Race Car Design

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LMP1 cars have big, bluff front fenders because they are trying to move the air over the front wheel openings that are there to stop the cars taking off when they spin,” Saward explains. “We wanted the RT24-P DPi to be more like LM55 or Furai, with a much more voluptuous shape and a beautiful silhouette, similar to race cars of the 1960s and 70s, where the front end was much more swept downward to the floor. Meeting those requirements was our biggest challenge.” Finally, while both engineering knowledge and practical observations can provide reasonable confidence in component designs or selections, physically or virtually testing the component can be the final way of assessing if your component works. Mechanical testing has been around for a very long time, and modern software has evolved over the years to enable amateurs to run basic simulations of structures (FEA or Finite Element Analysis) and airflows (CFD or Computational Fluid Dynamics or the “virtual wind tunnel”). If you are designing a car from a donor car chassis, your process will involve determining how the vehicle components can be changed to meet your vision/objectives. If you are designing from scratch, your process will involve the design and selection of components from the rubber on the road on up. Iterations Once you choose the type of vehicle you’re interested in, it’s time to begin thinking about how your vehicle is going to look, perform and cost. Vision/Concept

Testing is the most crucial aspect of a race car’s design. A great design effort might be lost if not enough tests are carried. Some categories, such as Formula 1, impose restrictions on off-season tests, aiming to reduce costs. This leaves only the specified pre-season tests and the free practices for the engineers to work on the cars. There are a lot of Cadillac design cues in the body lines of the DPi,” says Blanski. “The surface tension and line quality in the early sketches were inspired by the production vehicles in our studio.”

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The approach is made of six steps, namely, Analyses, Constraints and Goals Specification, Preliminary Design, Detailed design, Testing and Development. These steps will normally happen in a non-sequential manner, with some restrictions arising in later steps demanding changes in previous stages. Given that these unsprung components are continually accelerating, decelerating and changing the orientation of the rotational axis (steered wheels) during a lap, the sensitivity of the vehicle to these inertias becomes important.

Car design is iterative (that is, requiring repeated re-designs) because with the exception of a few parts on a car, all parts attach to another in some way.In this first column, I am going to explain how the two cars expected to battle for this year's world championship differ in a crucial aspect of aerodynamic philosophy - and how it could mean that, although Ferrari have looked very strong in pre-season testing, they might find themselves down a dead end when it comes to developing and improving their car through the season. The shape of an F1 car is dictated by the rules governing aerodynamic development What are aerodynamics for? The unsprung mass of the vehicle when in motion is both rotational (in the case of wheel assembly) and translational. It is the inherent inertias of these components which we need to watch out for. A high inertia requires relatively large amounts of energy transfer to accelerate and decelerate, affecting the response of the system. The approach that I use is to start a 3D sketch and work at it in 2D, choosing relevant plans to draw. It begins by the choice of tyres and wheels, which by themselves define the hub locations. Relevant dimensions of the car must be defined before drawing process begins.