Two Guys Rally

Why The Seats Are So Low In a Rally Car [ September 25th, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

You may have noticed that the co-driver can barely see above the dashboard. No… co-drivers are not like horse racing jockeys, they are  average when it comes to height. What makes them look like children is the seat height.

Co-driver seats (to an extent Driver seats too) are much lower in the car than your standard seat. That is because the engineers are trying to bring the center of gravity(CG) closer to the wheel hub height for more predictable handling. Higher centers of gravity accentuate ‘weight transfer’ in the car and that can make a car way more dangerous than it should be. 

This is why all the components that are high up, like the steering wheel, tend to be made of materials like carbon fiber. While the cars have a minimum weight (in the WRC) the engineers try and place the weight as low as possible in the car. In fact, Subaru’s “boxer” engine is an attempt to keep the engine as low as possible and further bring the CG down.

So stop making fun of how a co-driver might look in the car, for all you know they could be bigger faster and stronger than you… looks can be deceiving.

Keeping Drivers Cool [ July 30th, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

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.

What is a Co-Driver? [ April 18th, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

Unlike most motorsports, in Rally Racing you have two people in the car. That second person in the car is called the Co-Driver, or sometimes the Navigator. They are not dead weight either, they serve an extremely important purpose: to tell the driver what is ahead. They will remind the driver of how fast to take the next corner and what the corner after that is, in order to setup for corners.

While a closed circuit where drivers drive countless laps of the same eleven corners may be memorizable, in Rally the cars might see the same corners twice (depending on how many times a stage is run). A single Rally stage could have a hundred corners, so memorizing them is out of the question. The Co-Driver will read notes to the driver, describing the corners and what to expect (Jumps, bumps, trees on the inside of the corner). In some rallies the notes are provided, in others the drivers and co-drivers will have a Recce, where they drive the stages at slow speeds and write down every bump, jump, corner and danger. The accuracy of the notes by the best co-drivers is so good that a good driver can drive solely off of the notes.

Of course, since reading notes and keeping your place in them is not hard enough already, the Co-Driver gets stuck with other tasks too. Some of these tasks include, pulling on levers as you enter a water crossing (Subarus on the SWRT), watching so many gauges an airline pilot wouldn’t know what to do, activate the wiper blades, be blamed if anything goes wrong, push the car out of anywhere it is stuck and of course dealing with the rally officials.

With all the stress a Co-Driver takes, they have to be a pretty relaxed person. They also have to be extremely organized with everything related to the car, because they tend to be the ones dealing with people not on the rally team. So next time you see a Co-Driver, thank them for everything they do (even if they’re not doing it for you).