data logger to E1. It also provides the software tools required to generate the control applications and analyse both live and recorded data, including its Advanced Telemetry Linked Acquisition System (ATLAS) and McLaren Control Toolbox (MCT).

E1 was an early adopter of the VCU-500 when it was under development. It is now a commercially available product used by several teams in Formula E, as well as the Mission H24 hydrogen sportscar demonstrator, among others. The VCU found in E1 is the same hardware component used in motorsport, with the only difference being in the software capability. There is also an obvious difference in environment.

‘Although the VCU is IP rated for protection against water ingress, in E1, the unit is put inside an additional carbon box with the rest of the electronics, so it’s got an extra layer of protection,’ says Josh Wesley, motorsport product manager at McLaren Applied.

Wesley was SeaBird’s head of engineering throughout the RaceBird development and the 2024 season opener, before switching back to his previous company after the Jeddah event.

‘One reason to go for a motorsport unit was that we needed something that was robust and would work in harsh environments. Broadly, its use is very similar. It’s just controlling slightly different things – propeller instead of wheels, foils and rudders instead of steering. From the powertrain point of view, it is almost identical in its use to that of an electric motorsport car.’

Running on a 64-bit operating system, the VCU-500 is the brain of the RaceBird, controlling functions of the battery, inverter, sensor processors, display items, throttle mapping and more.

It predominantly controls these using CAN (Controller Area Network) bus communication networks. There can be several CAN bus networks in a single vehicle, connecting various control units for different areas of the boat. The RaceBird has eight of them.

Controlled environment

‘All of the main devices on the boat are controlled via CAN,’ confirms Wesley. ‘This means there is a very large number of parameters available for both analysis and control, and managing these is critical.

‘With the McLaren Control Toolbox software and Model Management suite, adding new devices to the CAN network, building the software to communicate with them, ingesting the vast amount of data and using it in control strategies is straightforward.’

According to Wesley, using MCT was critical to E1 powerboat’s development, allowing new software strategies and functionality to be developed and rolled out to the VCU swiftly, with new versions often being deployed throughout a test. This kept the pace of development high and both software and hardware development in sync.

‘The real benefit of the VCU is that it can be used not only for control, but also for data logging and telemetry,’ Wesley adds. ‘Logging is data that’s recorded to memory and telemetry is data over the air that you’re viewing live. Telemetry devices allow you to stream data which, during development, we used every time the boat ran, for monitoring of the safety systems and the battery.

‘We could then talk to the pilot on the radio and tell them if they need to stop, or if there is an issue on the boat. It’s a lot more difficult to go and recover a boat when it’s stopped. You can’t just put it on a truck like with a car, and the VCU allowed us to monitor systems and prevent us being stranded on the water with an issue.’

Battery development

E1 reached out to Kreisel Electric in early 2021 about using its battery technology in the RaceBird.

The Austrian firm works in both motorsport and marine: its activities in the former have included developing batteries for the electric RX1e class of the FIA World Rallycross Championship and working with Compact Dynamics on the FIA World Rally Championship’s hybrid system. Kreisel also develops battery systems for electric pleasure and commercial boats.

‘E1 batteries benefit from similar requirements [to racecars] in terms of cooling performance and ability to deliver high C-Rates [charge and discharge currents], while at the same time keeping cell temperature within the limits for this type of application,’ says Markus Fürst, mechanical design engineer at Kreisel Electric. ‘The result is a small, lightweight battery with high performance.

‘The carbon housing of the battery was a major challenge. Any changes in battery volume or space requirements would impact development of the entire boat. The RaceBird vessel was developed in parallel with the battery.’

The E1 battery has a nominal voltage of 518V, a capacity of around 37kWh and weighs 246kg. For context, the RaceBird tips the scales at 1100kg, the carbon fibre chassis alone being almost 900kg of that. Kreisel uses cells with high power density, rather than high capacity, because they have a high performance-to-energy density ratio.

Safety-wise, four water entry sensors are built into the battery to detect the presence of liquid. There is also a conductivity sensor in the cooling circuit that detects water intruding into the dielectric battery cooling fluid.

A battery management system (BMS) monitors data from the battery and generates warning signals when errors occur. Developing the battery for E1 has proven a useful crossover activity for Kreisel.

‘Being the battery supplier for E1 provides a lot of knowledge from performance battery behaviour under extreme conditions,’ says Fürst. ‘This helps us to evolve our technology requirements. Commercial and pleasure craft boats are different, so a different type of module is used for these applications, which has different safety features and requirements in terms of performance and lifetime.’

Batteries are charged by the Qube, a DC charging station from QiOn designed to be robust for use outdoors, and transportable. It has an output of up to 80kW, although the RaceBird doesn’t use all that available power.

‘Simply for the sporting format that we have, we don’t need to go to those levels,’ explains Basso. ‘This is also helping the battery life. We can charge the battery in 40 minutes without affecting the sporting format. Our autonomy is for approximately half an hour.

‘We need to consider that every session is in the region of 12-15 minutes. Every two or three sessions, we need to recharge. The good news is we don’t need to recharge fully, we can top up and keep going.’

Mercury rising

The E1 electric motor and inverter are situated at the rear, where the outboard normally sits on a standard powerboat. Typically, an outboard consists of three parts: the powerhead, housing the engine sat above the water, the connecting mid-section and the lower section, featuring the waterborne propellor.

For 2024, the E1 motor and inverter were integrated into a standard internal combustion outboard provided by American powerboat company, Mercury Racing. This used the mid-section and gear case of Mercury’s outboard, minus the six-cylinder petrol engine.

Integrating the electric powertrain into the ICE outboard was one of the major design challenges, partly because it was not originally built to run with a rear foil.

‘It was based on a commercial application, so the level of loads and duty cycles the outboard was seeing, was completely new, and maybe sometimes too much,’ explains Basso. ‘But we have been working very closely with Mercury to fix everything.

‘So far, we are pleased with what we are running. Mercury has the biggest order book of outboards worldwide, so it was just unbelievable [they contacted E1] because in August 2021 we were little more than a PowerPoint. It has been a great collaboration, and we are working on the future as we talk.’

Elaborating further on some of the technical hurdles of integrating the internal combustion outboard, Basso says:

‘We couldn’t touch the rear foil because it was not a self-standing component. It was there to balance the front foils, and we needed to keep the balance as it was. This is a matter of hydrodynamics and loads.

‘We discovered we had three components that needed to be reinforced. They were designed for a thermal engine and had some mechanical characteristics that were not suitable for our solution, so we had to re-shape parts.

‘It was a matter of structural engineering and reinforcing some mechanical parts until we got to the point that the whole outboard was enhanced and more robust, so it is now serving the purpose.’

Foil’s gold

The RaceBird is a foiling craft, so it uses dynamic principles that have been around for over a century.

Foiling was explored in the early 1900s. A notable pioneer was Enrico Forlanini, who mounted foils on ladder-like struts attached over the side of his boat at Lake Maggiore, where E1 has its technical headquarters today. Another was Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone.

Foiling is the act of lifting the boat’s hull into the air as it gains speed, freeing it from the drag of the water. A foil is essentially an underwater wing and shares many physical principles with its aerodynamic cousins used in aviation and motorsport.

The wing’s hydrodynamic shape guides water rapidly over the top surface, creating a low-pressure area above that surface in accordance with Bernoulli’s Principle, whereby pressure decreases as fluid speed increases, and vice versa.

The imbalance between the high-pressure zone underneath the foil and the low-pressure zone above it generates enough lift for the hull to breach the surface. This results in the striking sight of a hydrofoil boat that seemingly flies above the water, only connected to the surface by thin stilts.

The dedicated E1 foils were designed by Caponnetto Hueber, a naval consultancy with America’s Cup experience, which used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to map and test the hydrodynamic properties.

The foil design was then built to print by Milan-based ERF, before going to SeaBird for assembly and integration with the rest of the boat. It was, therefore, an area in which marine companies were leaned on more heavily.

Trim and lift

E1 drivers can make live set-up adjustments to the foil’s angle of attack and the height of the outboard.

The latter involves raising and lowering the outboard relative to the boat’s body. The higher the outboard, the closer the boat sits to the water. Such set-up changes are made on the fly during races and are useful when following another boat’s disruptive wake.

‘Generally, you can either be slow and stable or fast and unstable,’ says Joe Sturdy, team principal at Team Brady and an ex-Red Bull F1 power unit engineer. ‘If you change the lift, your trim window changes as well, so you have to play with them both; it’s risk vs reward.

‘You can be quite unstable and quite fast but drop off the foils more often, which means you’re starting from a high-drag phase of acceleration more frequently throughout a lap. Or you can try to be slow and consistent, staying on the foils the whole time and acting with that medium level of drag throughout the lap.’

According to SeaBird Technologies’ chief technical officer, Nathan Baker, the E1 powerboat operates ‘almost on a knife edge’ that requires constant adjustment.

‘That’s why there is a lot of involvement from the pilots in setting the height of the rear foil and trimming it,’ he says.

‘There is a great deal of skill involved in that as you have to anticipate water conditions and adjust accordingly. Those who can do that are smoother and faster.’

Driver crossover

It’s not just technology that has been transferred from motorsport to E1. Many of the pilots have racecar experience, though the switch from ground to water has required some re-calibration.

The field includes 2019 FIA World Rallycross champion Timmy Hansen, former Nissan GT3 ace Lucas Ordoñez and Extreme E driver Catie Munnings. There is also Emma Kimiläinen, a race winner in W Series, who together with her powerboat racer teammate, Sam Coleman, won the inaugural E1 title.

According to Kimiläinen, adapting to the RaceBird was straightforward: ‘The steering wheel is from a formula [racecar],’ she says. ‘The seat is a rally seat. The space is like a formula cockpit. Everything from that perspective, including my driving position, is like a racecar.

‘The driving itself, however, is pretty different, physically. It doesn’t require a lot of turning power. Quite the opposite. You need to have silk gloves on and be gentle with the steering, like karting. So it does have motor racing similarities, but in a different [way].’

The racecar driver’s ability to feel the car through their body is not lost in E1. Additionally, understanding when to adjust the foil’s angle requires similar intuition to controlling a racecar’s balance.

‘This is the first vehicle where I can set up the whole vehicle during the time I race,’ Kimiläinen adds. ‘Basically, if you’re not doing anything, you’re doing something wrong. It is very important to constantly read the water, the conditions and be aware of other boats’ wakes.’

In motorsport, tyre performance changes over the course of a race event as track grip increases, but there is no such evolution in E1. This was one of the main learning areas, and battlegrounds, in season one.

‘When you’re doing A-B-A testing of different set-up options, you can piece together what happened to the track in the time you’re doing the test,’ highlights Sturdy, ‘whereas in this, the water can change within seconds. For example, in Jeddah qualifying, there was one lap where Emma was, for what seemed like no reason, five seconds slower than another lap. It is purely down to water conditions.’

When assembling a fresh team for E1, Sturdy and his co-team principal, Ben King, made the decision to go for the best of both worlds. Their approach paid dividends as Team Brady won three of the five rounds en route to the title.

‘When we were trying to piece together this team, we took mechanics who had a split of experience,’ explains Sturdy. ‘Some were working in endurance racing, but one of our mechanics has worked in F1H20, the very top level of powerboat racing, so we’ve got these different perspectives coming together.

‘We’re trying to move powerboating in a slightly different direction to what we’ve done in the past, trying to bring across some of what we’ve learned in F1, Formula E and WEC, and apply it to this new machine we’re working on.’

Right on time

One of motorsport’s greatest exportable strengths is its ability to meet tight deadlines.

This skill came in handy when E1 was determining the component suppliers. It is also why SeaBird enlisted engineers with racecar experience, not just for their knack of doing things quickly and accurately, but for their connections in the agile motorsport supply chain.

SeaBird aims to use E1 as a platform to showcase its sustainable powerboat technology that it hopes to introduce to the wider marine market.

‘We have a number of people from different backgrounds, whether it’s aerospace, automotive or motorsport,’ says Baker. ‘We’ve had engineers from Red Bull and Toro Rosso within the group.

‘We’re very lucky to have that mentality and approach to designing and engineering a product. It leads to a completely different mindset when it comes to how fast you can do something, or what level of detail you go into. The attitude is that we’ll get it done, one way or another, within that timeframe.’

The RaceBird’s first shakedown took place near San Nazzaro on Italy’s River Po in July 2022. The inaugural season was targeted for 2023, but that plan was scrapped in favour of more testing, as the development team understood how to run the electric powerboat on foils and how to use the control systems.

During this time, motorsport expertise was especially useful in validating the SeaBird for safety. Comptech Engineering, a British company specialising in motorsport bodywork, was contracted to carry out non-destructive testing and inspections. Real-world crash testing was not part of the UIM’s homologation requirements.

‘We don’t have the skill set in-house, but we are using the same skill sets and people that Formula 1 are using, to make sure our loaded components are behaving themselves,’ explains Baker.

‘It’s ultrasonic testing or Eddy current testing, depending on whether it’s a metallic or composite structure. We’re also monitoring the fatigue of components and how things degrade. We have zero historical data, unlike an F1 team, which has decades of information to fall back on. [Comptech] brought their equipment to us and did the scanning, inspections and quality audits for us.’

Voyage of discovery

The first season of any new race series is almost guaranteed to be a rollercoaster. It was no different for E1, starting with shipping the boats to Jeddah in time for the opening round.

This was complicated by Houthi missile and pirate attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, which caused severe disruption to international shipping. The Jeddah event had been pencilled in for January but ended up taking place a month later.

‘In Jeddah, we had a lot of mechanical issues because the boats were finally being driven at the limit,’ adds Basso. ‘Technically, as you would expect, it has been a challenge. We had so many things on our list to be improved, and that we did improve.

‘Even at Como at the end of August, we still had some mechanical failures because of the specific circuit layout, but we managed to cope because we had the right number of spares, and we added some reinforcement to the parts.

‘Being a racing vehicle, naturally it goes through a lot of stress and strain. You need the right approach to cope with this at the very last minute. This can be stressful, but having racing people on board, we knew that was the case, so we were ready and reacted quite well.’

The weeks leading up to the inaugural race were extremely busy. McLaren Applied and SeaBird held education sessions, including two days of ATLAS training, so teams could understand how to use the electronics and hydrodynamics. There was a small amount of seat time for the pilots, but most substantial running only took place at the first race.

‘Leading up to Jeddah, we had a team in Italy pretty much full-time getting pilots up to speed,’ confirms Baker. ‘We were using Prototype 2, which accumulated a lot of hours as our fleet leader. If we were spotting issues, we were generally spotting them on Prototype 2, and then trying to fix those, mainly through software.

‘We’ve got a complicated, Formula E-on-the-water-style system. We were navigating the challenges of when the pilot does something, and the boat reacts in an unexpected way. A lot of those were resolved before and during Jeddah and have definitely been resolved since. Leading up to Jeddah was a huge learning curve and a huge test for us.’

Going forward

E1 is not going to be every motorsport fan’s cup of tea. But even sceptics might appreciate that it has only been possible thanks to the role of motorsport engineering. It has also benefited from the groundwork laid by the pioneering electric racing series, Formula E.

‘It’s things like Formula E and EVs that have started moving the industry in a direction to where it’s a low enough barrier financially, with lead times, that you can actually go and develop an electric racing boat,’ says Baker. ‘In the future, things like the RaceBird will help speed up development for the rest of the industry. It’s a nice passing on of technology from one sector to the other.’

Basso prefers to avoid comparisons between E1 and Formula E because he wants it to stand on its own two legs (or foils) and forge its own path. His vision includes making E1 a place where companies can test and showcase their technologies. In the shorter term, he would like to see the boats go a bit faster, and to increase the battery capacity and output, although he notes the current foil design is limited to around 70knt (129 km/h).

‘We have taken the state-of-the-art in that [motorsport] industry and put it into our boat, putting together fantastic players and suppliers,’ says Basso. ‘We had to marinate the solution, which is an integration issue that we have so far overcome. In the meantime, having the state-of-the-art from motorsport allowed us to accelerate electrification in the powerboating industry by at least 15-20 years.’

While the motorsport industry was clearly integral in bringing E1 to the water, Basso would like the dynamic to shift as the championship becomes more established.

‘We want to build partnerships and technology campaigns in order to be the driver of the future,’ he concludes. ‘So, instead of inheriting from motorsport and high-end automotive, I would like to be the test bed for future technologies, so all the other industries involved in mobility will have the chance to learn and see what is achievable. It is a mission, and a must, for the racing industry.’

The post How Motorsport Helped the E1 Electric Boat Series to Launch appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

Our new weekly Beyond the Racecar series will uncover examples of how motorsport technology firms have expanded into other markets, applying race-proven methods and expertise in a diverse array of fields including mining, defence, marine and more.

In part one, we explore how the renowned British racecar manufacturer, Prodrive, has entered new territory with its development of a compact delivery vehicle.

Buying habits have changed in the last few years, with working from home now normalised for many office-based roles, and home deliveries a regular convenience.

Be that a postal packet or a food shop, there has been a sharp uptake in home delivery demand. Prodrive, a racecar manufacturer for 40 years, has risen to meet the challenge of developing an affordable, sustainable delivery vehicle.

While electric heavy goods vehicles are still a long way off serving the mass market, a significant difference can be made on a local scale.

With zero emissions at the tailpipe, EVs are ideal for city driving. Prodrive, together with its design partner, Astheimer, identified a gap in the market for a low-cost, purpose-built vehicle that claims to be market leading in all areas of design and application.

Motorsport mindset

Prodrive is, of course, more famous for its exploits in rallying and sportscars, so this small electric van might seem a little left field.

However, despite outward appearances, there is a lot of racecar technology in it, and the build and design process drew heavily on the company’s work developing competition vehicles.

Also playing into the motorsport mindset, speed of delivery was a key element to Prodrive securing government funding to build a prototype, which was presented at the Cenex Low Carbon Vehicle conference held at Millbrook Proving Ground in September 2024.

The EVOLV Last Mile Vehicle was designed by Astheimer, but the engineering work, notably around the front steering system and suspension, was undertaken by Prodrive Advanced Technology, the company’s applied engineering division.

Packaging these items into such a small space required Prodrive’s racing experience to ensure it was effective and fit for purpose.

‘We’ve had the luxury of working with a lot of EV companies, so what we’ve tried to do is learn by what they’ve done well, and learn by some of their mistakes,’ says Dr Iain Roche, CEO at Prodrive Advanced Technology.

The result is a platform that fits into the L7e category. This means it is, by definition, a heavy quadracycle, weighing in at less than 600kg, for transport of goods, with four enclosed wheels, maximum power of 15kW and a maximum speed of 90km/h (56mph). It can be piloted on a regular driving licence.

Built for purpose

The vision was for Prodrive to create the most capable, safe and efficient L7e category quadricycle.

At just 3240mm long, 1450mm wide, 2150mm high and weighing 850kg (with batteries), the compact EVOLV packs a surprising punch. It has two configurable load areas providing 4m³ of carrying capacity, achieving a class-leading 60 per cent of overall vehicle volume.

The vehicle’s unique architecture minimises the driver package and maximises the load space. The result is it has approximately double the load box volume of some other vehicles in the L7e category, and is half the weight of a compact van with a similar load volume, making it the most efficient vehicle in its class, both in terms of cost and energy consumption per unit volume of goods per mile.

EVOLV’s design accommodates a 1.6m tall Euro pallet with a 300kg payload in the main load area. It is accessed on the side via self-locking sliding doors and has a 300mm load bed height. The secondary load area, accessible through ‘barn doors’ at the rear, provides additional space for a 1.2m tall Euro pallet and 200kg payload.

With safety a priority for operators, Prodrive Advanced Technology set out to achieve N1 (small van) safety standards, including passive safety crash standards, spanning front, side, and roof crash performance, pedestrian impact and driver safety requirements.

While Prodrive has focused on this category, it has also designed the vehicle to be modular, so it can be stretched to accommodate a higher payload.

‘We can stretch it in both directions, actually, so we can also shrink it, potentially create an l6 version,’ says Roche. ‘We want to be focused on doing one thing well, getting it to market, bringing in the revenue, and then building on that going forward.

‘The load box at the back is completely reconfigurable, so that gives a lot more choice and options, but we wanted to keep the skateboard platform as simple as possible so as not to distract ourselves from all the other applications. There’s a massive demand for this in inner city delivery.’

Interior design

As this is a delivery vehicle designed to be used by a single occupant for many hours at a time, everything has been done to make it a good place in which to work.

The interior has been designed around driver ergonomics, offering a comfortable work environment with an intuitive user interface, allowing for an easy transition from one driver to the next.

The central driver seat offers easy access from either side and the wraparound windscreen offers better visibility of pedestrians and cyclists. Cleverly, the driving position also streamlines the number of variants required for UK and European markets.

The flexible platform will allow for a family of models to be created, adaptable to the needs of each customer.

Conceived for high uptime, EVOLV also has a tight, 7.8m turning circle – comparable to the 7.6m capability of a London taxi – allowing for quick manoeuvring in congested city or suburban streets.

Perhaps reflecting on traditional usage, Prodrive designed fared-in headlights that are less likely to be damaged in a minor incident, while the highly robust modular body panels are easily accessible and can be replaced swiftly should a more significant impact necessitate it.

On the range

Analysis of duty cycles for last-mile EVs has led engineers to anticipate that specifying up to a 20kWh battery has the potential to meet industry demand, offering an ample, 100-mile range. Other battery capacities are under consideration for the production models, and will be explored in the next phase of development.

Mindful that most operators would have access to existing infrastructure to charge overnight affordably, when equipped with a Type-2 connector, EVOLV is predicted to have a 20-80 per cent charge time of less than two hours.

‘We’ve done a lot of work going out with customers, literally sitting with them, observing their deliveries,’ says Roche. ‘It varies, but most of them say 30-50 miles is what they actually need. Current legislation limits your motor to 15kW, so we’re looking at probably up to a 20kWh battery. That’s more than enough for that use case.

‘We’re trying to make it really easy, so it’s simple [to operate] and you don’t need a huge amount of infrastructure. The drivetrain components are commoditising, and becoming commercially available, and the prices are coming down. Frankly, we don’t need anything massively fancy from a drivetrain perspective.’

One of the key elements to receiving the funding to push ahead with the prototype was fast turnaround from concept to reality.

Prodrive admits the prototype is not quite there yet in terms of cost, so is now looking at ways to reduce the price of component parts using off-the-shelf solutions rather than bespoke products.

However, the company predicts EVOLV will go into UK production and be on sale by 2028, with an estimated cost of £25,000 (approx. $32,800).

Production process

‘We’re very serious about getting this into production,’ says Roche. ‘We got investment in that, and in financial diligence with another investor, so we made a prototype because we needed to; to learn from and to demonstrate to customers, investors and so on.

‘We’ve learned from doing this with lots of our Prodrive customers that you can’t afford to create a prototype and then start the design process all over again to make it ready for production. So, we’ve got some elements that we very deliberately said we don’t need to touch at the moment because we need to make some bigger decisions.

‘Other bits, we’ve started to design for cast, design for manufacture and design for production, so that we can hopefully go really quickly into production.’

So, having created the design for a prototype, how did the racing element of Prodrive become a defining factor?

The first is speed of design, the second is that the vehicle was designed to be easily maintained and fixed without high costs. That drew on the company’s rally experience.

For example, if any of the plastic front end panels are damaged, you just bolt on a new one that doesn’t even need a respray.

Market aware

‘We’re very aware that time to market is absolutely critical,’ continues Roche. ‘The market is really interesting. It’s a relatively new one, driven by legislation in cities and low carbon zones. Meanwhile, our changing consumer behaviour means we’re buying more stuff.

‘When you speak to the customers, they’re primarily using N1 vehicles, which are a car-derived van. Often they end up with a Sprinter in their fleet as well, because they want to put a pallet in every Tuesday, and they can’t fit that into the N1. They then might have a smaller vehicle, like an L7, that isn’t really fit for purpose.’

The question is, why are there not more vehicles like this on the market already?

The answer is that they are not that easy to make, as Roche explains: ‘Legislation limits the mass of the vehicle to basically 600kg, without batteries. The payload that we want to base everything upon is then 500kg. So that presents quite an interesting dynamics problem, which isn’t normal for a lot of small commercial vehicles.

‘We therefore had to engineer it in the same way that you do a racecar, back to basic first principles. You need all the mass as low as you can get it, but also to make sure you have the load space to put the pallet in.

‘But you’re limited by mass and footprint, and you’ve got to have suspension and steering that can cope with the different dynamics between laden and unladen. So, you design it in CAD and basically the suspension sticks out, you know, a couple of miles. There’s actually a big engineering technical challenge as well. We got kind of excited by the whole project.’

Now bear in mind that a full payload represents more than 50 per cent of the total vehicle weight, and is placed high up, so Prodrive needed to make a vehicle that was not only functional, but also safe to turn around in a tight turning circle without toppling over.

‘Racing cars don’t have that problem,’ says Roche. ‘At worst, you’ve got fuel start vs fuel at the end from a dynamics perspective. With this, it’s a horrible high mass, it’s all things you don’t want to do. So working out how on earth can we do that, and make it safe, and feel safe, was quite a challenge.’

Packaging challenge

Making such a small, lightweight vehicle compliant for the road, safe for the occupant and not feel like a milk float was a complicated engineering challenge that Prodrive clearly relished.

Positioning the driver behind the front axle created a packaging nightmare with the load area, but meant the team was able to fit the front suspension and steering system into the narrow space available at the front.

Due to the complexity of the design and build process, plus the cost, Prodrive is hoping its design will not be copied, even though the big delivery companies are already investing in their own versions of a similar vehicle.

It now hopes a competitive price, higher-than-expected safety standards, and overall efficiency and effectiveness will lead to a successful production programme.

The post Delivery! Why Prodrive Developed this Tiny Commercial Vehicle appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

One of them, Cosworth, is perhaps best-known for its engine manufacturing, headlined by its huge success in Formula 1 with the double four valve (DFV) from the 1960s to 1980s. The British company still makes engines, though much of that business has transitioned into high-performance road cars such as the V12 Aston Martin Valkyrie (it is also equipping the LMH version) and the V16 Bugatti Tourbillon. This month, the 257th and final V12 for the Valkyrie road car left Cosworth’s Northampton build shop.

Beyond engines, Cosworth is highly active in electronics and powertrain control. In 2018, it launched a new engine control unit, the Antares 8, designed to meet the demand for uses such as higher fidelity data logging, different types of powertrain, torque control, stratified gasoline direct injection (GDI) or port injection (PI) control, and custom code creation. This year, Cosworth expanded the Antares range with two more models, reflecting interest in advanced control strategies at multiple stages of the racing pyramid.

The Antares 4 and 6 look very similar to the 8, which is used in the British Touring Car Championship, Ford Puma Rally1 Hybrid, Super Formula Lights and the Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR-LMH, among others.

However, the three devices contain different attributes at different price points, to draw in new customers with different requirements.

‘Antares 8 was pitched as a high-end controller; with that comes an associated cost,’ says Rob Fisher, senior product manager at Cosworth. ‘It’s been very good for us, but that product doesn’t fit every application in motorsport. For some, it was too expensive.’

Before the Antares 8 arrived, Cosworth had a wider control unit range. There was the SQ6 and the SQ7Di, sitting beneath the MQ12Di which the Antares 8 went on to replace. But when the SQ products became obsolete after two decades of usage, a gap emerged in Cosworth’s lineup for more cost-conscious manufacturers and series.

‘We’ve taken what we’ve learned from the Antares 8 – all the same software and capabilities – but we’ve reduced the number of inputs and outputs [I/O] that have been tailored to these different engine configurations,’ explains Fisher. ‘The 4 being the four-cylinder, and the 6 being the six-cylinder, to reduce cost from the unit. Customers aren’t having to pay for things they don’t actually need to use. That’s the main reason why we’ve done it as a business.’

The differences between the Antares 4, 6 and 8 are detailed in the table below. But the main points are that the 4 and 6 have fewer injector drivers, analogue and digital inputs, CAN buses and mathematics channels, as well as smaller logging capacities.

‘We’ve got various variants in the Antares 8 that will change [in the other models],’ says Fisher. ‘Things like logging capacity, the number of I/O pins, and the amounts of sensors, injectors and actuators you can connect to it. That scalability is already there, and that is repeated across the 4 and the 6.

‘The 6 has less than the 8, but it has its options inside it to change the amount of logging, the logging rate of the I/O, the number of CAN ports etc. Because it’s a flexible platform for customers to run their own coding, it can be used for hybrid or EV as a vehicle controller, not just as an engine controller.’

There is flexibility within the parameters: the logging capacity of each model is available in three stages, up to the maximum publicised capacity. Also, the number of connectors in each device doesn’t necessarily correspond to what that device can run.

For instance, the Antares 6 can run on three connectors, despite having a fourth option available. This is because, while the connector itself only costs about £50, the work to engineer the removal of one – taking out the board the connector sits on and revising the metalwork – makes it hardly worth the hassle.

Comparing the price of the units, the Antares 6 is 50 per cent cheaper than the Antares 8. Cosworth hopes the 8’s head start to life will help to draw customers to the other products.

‘We are not as well known for our powertrain control, but we have some of these halo projects using it, and we want to open the door to more customers,’ says Fisher. ‘They might be using it one car, but also have a higher-volume vehicle that might need something a bit cheaper.

‘Being honest, there are applications using the 8 at the minute that, if the 4 and the 6 came earlier, they would have been better off. BTCC is one: Antares 4 would be perfect for a touring car.’

That said, Fisher thinks it may be too late for the BTCC to drop the Antares 8 in favour of the 4, considering the finalised package has already been delivered. But Cosworth has eyes on other series and disciplines that might be suited to the new models.

‘If there’s a new car that comes along in touring cars, Antares 4 would be a good option,’ says Fisher. ‘Rally2 is a higher-volume cost cap series and Antares 4 would be a perfect example for that. Euroformula Open, F3, F4 – that level of single seater.

‘Your 6 is then going to be more for the GT market, such as GT2 and GT4. Maybe some GT3, but the technology requirements are raising all the time. You’d probably get most GT3 cars into the 8, but the 6 would be an option for the categories under that. F2 is spec [with Marelli] at the minute, but an Antares 6 would be perfect for F2. That’s why we’ve done it: we can now attack those markets and offer something to offer our customers in those markets who have been asking for something at the lower price point.’

The Antares range is scheduled to be around until 2031. It will, therefore, need to serve the evolving needs of racecar manufacturers and teams until then.

According to Fisher, Cosworth’s customers and potential customers are increasingly wanting to create their own control strategies, as they seek to push the potential of their cars and powertrains.

‘The Simulink side and the custom code creation has massively ramped up over the last couple of years,’ he says. ‘But with that, we have to deliver a hardware architecture that supports it, in terms of the processors, the SOCs [systems on chip], the FPGAs [field programmable gate arrays] that are inside the device. We have to make sure we’ve engineered in enough headroom for the next 10-15 years when customers are creating these very complex control strategies for things like traction control.’

As manufacturers and race series look to increase the complexity of their control systems, so artificial intelligence (AI) has entered the fray. Cosworth offers its Antares customers real-time embedded software generation using a platform which supports the creation of custom code in MATLAB / Simulink. This enables the user to develop strategies using Simulink’s neural network blocks to develop control strategies for various powertrain and car functions.

The permeation of AI is being felt in the control systems arena, as Marelli recently unveiled a vehicle control unit, known as a VEC (vehicle edge controller) with onboard AI computational ability. It won two prizes at the Professional MotorSport World Expo in November, where Cosworth announced its Antares 4 and 6 offerings.

The Marelli VEC_480 will be featured in the January issue of Racecar Engineering.

‘Simulink has neural network and machine learning blocks that we can host in our device,’ says Fisher. ‘Having a processor that can run this complex code without falling over is very important. The architecture that Antares is being developed on has all of that in mind.

‘We’ve not had any CPU timing issues, even with very complex code and neural networks involved. There is still more headroom to go for the next five years.’

Cosworth is continuing to explore ways of handling the increased complexity of data being generated from more advanced powertrains. With a wider variety of fuel options on the table, there is scope for further improvement in the capabilities of these clever devices.

The post Cosworth on the Present and Future of ECU Technology appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

For 12 years now, TGR-E has housed a parasports division, responsible for developing racing wheelchairs, high-tech handbikes and prosthetic limbs for Paralympic athletes.

Utilising the engineering facilities and expertise housed within TGR-E, the parasports programme has delivered equipment on a case-by-case basis for German para cyclist Andrea Eskau, South African shot putter Tyrone Pillay and Guinea-born German wheelchair racer Alhassane Baldé.

Eskau, who was the project’s first athlete, won gold in the H5 category road race at Rio 2016 aboard a handbike fitted with a seat inset developed in Cologne. TGR-E then made an updated version of the handbike, with which Eskau competed at the Tokyo 2020 and this year’s Paris Games. In France, finished sixth in the H5 individual time trial and fourth in the road race.

Toyota isn’t the first motorsport or automotive manufacturer to be involved in parasports. BMW’s North American car division worked with the US Paralympic team to develop racing wheelchairs and Italian motorsport constructor, Dallara, built the carbon fibre handbike in which two-time CART champion, Alex Zanardi, won three medals (two gold, one silver) at London 2012 and Rio 2016 respectively.

Companies such as these, with experience in the production of lightweight and strong components, are a natural fit for parasports, especially the wheeled disciplines. This is partly because of their expertise in dealing with composites and structures, but also because they can provide athletes with the high quality, bespoke equipment they need to shine.

For Toyota, parasports is small fry compared to its factory motorsport programmes. It isn’t even a dedicated department; its engineers have full-time jobs in other parts of the TGR-E company and dip into parasports work as and when required.

‘It’s really a case-by-case project, depending on an inquiry, or an athlete who has a certain request and, of course, depending on available capacities on the design and production sides,’ says Norbert Schäfer, project manager of TGR-E parasports.

‘The good thing is that all our projects have, and had, top management back up. With certain exceptions, I think we can say we have a freedom to work in a concentrated way and be straightforward on the projects.’

The core TGR-E parasports team consists of around 15 people, most of whom work in departments such as design, CNC machining and composites. Central to each project, though, is the athlete, whose physical requirements and preferences are at the heart of developing comfortable, adjustable and manoeuvrable equipment.

Chance encounter

TGR-E’s parasports venture started in 2012 with Eskau, who has been paraplegic since a bike accident in her 20s. The collaboration began with a chance encounter: Eskau lived on the same road as a TGR-E employee (back then it was called Toyota Motorsport) and highlighted some issues with her handbike at the time.

During subsequent meetings at the factory to produce a new seat insert, Toyota learned that Eskau was also a successful Nordic skier. The two parties started looking at ways of improving her ski equipment and ended up developing a new sled. Eskau went on to win three Winter Paralympic golds with Toyota-designed equipment, one at Sochi 2014 and two at Pyeongchang 2018.

‘She showed us some pictures of her [original] sled,’ recalls Schäfer. ‘One of our colleagues gave the comment, “It looks not so bad… but we can do better.” The team in the composites department spent their private time, mainly, to quickly design and produce the first Nordic skiing sled made from carbon fibre, using some special components to create a one-off for her, which made her quite successful, to be honest. That was the start of the business.’

Schäfer runs the commercial side of Toyota’s parasports programme, serving as the link between the engineers and the rest of the company’s motorsport business, as well as the parasports regulatory bodies.

The technical side is spearheaded by Roger Kirschner, a senior composite design engineer at TGR-E. Kirschner’s motorsport career has included stints as an aerodynamics engineer for the Sauber and Toyota Formula 1 teams.

‘What is crucial is that there is a strong link between the athlete and me,’ he says. ‘When I have their opinion, I cast this into a first concept. I always go to the dedicated departments, especially from production, and say what I would like to do. They explain if I need to do it [differently]. I then make a second concept and take that into 3D design. Then, we release the components.

‘We make sure we have their opinion, to allow us to use new techniques, such as machining components more efficiently.’

Development of Eskau’s latest handbike started in 2018 ahead of the Tokyo Paralympics which took place in 2021. Despite winning gold with it in Rio, her previous handbike suffered from high-speed instability and was difficult to handle in the corners.

Kirschner and his colleagues went to the TGR-E suspension department to re-design the trailing arm for the wheel, which opened the steering angle and reduced its turning circle by three degrees. The updated version also featured adjustable steering damping and force feedback, while its weight was reduced by 19 per cent, from 12.2kg to 9.9kg.

‘If the handbike is stable in a corner, it is also stable in a straight line,’ says Kirschner. ‘Packaging-wise, the old handbike with massive wheels at the rear is something we wanted to avoid.

‘We wanted to deliver something with a lower c of g and much neater, compact packaging. The rear wheels are now lighter and better to package. You can put them closer to the [athlete’s] arm and, in doing so, reduce the overall length of the handbike.’

The rear wheels on the updated bike carry more negative camber than the previous version, too. This is to match the natural camber of Eskau’s arms as she propels the bike, leaning forward and using the hand grips. Smaller wheels helped reduce the wheelbase, contributing to the weight reduction and increasing structural stiffness.

TGR-E also modified the front section of Eskau’s seating compartment, bringing the monocoque closer to her body for a tighter fit, while keeping the seat adjustable. According to Kirschner, Eskau can take corners at much higher speeds than before.

Aero grey area

Devices built to aid aerodynamics are banned in Paralympic cycling disciplines to ensure it is the athlete who makes the difference. However, though this presents a grey area with regards to other parts. Aero might not be as important here as in a racecar, but handbikes can still go surprisingly fast. According to Kirschner, speeds of up to 100km/h are achieved on certain downhill sections in favourable conditions.

‘In the regulations, it says that if a device has one purpose and that is to be aerodynamic, it is forbidden,’ notes Kirschner. ‘But if you have a lever for the steering, it can look aerodynamic. So, you must balance this right.’

TGR-E has an aerodynamics department at Cologne, and Kirschner acknowledges that the people there can be an extremely useful resource for the parasports team, even if they can’t design any purpose-built items.

‘Of course, they can give their opinion,’ he says. ‘Maybe we should open or close an area, make a corner sharp or rounded. There is nothing wrong with this. It is just aero efficiency from a theoretical point of view. Putting devices into the wind tunnel for hours is too much for us. Not because we cannot do it, but because our understanding is this is not how it should be done.’

In creating Eskau’s new handbike from carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP), Kirschner’s team sought to increase the structure’s stiffness to best support her physical input. This was seen as more important than reducing the handbike’s weight.

Creating a lightweight handbike did result in less mass for the athlete to propel, but stiffness reduces as weight comes down, so there was a delicate balancing act at play. Drawing on TGR-E’s existing in-house composites expertise, the parasports team set to work on the handbike’s geometrical properties.

‘Here, performance is driven more by the pure stiffness of the product,’ explains Kirschner. ‘The power the athlete can give is limited. In the end, the stiffer product should lead to more transition [of strength] into speed. With speed, you are more competitive.

‘Stiffness is the key. It is usually done by geometrical stiffness and not the choice of material because you use carbon where possible. Carbon is very low on flexing, but in a racing wheelchair, the geometry will allow the beam to flex. Usually, people misunderstand, saying that by using carbon you will make it stiff. This is wrong. It’s about geometry. Of course, carbon will contribute to this, but not in the way that geometry is.’

Safety is also a key factor in the design, considering the high speeds that can be reached. Crash testing of the TGR-E handbike was not feasible, due to financial reasons more than anything, but Kirschner’s team carried out finite element analysis (FEA) to ensure the structure would protect Eskau in the event of an accident.

‘They are sitting in a monocoque,’ highlights Kirschner. ‘If you compare this to a motorcycle, or bicycle, the idea is different. In a crash, you try to disconnect the rider from what they are riding. We don’t have this. We have them encapsulated in the monocoque, like our racing drivers, so we have to make sure they are well protected.’

Contribution to racing

The development of Eskau’s handbike, and the other parasports equipment that TGR-E has made, has been possible due to the existing motorsport engineering practices at Cologne. However, the benefits don’t just flow in one direction.

The parasports division has a useful part to play in helping Toyota’s sportscar, rally and manufacturing programmes, through its ability to take on the risk of small-scale prototype parts and engineering processes.

‘Paralympics can always say, let’s go for that, we’ll test it,’ says Kirschner. ‘We have no problem with this. For example, machining a part from both sides using a new technique developed in the production department was used for the first time in Paralympics. When it proved a success, it went into things such as customer and works motorsport.’

Although Schäfer would love for TGR-E to expand into developing parasports equipment commercially, that is unlikely for the time being. Most of its project members work in other TGR-E engineering departments, so developing parasports into a proper department would require some serious restructuring.

Nonetheless, the small band of engineers seems to thrive on its underground reputation. It showcases the diversity of motorsport engineering processes and, when called upon, has a small but significant part to play in the operation of Toyota’s manufacturing activities.

While most engineers at TGR-E this autumn were eyeing up the closing rounds of the FIA World Rally Championship and FIA World Endurance Championship, a small number of staff at Cologne were just at keenly tuned into the Paralympics in Paris. There, the fruits of their labour could be seen in competition with some of the most remarkable athletes in the world.

The original version of this article appeared in the September issue of Racecar Engineering.

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Last summer, with Romain Dumas at the helm, it took on Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in the Open category. Despite some issues during the test runs, the modified Transit van completed the 12.5-mile (20.1km) mountainous climb in under nine minutes, smashing the previous class record by 37 seconds.

In February this year, the van conquered Mount Panorama in Australia, breaking three lap records (fastest electric vehicle, fastest commercial vehicle and fastest closed-wheel vehicle) with a 1m56.32s lap time.

Next, it raced to the top of Goodwood’s famous hillclimb course in 43.98s, winning the 2024 Festival of Speed shootout by over two seconds.

So how has Ford transformed its Pro E-Transit Custom van into a 2000bhp+ hillclimb monster?

Ford has been developing its SuperVan promotional vehicle concept since 1971. The first iteration, SuperVan 1, was a crude affair, combining a Ford GT40 chassis and its mid-mounted, 5.0-litre Ford V8 engine, with the factory steel bodywork of a Mk1 Transit van.

In 1984, SuperVan 2 came along, this time built using the chassis from a Ford C100 Group C car and a Cosworth DFL engine, all hidden under a glass fibre representation of a Mk2 Transit, with added aerodynamic enhancements.

A decade later, to promote the Mk3 Transit, SuperVan 2 was converted into SuperVan 3, this time using a 3.5-litre Cosworth HB V8 and a reduced scale silhouette body.

2022 then marked a new era in SuperVan history, with the first electric version, the Ford Pro Electric SuperVan 4.0, unveiled at Goodwood.

Ford Performance collaborated with Austrian electric racing specialist, STARD, to deliver a 2000+bhp powertrain capable of accelerating the E-Transit Custom-inspired SuperVan from 0 to 100km/h (62mph) in under two seconds. This one stretched the likeness to a regular Transit van to nominal, at best.

Following the success of SuperVan 4.0 at Goodwood, Ford wanted to face the ultimate hillclimb test: Pikes Peak, but this was to prove a whole new challenge.

Pikes Peak is arguably the most fascinating race event for drivers and engineers alike. The start line sits 2800m above sea level with ambient temperatures typically around 20degC.

The twisty, mountainous, 20km circuit winds its way up the highest summit of the southern Front Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to a peak 4300m above sea level, where temperatures are near zero.

At this altitude, the density of air is only 0.72kg/m³, compared to 1.2kg/m³ at the start line. This not only reduces the aerodynamic forces acting on the car, but also the available cooling as well. Consequently, SuperVan 4.0 needed to be re-designed if it was going to top the timings, paving the way for SuperVan 4.2.

Unsurprisingly, a Transit van is not the optimal size, shape or weight for setting record breaking lap times, on any circuit or track. To compensate for this, the powertrain needed to maximise power output and the aerodynamics needed to squeeze every ounce out of the available downforce.

‘The powertrain and the aerodynamics package are the main factors that compensate for the huge mass, frontal area and all the other disadvantages of choosing a Transit as a base package,’ says Michael Sakowicz, CEO at STARD. ‘That’s why we worked so hard to design a compact package that delivered high power density.

‘I’m not aware of many other BEVs that achieve such a high power output for such a small battery, so we’re pretty proud of that. This, together with the aero kit developed by Ford Performance, who did a great job, is how we’ve managed to achieve such impressive records with a van.’

At the heart of SuperVan 4.2’s powertrain lies a bespoke, 50kWh battery made up of ultra-high performance lithium polymer (Li-Polymer) NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) pouch cells housed in a carbon fibre case.

To help the battery operate within its optimum temperature window, particularly with the low density air at the top of Pikes Peak, cooling was a priority from the start.

‘The battery is liquid cooled with an oil-based fluid that runs in a separate cooling circuit,’ continues Sakowicz. ‘Cooling is very challenging for Pikes Peak because of the thin air, but I would say 50 per cent of a good cooling system is determined by the layout you choose.

‘The layout of the battery, motors and inverters, as well as how these units are packaged together, is very important. They must match the desired voltage range, as well as the continuous and peak power performance, and then those parameters can be tuned for each specific use case.’

The battery provides power to four six-phase motors, with two on the front axle and two on the rear, each capable of a peak power of 400kW.

The front and rear axles are not mechanically connected, but instead have a conventional motorsport differential with a two-stage, single-speed gear.

The torque is not distributed between the front and rear axles, but is controlled across each axle by a vehicle control unit (VCU) with STARD- developed software.

Interestingly, the power-to-weight ratio of the powertrain can be specifically optimised for each event by adjusting the number of motors in operation.

For Pikes Peak, SuperVan 4.2 only used one of the front motors, for a total of three, while at Goodwood and other events, STARD opted for the full complement of four.

‘Because SuperVan 4.2 was primarily designed for Pikes Peak, its high downforce aero package means we are producing much more downforce at lower speeds [at Goodwood],’ notes Sakowicz.

‘This, combined with the four-motor set up, gives us a huge amount of torque at the front.

‘In fact, we’re actually running a very long ratio because we have so much front torque available that we can achieve a straight line of torque until top speed. Whereas for the rear we use mixed ratios because, in this set up, we have a lot more traction due to the dynamic shift from the axle loads.’

The inverters are IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) technology and share the same cooling circuit as the motors.

‘We developed the motors and inverters together with a specialist partner, which are cooled with a water glycol fluid,’ continues Sakowicz. ‘We also integrated rotor cooling, so both the rotor and stator of the motors are cooled as well.

‘The battery, motor and inverter cooling circuits all use air-to-fluid radiators. So, located at the front of the car is the cooling radiator for the battery, with the radiator for the motor and inverter circuit behind, as this operates at a higher temperature.’

To generate enough grip all the way up the perilous climb, the aerodynamics package needs to produce as much downforce as possible.

Of course, with downforce also comes drag. This is less of an issue towards the top of Pikes Peak as the thin air results in lower drag, but at the start line where the air density is more typical, a great deal of energy is required to overcome the high drag of the high downforce package and accelerate the SuperVan.

This was another reason why the powertrain needed to have such a high power density.

‘We are running close to Formula 1 levels of downforce, but with a 1700kg vehicle, compared to the minimum weight of an F1 car, which is 796kg,’ highlights Sakowicz.

‘More than 50 per cent of that downforce is on the front axle, and at sea level at 200km/h [124mph] we have about 2200kg of downforce in total.’

The upgraded aerodynamic package features a new carbon fibre front splitter and monster rear wing. Centre ducts in the floor help channel air from the bottom and guide it towards the rear and over the rear axle.

‘The frontal area of this van is around two to three times bigger than a typical GT car, so we had to find ways around that with an efficient aerodynamics package that is very different to other cars,’ explains Sakowicz.

‘This made packaging a challenge, particularly the rear axle, which is extremely tight, as the unit is quite powerful and so needs some space, but the diffuser is located on the bottom with ducting above.

‘Other areas, however, were relatively easy to package due to the van’s large size. For example, because the bonnet is so high, the driver needs to sit higher up to have a clear line of sight, so that lends nicely to locating the battery packs underneath the driver.’

The combination of high downforce, extreme power and significant weight of SuperVan 4.2 generates loads at the wheels that seriously punishes the tyres.

‘We are quite limited by the tyres,’ admits Romain Dumas, five-time Pikes Peak and two-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner.

‘With the weight and the downforce, we could run with much bigger tyres, but nobody makes them. So we have had to use 18in Pirellis based on GT tyres. We could probably go even faster if we had more bespoke tyres.’

‘It’s not just the tyres that we are pushing to the limits,’ agrees Sakowicz. ‘We are loading the wheels, steering, suspension and brakes much more than any other car.

‘It’s very different to any other vehicle we’ve worked on and has caused us a lot of headaches.

‘We’ve had to adapt systems that have been tested and validated in much lighter, less powerful vehicles and really take them to their limits, so that has been a big challenge as well.’

So, what is this 2000bhp creation like to drive around some of the world’s most exciting circuits?

‘It’s more or less like driving a Dakar car, but with a lot more power and a lot faster,’ says Dumas.

‘The most difficult thing is to drive and brake with the weight because, due to the high centre of gravity, there is quite a lot of roll.

‘Particularly as the battery is underneath you, which is good for weight distribution, but it means you sit quite high, so as soon as you steer there is this rolling response from the weight. Grip from the front axle is very good though, it is just as sharp as a conventional racecar.’

Piloting the SuperVan up Pikes Peak, Mount Panorama and the narrow hill at Goodwood required three very different styles of driving.

‘Goodwood is not at all for this car. It’s far too wide for this hillclimb, so this is probably the event that I was furthest from the limit,’ says Dumas. ‘Bathurst, on the other hand, was where I was pushing the most because we knew the lap time of the [modified GT3] Mercedes that we wanted to beat.

‘I mean firstly, we were never expecting to compete against them because we were expecting to go much slower but, when we saw their time, I was determined to go again.

‘The best thing about the SuperVan, compared to the Mercedes, was our top speed. We were going more than 300km/h [186 mph],’ smiles Dumas.

‘Travelling at that speed, with all the elevation at Bathurst, at the crest was the most challenging in terms of intensity. Particularly as we had some issues with the power steering system because we were so much faster than expected.’

‘Pikes Peak is a different challenge again because you cannot go 100 per cent as you only have one chance,’ continues Dumas. ‘So, even if you do a good run, you know you could improve here or there. It’s very difficult to be on the limit the whole time when you only get one lap.

‘You also have the issues with battery cooling. People have the attitude that electric cars have such an obvious advantage at Pikes Peak because you are not losing performance [from the engine due to the change in altitude].

‘This is completely true, but people often forget that batteries are heavy and need to be kept cool.

‘So, although you don’t lose power going up the hill, you have to limit the top speed because you are never quite sure if you’re going to finish the run, or if the battery is going to overheat. It was the same with the [Volkswagen] ID.R.

‘At the end of the day, the concept is really fun,’ concludes Dumas. ‘If you strip the car out, it really is a racecar with a tube-frame chassis, wishbones, uprights and everything.

‘But for the marketing side it needs to look like a Transit, which is why it is so big and heavy. It is a bit rustic, I would say. Daniel Ricciardo drove it in Melbourne last year and he was a bit scared!’

‘It is incredibly quick,’ concludes Sakowicz. ‘At Goodwood, we’re competing against cars like the Subaru Project Midnight, which is the best you can build on the base of that vehicle.

‘While at Pikes Peak, we smashed the Open class record, and in Bathurst set a closed-wheel vehicle lap record against unrestricted GT3s with Formula 1-style DRS. So we are a lot faster than some incredible racecars – with a van!

‘Overall, we’re really proud of how reliably it works, and also how adaptive it is,’ continues Sakowicz. ‘Normally, these one-off projects are designed for one specific challenge, but SuperVan 4.2 is so versatile that it can achieve phenomenal performance from drag strips to hillclimbs, and even rally stages.’

Gemma Hatton is the founder and director of Fluencial, which specialises in producing technical content for the engineering, automotive and motorsport industries

The post How Ford Turned a Transit Van into a Record-Breaker appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

The initial motivations for our ancestors were driven by the desire to facilitate meeting needs for provision of food, water and shelter – the fundamental requirements of survival. Shaping a hammer from a stone core, or using plant materials to build a shelter, were some of humanity’s earliest design enterprises.

With the perfection of concepts like the lever and pulley bolstering agricultural productivity, mechanisms such as the windmill soon emerged, enabling more complex functions to be considered and sparking an industrial revolution.

The evolutionary process of design flows such that innovations lead to innovations and, once basic needs are met, further experimentation is driven by some level of enjoyment gained from tapping into our innate desire and curiosity to keep exploring, optimising and doing better. This is what we know today as the pursuit of excellence.

For example, the imagination of the first wheel led to the innovation of the horse-drawn carriage, which, in relatively short time, led to the innovation of the motor car.

Sport from design

Following that glide path, it’s not difficult to see how humans, enjoying the comfort of plentiful food and warm houses, began to create sport out of design. This led to the development of hugely complex mechanisms like Formula 1 cars, made of thousands of components, each one of them a specialised evolution of a basic function, acutely focused on a specific objective.

The addition of sport to design activity is a significant point. With competition in the mix, the quality of a design is considered with a new scrutiny because an edge is gained by designing better than your opposition. This leads to some unique specialisations.

In any high-performance design, each innovation is undertaken with a focus on improving the previous function by a certain metric. When the designs are intended to bear loads, the metrics are strength, stiffness and weight.

With this, we enter the world of structurally efficient design.

What is structurally efficient design?

In motorsport, we need components to be strong enough to withstand their intended use without permanent, plastic deformation or damage. We need parts to be stiff and not flex excessively during operation.

The catch is we also need them to be light, because every excess gramme of weight carries a performance penalty, primarily in the form of a lap time increase.

Stiffness is a consideration that attracts focus in motorsport for very particular reasons. Testament to this is the suspension system, where excess deformation in the control arms or steering rack caused by high g lateral and longitudinal loading will dynamically alter the wheel’s camber and toe.

After spending many hours running countless simulations to dial in your kinematics, it would be tragic to have it ruined by an overly compliant suspension.

Stiffness quandary

If we design a part to be strong enough, it likely won’t be stiff enough. Conversely, make a part stiff enough without care to detail and it will be overly strong and too heavy.

To begin to untangle this problem, we need targets. Most structural parts will carry some compliance constraint, defined by their respective attribute group. This gives us a starting point to approach the design process.

Damian Harty, former CAE team leader at Prodrive and founder of Future Vehicle Systems, had the following thoughts to share on his approach: ‘In our suspension target definition, I used to ask what’s the smallest adjustment to the geometry we can make that the driver can measure? This was about one tenth of a degree for toe and a quarter, or half a degree for camber. So, that defined our compliance target under the maximal lateral loading we’d expect during a season.’

Compliance target

The first task to defining a compliance target into something useable is to have a sound understanding of the environment the part will be operating in, in terms of forces and moments in each degree of freedom.

In motorsport, unexpected loading events are almost a given, so must be accounted for. Defining nominal loading is straightforward enough, but in something like a suspension system or chassis structure we must also account for crashes, contact with another competitor, kerb strikes or other events that introduce abnormal loading into our components. The standard deviation of loading is therefore relatively high.

‘In our WRC project, we used to design the cars to withstand a vertical load of 11g, but we also wanted to be clear on what would break if we exceeded that, and what would happen as a result,’ recalls Harty. ‘By the time we were at those loads, the tyres were contacting the inner wheel well, and the armoured belly was in contact with the ground. The car could survive that, but seeing as much as 11g generally means the driver has done something quite wrong.’

Defining these upper limits is still very much a human process, where judgement, experience and data are part of the decision making. The idea is to design such that we have a reasonable confidence that we won’t see failure, even during abnormal events.

This is a sound philosophy, but can look quite different in its implementation across different component types.

Heavily loaded powertrain components, such as connecting rods, crankshafts and, to a lesser extent, gearbox and driveshaft components, all must withstand very high peak loads. However, as the combustion process is reasonably repeatable, the standard deviation of these loads is way less than that of wheel loads.

Chasing efficiency

The objective is to achieve high stiffness while using the minimum amount of material possible. This is where the ‘efficient’ element of structural design comes into focus.

Structurally efficient design is an extremely interesting domain. It can be distilled into the following considerations: 1) robust material selection; 2) design that mitigates localised stress concentrations in the part with filleted edges and no abrupt section changes; 3) optimisation of the stress distribution through the part; 4) consideration of the section modulus to maximise bending stiffness relative to the volume of material used.

Clearly, then, the choice of material for a component is a meticulous process.

Stiffness at the material level is often evaluated through what is called the
specific modulus. This relates the part’s stiffness (Young’s modulus) to its density. Interestingly, the most commonly used high-performance engineering materials – aluminium, steel and titanium alloys – all have a similar stiffness modulus.

This means for a given weight, they are all just about as stiff as each other. There are no advantages to be gained there, apparently. So, the appropriate material choice isn’t immediately obvious without further consideration.

Evaluating strength with respect to density is another way to filter the good from the bad. Here, specific strength is our metric. A higher specific strength means less material is needed for a given part strength, so initially we want materials to have both high specific strength and specific modulus.

Material choice

The high strength of titanium alloys like Ti-6AL-4V is attractive, but it loses out to steel grades such as AISI 4340 on specific modulus. An aluminium alloy such as 7075-T6, on the other hand, performs well in stiffness and strength, comparable to both steel and titanium, but falls short in fatigue resistance, elongation and toughness. This means it bends less before failing and can withstand fewer loading cycles.

Carbon fibre stands out above metal alloys for some of these metrics, so can be a strong choice for applications where loading modes are well understood and relatively simple. However, unlike metal alloys, which are isotropic and exhibit the same strength in all directions, anisotropic composites like carbon fibre have mechanical properties that vary with loading direction.

This makes a material challenging to apply in complex loading scenarios, and its low elongation and toughness means failure is often catastrophic when yield is exceeded.

Special mention here should be given to some of the more exotic alloys, such as Al-Li (aluminium-lithium), Al-Be (aluminium-beryllium) and MMC (metal matrix composites), all of which offer some very attractive properties, but are generally tightly controlled by regulations due to their huge expense (or, in Al-Be’s case, outright banned because of its toxicity).

It’s not hard to see how complex the matrix of considerations is to pick the right material for a job.

Stress and strain

The loading experienced up to yield stress can be simplified as the linear strain region, where the relationship between stress and strain is approximately linear. With continued strain, it enters the realm of plastic deformation, where the relationship between stress and strain becomes highly non-linear.

These distinct properties form a lineation in material behaviour, and we ideally want our upper design load to sit right at that transition of linear to nonlinear response.

Materials and their stress / strain responses are fascinating, but component design is the realm where it all starts to become a little more tangible.

Joining our components together to form the structure is clearly the most pressing concern and, while packaging and kinematic constraints will certainly dictate some of the final form, there is a huge amount to be said for craftsmanship.

One wonders if the fact that pretty, aesthetically pleasing structural designs are often the most efficient load bearing shapes is purely a coincidence, or an innate feeling we all have for good and sound design.

Sharp edges give rise to sharp stress gradients, so fillets and smooth edges and transitions are a designer’s best friend. That’s elementary, but further refinement requires a trained eye, and a particular inspiration.

Nature’s gift

The field of biomimetics recognises that nature has some truly spectacular engineering solutions. Bones of animals feature trabecular tissue, which is specifically present to increase the stiffness and strength of bones without largely impacting the mass.

Bones also provide a brilliant observation of maximising a geometric property called the section modulus, which provides a metric of a form’s ability to resist bending stress.

A high section modulus is achieved by placing material away from the neutral axis, where the bending stress is zero, raising the moment of inertia and, in turn, the stiffness for a given quantity of material.

Applying this to motorsport engineering is the reason we have larger diameter tubes in roll cages, and why aluminium parts are generally larger section than an equivalent steel part. A great practical demonstration of the effect of an increased section modulus can be found in the steering rack.

A steering rack can be simplified as a bar inside a tube, supported in two places. The bar (rack) has teeth cut into it to allow the pinion gear to move it back and forth as the steering column rotates.

‘As the suspension articulates, there is an appreciable bending moment on it that makes the rack flex vertically, in a meaningful way,’ explains Harty. ‘When we were looking at compliance on the BMW Mini Countryman project [at Prodrive], we rotated the rack to give us the stiffer side of the bar working against the bending moment. It worked really well, and just seemed so obvious when we looked at the model.’

Validation time

With such time and focus on achieving structurally efficient design, painstakingly selecting the correct alloys and designing elegant part geometries, we of course need methods of validating the resulting component.

In earlier times, performing structural analysis was a slow process, but it has now been revolutionised by simulation and computing power.

Finite element analysis (FEA) tools, for example, have advanced leaps and bounds in both ease of use and integration into the design process. They use mathematical models of material behaviour and, in the linear strain range at least, provide quick, relatively simple and accurate predictions of how a material will behave.

Results from the FEA are fed back to the designer in very short time to allow modification of the design based on stress concentrations and overloaded areas. This iterative approach to design has been in practice for decades and, while there have been efficiency improvements to workflows and methodologies, the basic principles have remained static.

Additionally, 3D printing and metal sintering techniques have allowed some very interesting and previously unachievable geometries to be developed.

Validation revolves around gathering physical data from real-world testing to correlate the FEA to observations on prototype parts from tests in a lab setting on test rigs or running the part on a real vehicle on an accelerated durability test. By validating FEA predictions with empirical data, engineers can identify discrepancies and refine their models to improve accuracy. This iterative process ensures the final design meets performance targets, ultimately leading to more reliable and robust components.

What the future holds

The future of structurally efficient design in the motorsport environment will be significantly influenced by advancements in materials science and manufacturing techniques. Part of this revolution will be through emerging technologies such as metamaterials and nanomaterials.

Metamaterials are engineered materials, which exhibit properties not found in naturally occurring substances. They have been an area of intense research, partially unlocked through improvements in additive manufacturing technology such as selective laser melting (SLM), which allows for the creation of complex, periodic structures with extremely high precision.

Similarly, nanomaterials are making waves. By reducing the grain size of materials like titanium and aluminium, researchers have significantly increased their yield strengths. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), when integrated into composites like carbon fibre (CFRP), improve stress distribution and provide substantial benefits in terms of fatigue resistance and crack mitigation.

These cutting-edge materials share the common goal of enhancing the strength and stiffness of components while, at the same time, minimising weight. Although there are still challenges to overcome, the future looks promising.

The pursuit of structurally efficient design is a dynamic and evolving field. From the historical advancements in basic mechanical principles to the sophisticated integration of modern materials and computational techniques, the journey is a remarkable one.

Continuous improvements in material science, coupled with advancements in simulation and optimisation algorithms, promises a future where designs are not only lighter and stronger but also more adaptable and resilient. If there are benefits to be found, we can be sure motorsport will find them.

Jahee Campbell-Brennan is the director of Wavey Dynamics, a consultancy specialising in vehicle dynamics, race engineering, powertrain and aerodynamics across the motorsport and automotive sectors

The post Tech Explained: Structurally Efficient Design appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

The British company, which acquired Avon’s residual stock after the brand was shut down, purchased the existing Camac Pneus production site located on the banks of the Ave river and is undergoing a major refurbishment to turn it into a ‘new European centre of tyre manufacturing excellence’.

The site, situated between the cities Porto and Braga, will enable Nova to resume production of new Avon Motorsport products and develop new racing tyres for the future.

Over 200 trucks have been used to transfer the tyre manufacturing equipment from Avon’s previous headquarters in Melksham, UK, to the new site in Portugal. The Melksham site was auctioned off by Avon’s parent company, Goodyear, in February but the buyer remains undisclosed. Nova was set up by former Avon employees and has launched a recruitment drive for its European manufacturing programme.

‘The creation of Nova Motorsport’s new European centre of tyre manufacturing excellence represents a crucial strategic step for the imminent resumption of production of legendary Avon Motorsport tyre products,’ said Nova Motorsport chief technical officer, Mike Lynch.

‘Integrating Nova Motorsport’s engineering and design resources into the Camac facility has significantly enhanced the site’s manufacturing capabilities. The upgraded labs and NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) facilities will elevate product quality and performance, significantly benefiting both Avon Motorsport and existing Camac products.’

Nova plans to start production of its historic and rallycross Avon tyres in early August, using track and in-house rig testing as part of the process. The company has stated that it is ‘on track’ to start full-scale production of the Avon CR6ZZ, Avon ACB9, Nova autocross and some rallycross products in the fourth quarter of this year. Other tyres, such as the Avon ACB10, Avon hill climb products and several historic competition ranges, will be manufactured in early 2025.

‘The hard work and rapid advancements made by the Nova Motorsport and Camac teams bear testament to our determination to establish a world-leading centre of tyre manufacturing excellence in Europe, supported by our Global Technical Centre and HQ in Holt, England,’ said James Weekley, Nova Motorsport Commercial Director.

‘However, this is only the beginning of the Nova Motorsport journey. Our next goal is to produce the first Avon Motorsport products in Portugal, marking a new chapter in our commitment to delivering high-performance tyres for the motorsport industry, and we remain firmly on track to achieve that.’

The post Nova Developing €20 million Tyre Production Hub in Portugal appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

It currently builds the gearboxes for IndyCar, NASCAR, Supercars, all LMDh cars, most LMH cars, several in Formula E and more. In recent years, Xtrac has diversified into the high-performance automotive sector with electrification projects and boasts an impressive factory in the UK. Racecar recently went to Thatcham to find out what 40 years of progress looks like.

Xtrac: Origins

The first Xtrac headquarters were as humble as you like: a small workshop around the back of a Chinese takeaway in Wokingham, a small town west of London. Endean built transmissions and related components in small quantities, mostly for off-road motorsport. The name Xtrac only emerged after Endean’s G4 gearbox had started racing in 1983. The story goes that Endean light-heartedly told the revered British motorsport commentator, Murray Walker, that his as-yet-unnamed firm could be called ‘Mr X’s Traction Company’. Walker then ran with it, going onto the broadcast and shortening it to ‘Xtrac’. The impromptu, catchy moniker stuck and Endean, together with his wife, Shirley, established Xtrac Ltd on June 15, 1984.

Building on its success with Schanche, Xtrac gained more off-road customers, particularly manufacturers building cars for the Group A regulations. As it gained more work, Xtrac moved to a new 9000ft.sq factory at Hogwood Lane, having moved out of the cramped workshop behind the takeaway.

‘We were bringing in one new person every two to three weeks,’ recalls Peter Digby, Xtrac president and one of the company’s earliest employees. ‘We couldn’t afford to buy machines because we were so small, so we would go to these [car manufacturer] customers and say, if you want to have that gearbox, we need this much up front for design, tooling etc.’

As the company grew in the late ’80s, bringing more processes such as heat treatment in-house, it branched out from rallying and set its sights on Formula 1. It had made a few F1 parts in the early days, for the likes of Penske and Haas Lola (where Digby was previously managing director before joining Xtrac) but not an entire transmission. That changed in 1989 when Onyx contracted Xtrac to develop a transverse gearbox for its F1 car.

‘Then we were approached, almost at the same time, by McLaren,’ recalls Digby. ‘Pete Weismann had designed them a new, revolutionary gearbox and they were making gears, but having some issues. McLaren decided to do a back-to-back test. Allegedly, ours lasted longer.

‘So, overnight, we had a massive order in from McLaren, which was a real challenge. Then, within a couple of years, we had six Formula 1 teams that came to us. Nearly all of the work was bespoke at that point. We had Benetton, McLaren, Tyrrell, BAR, Williams and Jordan on the books. That was probably our peak of Formula 1.’

Xtrac is still involved in F1 today, supplying torque-carrying steel internal gearbox components to ‘a number of successful teams’. The company pushed in the past for F1 to adopt a single gearbox supplier, as other series have done, but that didn’t materialise.

Sole supplier success

However, single-supply contracts in other categories are where Xtrac really accelerated its growth heading into the 21st century. In 1999, IndyCar enquired about a standardised gearbox to try and prevent development wars and reduce costs for teams. After convincing the series that it could bring the cost per unit down, Xtrac was signed as the sole supplier.

‘Overnight, we had to go and build 100 gearboxes very quickly with all our own money, before we sold one,’ says Digby. ‘We were bursting at the seams.’

The huge increase in workload had Xtrac searching for a new factory location. It eventually landed on a 13-acre site in Thatcham and enlisted Ridge & Partners, the architect for most F1 team headquarters in the UK, to put a 88,000ft.sq facility in place for staff to move in by the summer of 2000.

Three years later, Xtrac opened its first American outpost in Indianapolis to service the IndyCar transmissions (the other one serves NASCAR in North Carolina). However, this rapid expansion, which included buying new manufacturing machines, came with a financial cost. HSBC Private Equity (later called Montagu) took a 25 per cent shareholding, the first of three times that Xtrac has worked with an external investor to finance its growth. Its first major structural change occurred in 1997, when Digby led a management buyout that saw Endean step back from his duties.

The IndyCar supply deal came after Xtrac had already expanded into other areas of motorsport. It created its first complete 24 Hours of Le Mans transmission for the Peugeot 905, developing a six-speed sequential manual for the first time. It went on to supply other winning cars including the McLaren F1 GTR, Bentley Speed 8 and LMP1 machines from Audi and Toyota. In parallel, Xtrac was building front and rear sequential transmissions for several BTCC cars, and eventually moved to a single-supply contract for the series that it still holds today.

‘We then decided to take sequential to rallying,’ says Digby. ‘Most of the drivers said they didn’t want that, but we built a gearbox mock-up to show them that you could go from sixth to second as quickly as you could on an H-pattern, but without blipping the engine. It was transformational at that point. Nobody looked back after that.’

Covering various categories and adapting the gearbox technology to suit different vehicles’ demands helped increase Xtrac’s reputation across motorsport. Its products were often not the cheapest option, but its selling point has been reliability with the aim of being cost effective in the long run.

Automotive Expansion

Despite hailing from motorsport, Xtrac has ramped up its high-performance automotive (HPA) business in the last two decades. According to company CEO, Adrian Moore, years of working on hard and fast motorsport deadlines enabled Xtrac to be agile in reacting to road car projects which tend to be more fluid from a timing perspective.

‘The core of the business is still motorsport,’ he says. ‘It gives us the customer focus, the reaction time and the ethos.’

However, the automotive side is growing – it currently takes up around 40 per cent of the projects and Moore projects it will be as big as motorsport in a couple of years. The expansion has been supported by Xtrac not just selling gearboxes: it also builds turnkey packages that incorporate control systems, gearshift mechanisms and clutch actuators.

Since its first electrified powertrain project for a Tesla prototype in 2006, Xtrac’s EV and hybrid workload has increased and is set to overtake internal combustion. According to Moore, the split last year was about 65 / 35 in favour of IC, but now they are on equal terms. Hydrogen has also recently emerged as an option and Xtrac has started developing transmissions for hydrogen combustion engine prototypes, such as the Alpine Alpenglow HY4.

‘As legislation changes, we’re still small and agile enough to react to that,’ says Moore. ‘As well as IC, our capability is transmissions for those three [hybrid, electric and hydrogen propulsion systems]. We’re ambivalent as to which way the regulations go, it just depends on what the customers want.’

Extensive Factory

Xtrac produces a quarter of a million components annually – that’s almost 5000 weekly, or 685 daily – at its Thatcham facility.

Before any part is manufactured, it is conceptualised in the design office. There are 90 engineers working in this department, with about a third of them on motorsport projects and the rest on high-performance automotive. Downstairs sits the production office, where manufacturing plans and quality control are directed.

Unsurprisingly, the manufacturing area utilises the most space. It is constantly evolving, with new machines regularly being introduced or re-positioned for efficiency. A wide walkway runs along the length of the factory floor and serves as a gateway between the offices and machinery on the other side. Along the walkway, project timelines are laid out on whiteboards.

On the manufacturing floor, gear-cutting machines stand like towers above a network of narrow walkways, through which technicians and engineers commute between the different stages of manufacture – turning, milling, gear cutting and heat treatment. Once a part is designed in CAD, its first step towards manufacture takes place in the turning department. This consists of nine Okuma CNC lathe machines, which receive inputs from a turning program.

‘We’ve got multiple coordinate measuring machines, which are used to measure our parts,’ says Xtrac principal engineer, Nick Upjohn. ‘They validate that the program is machining the part how we want it. That way, if you’ve got an error in the program, you can correct it and account for any discrepancies in your next turning operation. It’s a nice, closed-loop system. A lot of work will be done here before any issues present in our manufacturing support office.’

Next is the milling department, where over a dozen mills cut and remove material to define the part’s shape, be it a bearing retainer or a gearbox casing.

‘We have a huge array of mills,’ says Upjohn. ‘Anything from small, three-axis manual mills for simple parts, all the way up to five-axis machines that can accommodate a one metre cubed work piece.’

Cutting Teeth

Once a blank part has been made, it is taken to the shaping department where teeth are cut into it by up and down movements. It takes about 15 minutes to produce a spline of 30mm diameter. Some gears can have as many as 150 teeth, and there are different cutting methods employed, including broaching and hobbing machines, which use rotary cutting tools.

‘Our Klingelnberg G30 CNC spiral bevel gear grinding machine was the first in the UK,’ says Upjohn. ‘We dress the form of the tooth we would like onto the wheel, and it then form grinds the material away. It’s an abrasive process, as opposed to a metal chipping one.

‘We then take it to our inspection department and a probe will measure where it’s incorrect vs the true perfect form. It will then send that information back to the first machine, which will administer corrections to make it the perfect shape. It’s a closed-loop system, right back to the original design data, which enables our engineers to refine the design for optimum strength, wear, efficiency and, for automotive applications, low noise.’

Once the gear has been produced, heat treatment realises the intended material properties of hardness, ductility and strength. Xtrac uses two types of heat treatment furnace technology, both of which use electrical elements to heat to the correct temperature: a seal quench furnace (of which the company has three) and a low-pressure carburising furnace.

The heat treatment process creates a reaction in a gaseous environment that produces carbon, which infuses into the gear’s surface when the heat is raised up to around 1000degC. The low-pressure carburising furnaces are newer to Xtrac, having only been introduced within the last six years, and can provide a more precise process than the older, but  proven, sealed quench furnaces through their gas quenching process, rather than the oil quench of the older equipment. There are currently two in operation, all feeding off a dedicated electricity substation.

After heat treatment, most parts, including gears, are processed through shot peening to improve their fatigue resistance and prolong their lifespan. This aerospace process involves firing tiny shot pellets at the gear surface and creating surface tension.

Test and Build

Heading back out to the main walkway, greyed-out windows on the office side signify the R&D department. Of course, this most interesting of rooms is strictly off limits to outsiders, but we are told it contains testing apparatus, such as a four-square rig, a gimbal rig and a quasi-transient differential test rig (QT-DTR) that customers and Xtrac both use. The factory also houses two fully loaded, transient powertrain test rigs, and multiple rigs used for end-of-line gearbox testing.

Next door is the Xtrac Academy: a practical training area for level two and three apprentices with manual and CNC machines for making non-production parts, plus computer-aided engineering (CAE) training areas. Xtrac takes on around 10 apprentices per year, and a high proportion go on to stay with the company. As an example, Xtrac’s first apprentice from the 1990s, Simon Short, is now head of its Indianapolis build shop.

Upstairs from R&D and the academy is Xtrac’s motorsport build area, where gearboxes are put together. Five years ago, it was the assembly shop for all products, but the increased automotive workload has correlated with a significant investment into a dedicated assembly line located in a different area. At the time of our visit, sportscar gearboxes are being built for Le Mans.

Also visible is a huge, 3D-printed casing built for the 932kW Czinger 21C electric hypercar (an industry first as most gearboxes use L169 aluminium). This makes a fitting bookend to the G4 layout encountered at the top of our tour. Gearbox technology has come a long way since Endean’s first, successful product and Xtrac has been a key part of furthering reliability and performance in many categories during that time.

As motorsport looks to other powertrain and fuel solutions for the future, Xtrac is well positioned to remain at the forefront of transmission design.

CLICK HERE to read the full version of this article in the July issue of Racecar Engineering!

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The post Xtrac at 40: From Back of a Takeaway to Gearbox Giant appeared first on Racecar Engineering.

A team of Delft University of Technology technical department students studying to become tomorrow’s engineers have designed, built, and raced a hydrogen fuel cell electric-powered Prototype to demonstrate the possibilities for hydrogen in motorsports, mobility and more.

The team, called Forze Hydrogen Racing, was set up to accelerate the marketing, activation and visibility of hydrogen and the technology inside fuel cell cars. The result is a collaboration of academic programmes and industrial partner-engineered design, providing a laboratory environment to develop hydrogen fuel cell technology under rigorous racing conditions.

Forze Hydrogen Racing was founded in 2007 and started by putting small fuel cells on a go-kart. The latest car, the Forze IX, is a full-scale Prototype racer that currently competes in an Open GT racing class in The Netherlands. It is considered a breakthrough in hydrogen fuel cell electric car performance.

Fuel cell operation

The Forze IX is an electric-powered Prototype racecar with a supercapacitor accumulator, and two independent EKPO fuel cell systems that produce its electricity. The sensitive operation of the hydrogen fuel cell makes designing one for the racecar application challenging.

The oxygen required comes from the outside air, which is scooped in from the main inlet on the roof and fed to the two cathode systems. Before the air can reach the fuel cell, it must be conditioned to remove contaminants and rainwater. So it is run through filters designed with one of the team’s partners, Donaldson, before being compressed by an electrical turbo-compressor from Fisher Spindle.

Due to this compression, the air heats up so, before entering the cathode, it passes through an intercooler to cool it down. Compressing the air also enables energy recuperation from the exhaust flow, which significantly increases system efficiency.

Finally, Fumatech humidifiers moisten the air so as not to dry out the fuel cell.

The compressed, intercooled and humidified air then enters the cathode inside the fuel cell. Both cathode systems consume as much as 16kg of air per minute.

At the anode, hydrogen molecules are split into atoms and stripped of their electrons, leaving a proton that needs to pass through the fuel cell membrane. Meanwhile, the hydrogen’s electron is forced through an electrical circuit. This electron movement is current that the car can use as drive power directly at the motors and power systems, or to charge the accumulator.

At the cathode, the proton bonds with the oxygen in the air and re-combines with the electron to form a water molecule, which is then exhausted from the system using excess air.

‘What makes the car truly unique is that it runs on two separate and independent fuel cell systems,’ explains Abel van Beest, team manager of Forze Hydrogen Racing. ‘Only a few experiments have been done in the past with dual-engine cars, and this is a first for fuel cells.

‘Running on a dual fuel cell system like this one has several advantages. Starting from redundancy can help in case of a partial system failure and reduce engineering risk as one system can be developed and tested before producing the second one.’

The fuel cells provide a continuous 240kW.

‘The two EKPO fuel cells are very power dense and are therefore a great match for a powerful, tightly packaged car,’ van Beest continues. ‘The two fuel cells simultaneously operate under independent deployment strategies to provide the most efficient performance for any part of a track, and allow our engineers to develop and iterate upgrades much faster.’

Hydrogen management

The total volume of hydrogen on board amounts to about 8.5kg, which is stored in four tanks at 700 times atmospheric pressure (bar). From the tanks, it is transported through high-pressure and vibration-resistant tubing from Parker to a pressure regulator that drops the pressure of the hydrogen.

The next stop is a hydrogen control system, custom developed by Forze’s fuel cell engineers, in collaboration with Burkert.

This system consistently provides the fuel cell with the exact amount of hydrogen for the demand. In some conditions, excess hydrogen is delivered to the fuel cell to gain more performance and lifetime. A recirculation system was developed using a custom component called the ejector so as not to waste the hydrogen that comes back out of the fuel cell. The ejector is a passive device used to sustain hydrogen recirculation to the fuel cell, specifically on the anode side, without power.

‘The ejector, in essence, can be viewed as a pump, a device that increases the pressure of a fluid to overcome the frictional losses associated with mass transport,’ explains India van Doornen, chief engineer at Forze Hydrogen Racing. ‘Within the control of the various mass flows to and from the fuel cell, the ejector’s job is to maintain the hydrogen flow on the anode side of the fuel cell, which a recirculation pump would typically fulfil.

‘However, a recirculation pump requires considerable amounts of power, usually in the order of several kilowatts, to achieve the required pressure lift,’ he continues. ‘This power would come from that produced by the fuel cell system and is directly consumed by the systems supporting its operation, generating parasitic losses. The ejector, on the other hand, reduces the parasitic losses of the fuel cell system by tapping into another energy source: the potential energy stored as pressure within the hydrogen storage tanks.’

The stored hydrogen must be returned to near atmospheric pressure before the fuel cell can use it, and the ejector system exploits this potential energy to increase the hydrogen pressure in the anode recirculation loop. The hydrogen feed is throttled to coincide with demand, and this process is not used to produce useful output.

‘The ejector increases the pressure of the gases in the fuel cell anode recirculation loop by throttling the hydrogen to a pressure several bar above the final desired pressure,’ confirms van Doornen. ‘The hydrogen from the storage system is accelerated through the ejector’s convergent nozzle geometry, which decreases the fluid’s static pressure.’

The ejector geometry means the pressure of the fluid leaving the nozzle is lower than the pressure of the fluid in the recirculation loop. As a result, the hydrogen in the recirculation loop is entrained because of the negative pressure gradient. The gases in the anode loop are therefore accelerated and mixed with the hydrogen from the storage system at a high velocity. At this point, a lot of the fluid’s energy is kinetic.

The flow is fed through a diffuser to transfer this kinetic energy back into potential energy in the form of pressure, and the ejector’s geometry increases the pressure of the fluid relative to the entrained flow.

The Forze engineers optimised this component using flow simulations, with help from FTXT. The car features an accumulator of supercapacitor cells from Musashi, enabling onboard electrical storage with ultra-fast charge and discharge to make the fuel cell system efficient and practical for racing.

Another partner, SciMo, provides the four lightweight and power-dense electric motors that allow Forza IX to have a combined motor torque equivalent to that of a Lamborghini Huracán. The SciMo motor units also enable the Forze IX to regenerate as much energy in one braking zone as a Formula 1 car can generate in an entire lap. 

‘Each motor is connected to its custom gearbox and drivetrain so the wheels can spin at different speeds, allowing for torque vectoring,’ explains van Doornen. ‘When the car approaches a corner, it needs to decelerate. A significant part of this deceleration is achieved by regenerative braking using the four electric motors to charge the accumulator. When the car is most power sensitive, at corner exit, besides the fuel cells working on maximum power, the accumulator can be quickly discharged to the motors, delivering the total output of 600kW to the wheels.’

System integration

Creating a lot of power always comes with a lot of heat, since no system is 100 per cent efficient. As such, the Forze IX is heavily cooled to maintain performance. Despite the significant new technical innovations onboard, the cooling presented some of the biggest design challenges for the project.

The hydrogen fuel cell and supercapacitor accumulator run at very low temperatures compared to an internal combustion engine but, because the temperature difference between the powertrain and the outside air is small, it is hard to cool it using outside air.

The car is therefore fitted with five radiators spread over the car to address the cooling requirements, which the Forze team cooling engineers designed with partner, PWR. Pierburg pumps drive coolant through the system at a flow rate of up to 460l/min.

To have enough airflow through these radiators to exchange the heat with the coolant, the Forze IX needed specialised aerodynamic bodywork to accommodate its thermal requirements, while also maintaining adequate performance and efficiency. The Forze IX aerodynamics engineers designed the car’s carbon fibre bodywork, which was produced with partner, Airborne.

‘The Forze IX’s shape is the result of over 500 iterations of airflow simulations to optimise the aerodynamics for the application,’ highlights van Doornen. ‘The mass flow of air through the radiators is 190kg/min, and the Forze IX still generates 1200kg of downforce at top speed. Even with higher cooling requirements than other Prototype cars, the Forze IX has good aerodynamic efficiency with a lift-over-drag ratio of around 4:1.’

The front of the chassis is a carbon fibre monocoque construction, built for driver and systems protection, with integrated mountings at the rear to accommodate power unit systems. The monocoque features a frontal extension to include the front drivetrain, while the back houses the accumulator and mounts for the central subframe, all while weighing just under 100kg.

The car’s body was iterated over 300 times using various CAE solvers to ensure seamless integration of the powertrain systems.

‘The central subframe mounted behind the monocoque houses most of the critical systems in the car, such as the fuel cells and the main tank,’ notes van Doornen. ‘It was optimised for stiffness and crash protection, while also accommodating the rear subframe mounting. The rear subframe consists of a structural motor and gearbox housing designed to attach to the rear suspension and a rear wing support structure to deal with those loads.’

Forze Hydrogen Racing’s vehicle dynamics engineers designed the car’s double wishbone suspension.

‘The tricky part about designing the suspension was the little space we had to work with in the car,’ notes van Doornen. ‘We needed to ensure the forces were translated properly from the ground to the chassis and provide optimal road handling while tightly packaged.

‘Our suspension features high-quality bearings from SKF that ensure a smooth and low friction movement.’

Using driving simulations, the Forze engineering team identified all the forces and shocks occurring within the suspension while racing. A damper package from Koni was then chosen as the optimal solution for the car, providing the driver with the proper feedback from the interaction between the car and the road.

Control systems

The Forza IX is a complex machine, with a great many systems interacting, so it needed a brain to activate and accurately control all those systems. A custom power distribution system was therefore designed to manage the energy flow from the fuel cells to the four electric motors, two compressors and all other power devices.

‘The function of the brain is taken up by our embedded system, which has a central processing unit and distributed sensing and activation units that operate like a nervous system,’ explains van Doornen. ‘All the embedded systems are prototypes, with many custom components and experimental samples from the automotive industry.’

The embedded central control systems monitor, protect and control all the sub-systems in the car.

To help do this, the team developed a component called the supervisor node. This monitors the hydrogen tanks and refuelling system, checks high-voltage electronics and performs critical shutdown safely. It can take up all safety-critical features and operate them during a system failure or power loss.

The state of the car is constantly monitored by over 400 sensors provided by team partner, Kistler. That’s more sensors than on a current Formula 1 car.

‘The various sensors accurately measure a large variety of parameters from which thousands of calculations of the state of critical systems are made to operate the car safely and in the most performant manner,’ notes van Doornen. ‘Measurement of many parameters are needed to learn about the systems since the team is working with all-new technology that has never been benchmarked before.’

The team’s electrical engineers have also designed custom telemetry system hardware that collects sensor data and communicates it to the central control unit of the car. From there, commands are communicated to the external hardware and relays telemetry, and to all other electrical components throughout the car when necessary.

The wiring harness and the central control unit, which has enough processing power to run all the control systems and process all the data, were designed in cooperation with partner, Fokker, while the control algorithms are written by Forze control system engineers, and dictate at all times what the controllable components in the car have to do.

‘Due to its unique hydrogen electric design, the Forze IX consists of a unique collection of specialised electrical devices. To integrate those into a robust and embedded system, our software engineers had to design a completely custom and extensive software structure,’ explains van Doornen. ‘It features low-level codes to interface specific devices, and high-level implementation for system level error handling.’

As it is not enough that the car itself knows what’s happening during a race, the trackside engineers also need to have all critical information to hand to spot mechanical or electrical problems whilst the car is on track, or run a power strategy at a particular moment in the race. Therefore, the Forza IX features telemetry using UHF, 4G and Wi-Fi systems. The car can transmit all the necessary data at various data rates depending on the distance from the pit wall. To make telemetry even more convenient, the Forze team, together with IBM, are setting up cloud-based telemetry for easy data storage and analysis.

‘The Forze IX is built to keep growing and innovating, so that is what we are going to do,’ states van Beest. ‘In the future, Forze aims to shift towards endurance racing. We believe that is where the power of hydrogen lies.’

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