The constraints are the practical limits within which the team should work on.
Yet, the design team should do their best to quantify the performance of an opponent, as this is fundamental in specifying the performance goals.Īt this stage, the design team should look at the constraints imposed on the vehicle. Data from opponent teams will generally be extremely difficult to get your hands on, especially in the higher echelons of motorsport. The goal is to recognize the features of the previous car that the engineers should to try to keep for the new design and the ones they should try to eliminate.įinally, a benchmarking study should be conducted, in order to evaluate the performance of concurrent teams, identifying the gap between one’s own design and that from other teams.
Later, a performance analysis is conducted, in order to evaluate the performance of a previous design, if there is one, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. Also, the introduction of restrictions on fuel flow and fuel load per race, in 2014, forced manufacturers to increase their engines efficiency. For example, the refuelling ban implemented in the 2010 Formula One Season, forced teams to run larger fuel tanks, and they also had to take into account the changes on CG height due to fuel burn off. Here, all the regulation changes are reviewed, and their impact on the design is assessed. These steps will normally happen in a non-sequential manner, with some restrictions arising in later steps demanding changes in previous stages.ĭuring this step, the design team will gather information that will serve as a foundation to set the design constraints and goals. The approach is made of six steps, namely, Analyses, Constraints and Goals Specification, Preliminary Design, Detailed design, Testing and Development. The design approach briefly described here is the result of my previous experience in Baja SAE design team, my internship in the engineering design department of a company that builds racing cars to the largest motorsport category and some minor categories in Brazil, and from some excellent books, which I will recommend in the end of the article. With cleverness, one or more resources may be substituted by another.įigure 1.
Resources include time, budget, previous experience and resources in the design and building facilities, such as computing power, prototyping and manufacturing machinery, testing equipment, instrumentation, and so on.
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Before the design process begins, one needs to have full knowledge of the resources available, and on the limitations imposed by these resources. The design process of a race car (just as many things in engineering) is not a sequential process, but rather one where there are many “backward steps”, as many iterations and solution refinements are made. The design teams in the many motorsport categories are constantly developing new solutions with one single goal in mind: to make a car that, in combination with the driver, travels the distance of a circuit in an amount of time smaller than any other driver/vehicle combination present in the race venue at the day. Race car design is one of the most fascinating and yet one of the most complex aspects of the racing world.
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