I rode in a friend’s Ferrari (1978 308) recently and while I love how it sounds… I often can not get enough of the turbocharged sound. So if you love the sound of turbochargers doing work here you go:
Link for you RSS peeps.
It may be an older video of ours, but I love it and cannot get enough.
Update: Apparently I decided to post this exactly two years after uploading it to YouTube. Odd.
Travis Pastrana’s car is supported by oh so many spares of almost everything on the car. Rarely would you get to see inside the support vehicles unless you were at a rally. I happened to stumble across a video of just that on YouTube. You may want to fast forward a bit past the intro.
Here is a link to the video for you RSS folks.
The whole point of keeping a racecar cool is so you can keep the driver(s) cool. There are lots of neat ways that race teams around the globe do it. Here are a few of them:
Cut Back On Layers
This may sound obvious but most racing suits have three or more layers of material to them. Keeping the layers down to a minimum (safety still matters) will allow the air you bring into the car to do its job and cool the driver down. The Subaru World Rally Team cuts that down to 2 layers of outerwear for the really hot rallies. The neoprene underwear still restricts breathability but keeps the drivers safe from fire.
One of the neat things about Rally Racing is that short sleeved suits are allowed in the extremely hot rallies. Many famous world champs have rocked the short sleeves or rolled up sleeves during desert rallies. See Colin McRae and Richard Burns for prime examples.
Drink Lots of Water
Being properly hydrated keeps drivers cool for a few reasons. First of all they can sweat, and if the car is breathing right that sweat can evaporate and will take a large amount of heat away from the driver(s). You will also lose a large amount of water through sweating, especially in the heat of a cockpit.
Your body is mostly water, so any heat your body generates related to general metabolism gets dumped into that mostly water body of yours. Less water means higher temps for the same metabolism (when controlling for the effect of sweat).
Your blood volume is also 80-90% water and so losing water means your blood volume will go down. This makes your heart work harder (oh look more energy release) and you feel hotter for the same temperature. Petter Solberg has said that he and Phil Mills will drink 10 liters of hydration fluid (mostly water and some electrolytes) in a day. That works out to over 1 gallon per person on that day not including the water that is in the food they eat. So drink up before and on race days.
Put Things In Freezers
Put everything you wear in a freezer (except maybe the neoprene) as it will make it a little nicer for that much longer. Your clothes will absorb that much more heat before letting you heat up.
Throw in some towels sprayed with water. Freeze those puppies so when at service, or pre and post race, you can wrap one around your neck and keep cool.
Mix Alcohol and Water
I am not saying drink alcohol, but add water and rubbing alcohol together and keep that chilled in a spray bottle. When you can, spray some on your skin and lots of heat will be pulled away with the alcohol and water (so will the oils in your skin). This works so well that some racecars will put this mix in intercooler spray reservoirs. It really will make that much of a difference.
Drinking alcohol will actually hurt your ability to cool off as it is a diuretic. So that is just one more reason not to drink when racing (besides the many obvious ones).
Neat Technologies Help
A loyal reader Dustin Tarditi reminded me about things like UnderArmor (loved it for lacrosse) and their high tech cousins deemed Cool Suits. Under armor is great for wicking away sweat (and with that heat) from the body and allowing air to do its job.
Cool Suits are even cooler as they will run coolant (water or what have you) from a cooler that is in the racecar (or in the pits) through tubes and across your body. The tubes are zig zagged across your chest and they pull heat away from your body into the coolant (which goes into the cooler).
Newer styles of Cool Suits are focusing on the wrists and palms. Why? Because “in order to cool the body you must cool the blood”, and the blood is a lot closer to the skin around the hands. This is the same reason you treat heat stroke/exhaustion by cooling the hands and feet rather than the whole body (the latter is dangerous as it may make it harder for the body to cool itself as it will bring the blood into the core due to shock). The trick to the new technologies is making them lightweight and not interfere with the driver(s) control of the car.
Gas stations need to be refilled just like your car. The trucks that fill the gas stations have pretty busy schedules, so they pump in the gasoline as fast as they can. That is all fine and dandy until you are refilling your car soon after they refill the gas station. The refilling process stirs up all the particulate matter that settles out of the gasoline in the storage tanks. The particulate matter then gets pulled up into the gas pumps and into your car.
So don’t fill up at a gas station that has been refilled recently. While a small amount, you’ll be spending parts of a penny on things that are not gasoline and paying for it as gasoline. Plus you will be making your fuel filter work just that much harder and possibly restrict its flow over time. So if you see the gas truck in the gas station, keep away from there for a few hours. It might save you that much more (if your time is worth it).
As pointed out here in passing before, we’re excited for the 2008 X-Games and the rally event that it is going to have. Just a reminder to everyone, the X-games is coming up very soon, starting on July 31st, this Thursday, running to Sunday, August 3rd.
A large part of the philosophy behind TwoGuysRally is to attempt to create a larger Rally awareness and fanbase in the USA. Media coverage is sorely lacking, and the general popularity of the sport is just pathetic compared to many other countries in the world, especially when you look at European countries. How can we fix this? Well, now that the opportunity is presented to us, go watch the rally coverage along with all of your friends who have even the slightest interest in motorsport! The more people you recruit into the crazy sport where we toss cars through trees at high velocity in the snow, the better! I mean seriously, who doesn’t enjoy the insanity of the co-driver’s pace notes, and his reaction to unforeseen events, forbid they actually happen.
Unfortunately, I’m having difficulty finding exactly when the Rally is going to be shown. Anything that covers X-Games should show it, or some of it. I know that it will be airing on ABC on Sunday sometime, in the middle of Skateboarding. So make plans to sit near a TV this Sunday to watch it, I know Charles and I will be!
Charles made a mention about keeping calm to improve your driving a few days back. There are two things that brought this article to my attention recently.
First would be the F1 race in Germany last weekend. For those who follow the F1 races, notice how much Filipe Massa’s driving improved when he stopped pushing the car too hard. It is possible, and perhaps too easy to create strange and unsettling handling issues that unnerve you when pushing too hard. This will just make you nervous and lose confidence in the car. Stay calm, don’t let the pressure affect your driving negatively. I realize this is easier said than done, and requires some practice, which brings me to my second point.
The other relates to driving on normal roads with everyone else. A major problem with cars is that we treat them as our own personal space, when we have to share that space with others on a public road. Invariably, we get frustrated and annoyed with other drivers who don’t do what we want them to. I saw a few good examples of this on the drive home from work today. There was a large backup caused by an accident, two lanes closed on a three lane highway. When it came time to merge to the one lane, everyone went from just driving normally to honking, swearing, cutting each other off, and generally carrying on. Just calm down, use a blinker, and try to set a good example for other drivers on how to behave. This prevents a lot of stress, as well as potential accidents. Both are good things to avoid! By mastering your patience with the insanity of the general population, you will take a large step forward to mastering your calmness on the race course.
While this is not so much a gas saving tip as it is a money saving tip, I think it addresses a common misconception about gasoline.
Stick to Low Octane Gas. If you don’t have a requirement for above 89, buy the lowest octane gas that will keep your car working. Octane has nothing to do with engine performance by itself. That is 93 octane will not make a car that only needs 87 octane run better.
Higher octane gas can put up with higher temperatures before it ignites, so high performance engines take advantage of this fact. They compress and heat up the gas and air more than a normal engine would in various ways. They could turbo/supercharge, increase compression in the cylinders, etc… All of those would require higher octane gas. If they used lower octane gas, the engine may start to knock. That means the gas is igniting before the spark and you can damage many parts of your engine when this happens.
So unless your engine requires it to prevent knocking (detonation), stick to the lower octanes.
Many people tend to think that roll cages only provide safety and some extra weight, but they’re forgetting something: what they can add is stiffness.
Because roll cages were mandated as required safety devices in oh so many racing leagues, clever engineers figured out that they could use them to make their cars better. I don’t know who did it first, but they decided to connect all the suspension points together with a tubular space frame and call it a roll cage. Suddenly the mass of tubes becomes a way to stiffen up the car’s chassis.
You might not realize just how much a normal street car’s chassis flexes under any sort of acceleration (0-60, cornering, braking, etc…). This flexing acts much like the suspension, in fact most go-karts depend on frame flexing as the suspension (also the tires). However this flexing in a normal car changes the geometry of the suspension which can make a car less predictable and much harder to tweak (suspension wise).
Connecting the points where the suspension meets the frame with tubing (aka roll cage) can significantly increase the stiffness of a stamped sheet metal frame. This will keep the suspension geometry closer to normal under hard accelerations and allow you to more consistently judge how your suspension is affecting your car. However in most cars, connecting the suspension points (strut towers) will require to send tubes through the firewall of the car. Do you notice the tubes going through the firewall on the Subaru US Rally Team car? You should not be intimidated by the firewall, cut through it and reseal it around the tubes!
So, if you’re going to add a roll cage, don’t just add it to be within your competition rules. Take advantage of the rules and stiffen up your car so you can better adjust your suspension. Also, it results in less deflection in the chassis, which Mark tells me means you’ll end up with “smaller cyclic loading” on it. That means you’ll have more use of the chassis before it fails from normal race stresses. HOORAY ROLLCAGE!!!
While racecars are usually most definitely awesome, today’s weather reminded me they are pretty effing hot inside them. In the quest to save weight (translation: saving time on your laps/stages) common things are kept off the car. Air conditioning is gone, underbody/frame insulation is gone and the lexan windows usually dont roll down. Combine that with the fact that a racecar’s engine runs quite a bit hotter and cars with antilag systems (ALS) have exhaust temperatures above 1000 ºC the car’s interior will be hotter when running. However there are a few tricks to keeping the cabin temperatures survivable:
Air Vents
Racecars have a love hate relationship with air. At really high speeds it slows them down and sometimes even makes them crash, but it also cools their engines. In a similar fashion, it can help cool the cabin and driver(s). Keeping your drivers alive means getting them nice cool air to breath. Good helmets allow the driver to breath and it lets sweat do its work at cooling the driver(s) down. NASCAR likes to use forced air helmets that push air through the helmet, while Rally tends to use open face helmets (very breathable and you can yell at your driver in them).
In order to let a helmet do its job air needs to be getting to the driver(s) from outside. Vents to the cabin are nice for this. Rally cars often have a vent on the top center of the car to let air in through a diffuser so the drivers can breath and cool off. Air also has to exit the cabin, but if your windows are closed how can it do that? Closable vents in the back windows help with getting air out of the car, however in a Rally application I would suggest a filter on them (dust likes to come into the car otherwise). Andrew Comrie-Picard’s Mitsubishi is a shining example of common air ducting.
Window Tint
Sunlight heats up the cabin majorly. Ever been burned by a seatbelt buckle that was left in sunlight on a hot day? I know I have. Tinting a racecar’s windows with reflective tint can reduce any sunlight that is causing the cabin to get real hot. While black tint works to combat cabin temperatures, mirror tint works better (more reflection, less absorption) as it will not radiate as much heat through the glass into the cabin.
Roof Paint
Another way to keep the cabin temperatures from skyrocketing due to sunlight is to paint the roof of the car. The roof of the car is often not seen by spectators, so diverting from your colorscheme is not as big a deal. Painting the roof white will keep it from absorbing as much heat from the sun and further lowering the temperatures in the cabin.
Interior Paint
The interior is exposed to light too! Roll cages and the inside of the car frame make up a large surface that can absorb even more heat. Painting them white keeps them from absorbing as much heat. Plus a consistent interior color makes the car look neater and better organized. Also white shows everything wrong(great trait in a racecar) like: all sorts of leaks including exhaust, cracks and where you dropped your notes pen.
Insulate Exhaust Pipes
Exhaust pipes in racecars get extremely hot. They get way hotter than the exhaust on a street car so there is a lot more heat that comes off of them and into the cabin. Wrapping the exhaust in heat insulation might add a couple pounds, but it might give you a better performing engine. Higher exhaust gas temperatures means higher exhaust gas velocity, and if you’re running a turbo this means a faster spooling turbo. Not only will you get a possible gain in your engine, the cabin temps will drop. A normal exhaust will radiate heat into the metal on the underside of the cabin (a good amount of it too) which will transfer into the cabin. 1000ºC exhaust gas will conduct massive amounts of heat through a thin piece of metal(exhaust piping).
Regardless of what you’re racing doing everything you can to combat high cabin temperature will make your racedays more enjoyable and more consistent. Heat fatigues people, and tired drivers are dangerous drivers. That one, came straight out of a DMV Manual.
I was pushing a cart around at work today at a rather rapid rate, and no, I was not racing a co-worker, I swear! It was one of those carts that had fixed front wheels and rear wheels that were free to pivot. Being the forever analytical engineer I am, I noticed how much the cart liked to turn, and how much the front wheels slid. I didn’t give it much thought until I hopped into my car to go home. Then: “Why don’t we see many, if any cars with rear wheel steering?”.
Obviously, it must have some sort of major handing characteristic that is undesirable, or we would have seen it in racing a long time ago. It is kind of hard to predict what such a car would handle like without testing it out. I would say drive a normal car in reverse, but that’s a little different because the suspension is designed in such a way to make the wheels center when going forward. In reverse, the car wants to turn more into the direction it’s turning.
From an overall physics standpoint, it’s rather curious to think about. Normal cars turn by pulling the front end in towards the center of the turn, the rear wheels just follow along. With a car that has rear wheel steering, the back end is let loose, and follows the front tires that stay on the same line. This should sound vaguely familiar, as that is what happens when the car oversteers. To be precise, it’s very very similar to what is happening when the car oversteers just enough that the turn can be held by keeping the front wheel’s axis in line with the center of the turn.
Knowing that, it’s pretty easy to understand why we don’t see it in cars; The setup is highly unstable. However, this could be a very good thing for certain types of racing, if the driver is up to dealing with the demands. Rally is one where it’s benefits could be seen greatly. Going around hairpin turns would be a breeze, just keep the front wheels on the line you want to take, and pivot the rear out, just like what happens through careful use of throttle, steering and handbrake use on normal cars. If the front tires start sliding, simply turn a little harder to pivot the car in some more. If the back slides out, turn less. Very intuitive, as opposed to countersteering and managing throttle input to keep the back from spinning around, or juggling weight transfer through braking to manage understeer.
Someday I’ll have to try racing a rear wheel steering car to confirm my suspicions. Until then, just a thought to keep in the back of your mind, instead of taking for granted that cars should always use the front wheels for steering. Also, think about how easy parallel parking would be!
I was perusing Rally America’s site and one thing caught my eye: air dates for rally coverage on ESPN2. Im excited to see that American rally is making it on to TB, but I’m dissapointed at the same time. STPR, which took place in early June, will not air until July 27th along with Oregon Trail(April 20th) and the Olympus Rally(May 19th). Three rallies, which happened months ago, only get one hour of coverage from 5pm - 6pm (so 42 minutes) total. I think it is a shame we only get 10-15 minutes of coverage per event on TV months after they happened.
Thank god for the X-Games Rally, which will air on ABC for much more than 15 minutes of Rally highlights. How do you guys think the coverage should be handled? During the event have daily highlights and recaps? A whole rally channel to cover every aspect of Rally 24/7? Highlights only? I’m eager to hear what you think.
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