WOW is all I can say!

Their facility is located in a Lincolnshire IL, I drove up there this morning with some SAE members from my school.

The tour was hosted but a head engineer Tom Smith and the engineer in charge of the suspension. These guys knew there stuff! I was an amazed. I will give a brief over view of what I saw and cool things they told us. Keep in mind each main section of the car has its own very large and generous fully outfitted work area.

We started with the engine and drive train which. Currently they run a Cosworth V8, and they say under current restrictors it is at about 750 HP. These engines have are required to have steel, valves, springs, and connecting rods and they still manage 15,000 Rpm! Also I found interesting is that the turbos run about 3lbs of peak boost! And still produce a hell of a lot of power. They do not open up the engines no matter what due to the complexity and send the engines back to Europe when needed. They had about 12 in crates and 4 on stands there.

Next was transmitions. They had about 4 being assembled and torn down. The inside of the tranny looked like a Swiss watch with large load baring gears and small gear all intertwined. Very cool stuff. They showed the drive shafts to handle all the power and they were super beefy 3M made of composite metal.

Next was the brake section, they use a multitude of Brembo rotors with performance friction pads. The calipers are also Brembo and HUGE! And weigh in at about 4 pounds. Very cool stuff. I asked what kind of fluid the use and he described a Castrol product that they sneak into the country so the EPA does not find out. Supposedly the fluid is some toxic stuff but will not boil. And they pull a little over 4 gÂ’s when braking.

Next and my favorite was the damper section. They had about 100 sets of dampers there. What kills me is I forgot what the manufacturer’s name was, they are from Europe and they are the only team that uses them as they have an exclusive deal with the company. The owner of the damper company is a close personal friend to Paul Newman so he gets the “hook up”. These dampers are very small and super light with high speed and low speed bound and rebound adjustable. They have a very cool shock dyno which they ran a few times and showed how they analyze the data. I then asked how their suspension program compared to F1 and he explained that the F1 cars small wheels and large tires made suspension tuning very difficult as the tires flexed so much. He also said how Mclearen uses the same companies’ shocks and they send all their work back to the company and do no rebuilding in house while Newman Hass does all their own rebuilds.

Next was the place where they work on the cars. There were four large “bay” with all the tools they needed and it is divided into two teams one for each driver. And some old chassis sitting around. We were allowed to poke around at all the stuff and ask any questions we had. I asked a ton, as none of the other guys really had a clue about CART.

He then took us to the place where they model everything from suspension performance to engine management. Everything is done on the computer first and then applied to the car. Very cool stuff, they use Adams modeling program and it is one powerful tool. They had every lap that the car made last season on this computer, every bit of data that you could possibly think of is recorded and analyzed. He brought up the qualifying lab of Bruno, every thing from ride height at any given time to the exact load on any tire at any time in a lap. Mind blowing amounts of data!

All in all a great experience, we did a lot more but this post is long enoughÂ….
They said their rough budget is about 25 million for the year and they come out about even at the end of the year with sponsors and other endeavors.

I AM SORRY FOR NO PICTURES!!! We taped the whole thing on a video camera so when I get a hold of that this will be updated.

Thanks for reading!

-Nate

Cliff notes: CART cars are complex and use nice *** stuff!


Modified by Nate at 5:51 AM 2/8/2004


Modified by Nate at 6:03 AM 2/8/2004

 

Very nice Nate, thanks for great overview. Can't wait to see the vid. Sneaking Castrol into the country, now that is great.

 

That place is about 10min from my parents' house. Too bad I've never been able to go. What school do you go to??

 

I go to Bradley University in Peoria IL. Not sure how we got the private tour but it was an amazing exsperiance!

Oh yeah if you guys have any questions there is a good chance he covered it or i asked it myself so shoot away!

-nate

 

IIRC, a Champ Car clutch is about the diameter of a donut, right?

What kind of shock dyno was it? Roehrig seems to have the largest market share. I think NHR uses Dynamic Suspension components.

 

the clutch pack was 4 inches in Diameter, It was a pack of 4 clutches. He said it could handle up to 400 ftlbs of torque. Dynamic suspension seems to ring a bell, hmm... the shock dyno what build buy the company that builds the shock. the dyno itself was carbon fiber! The dyno run consisted of a 1 inch stroke at 1 rep per second and then ran at 6 reps per second. This data produced a nice graph that compared a stock run compared to what ever motificarions that were done! good stuff!

-nate

 

3 lbs of boost? I will venture that it is actually 3 bar.

Ben

 

Sounds like a cool trip.

Mclaren uses Penskes

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Nate &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">WOW is all I can say!
He also said how Mclearen uses the same companiesÂ’ shocks and they send all their work back to the company and do no rebuilding in house while Newman Hass does all their own rebuilds.


Modified by Nate at 5:51 AM 2/8/2004


Modified by Nate at 6:03 AM 2/8/2004</TD></TR></TABLE>

 

I am sure it is 3lbs of boost, they measured boost in very small increments and were able to control the boost level to .1lbs of boost to push the limit of the pop-off valve.

Penske shocks, good stuff! The head guy must have had some old information, or he was just BSing me

-nate

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Bnjmn &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">3 lbs of boost? I will venture that it is actually 3 bar.

Ben</TD></TR></TABLE>

No. three pounds is about right. they use very large turbos.

 

A few years ago I read an article somewhere saying that they were dropping the maximum boost pressure allowed by 2 psi, to something still in the 4x psi range - don't remember the exact figure. 3 bar is 3*14.5 psi = 43.5 psi, so I would also definitely agree that champ cars are running around 3 bar of boost, not 3 psi. Out of just 2.65L(?) of displacement, you physically need a lot more additional airflow to make 750-800 hp.

Great read!

 

750 hp @ 14,000 RPM is 281 ft/lbs of torque at the same RPM. I would think a A 2.6L is capable of making that much power with the proper compression and only 3psi. But I really have no idea.

 

Yes, it could. F1 motors make around 300 lbs-ft of torque out of 3.0L now(?), so it is possible for NA motors to reach the 100 lbs-ft/L mark. (This btw is much more difficult than to reach 100 hp/L.) However, with all the talk this year of the drivers having had to get used to the big jump in torque in the low end when boost kicks in on these new Ford motors, just by this alone it's enough to make me think that a whole lot more than 3 psi is being pumped into the engine to make such a significant increase in torque down low "when the boost comes on". Of course I'm not 100% sure either way (just about 95% to 5% ), but to me at least after what I've been following up on champ cars over the years, 3 bar makes a lot more sense.

 

I'm not really knowledgeable about turbos but didn't CART measure boost by inches? I think in 1996, boost was 45 or 40 inches, and as the years went by CART tried slowing the cars by reducing boost down to 30 or 35 inches. I was told this was barely above atmosphere.

 

You are correct outrun. I've confused the units of measurement in my earlier post to psi, when what I was referring to was measured in inches of mercury. Basically 1 inch of mercury = 0.4912 psi. In 2003 they ran 41.5 inches of mercury on road courses and 39 on ovals. That's 20.4 and 19.1 psi respectively. (1 atmosphere is I believe 14.7 psi.)

 

Yes they measured in inches of mercury. The guy told me that it was about 3psi but he could have been wrong. Your numbers seem resonable and it relativley low boost. I might have to shoot him an email to get the right answer.


-nate