RCE Oct 08 - Supplier and Demand

It’s an amazing thing to see a production intake valve being made. The forged blank is fed into a lathe by a robot, the view window goes white with the spray of coolant and metal shavings, and six seconds later a valve falls out. Racing valves are manufactured a bit differently, taking close to six weeks from forged blank to finished valve. It’s like the difference between the carefully hand crafted Tag Heuer watch Kimi flaunts at every interview and the cheap drug store watch your brother hastily bought for you on his way to Christmas dinner at your parents house. They’re both watches, but that’s about all they have in common. The valves, be it the one in your 335i, or the one in Nick Heidfeld’s Sunday driver, have something more in common than just both being valves. Neither of them was made by BMW.

The big move to outsourcing in production car parts began a few years ago, leading to more outsourced design work. Suppliers are selling full systems for OEM production, from the brake rotor to the brake pedal. Until recently the game in racing has been to design in house, even if the manufacturing is done elsewhere. Now with these suppliers gaining all that valuable system design for the OEMs, coupled with race teams’ ever tightening budgets, more and more race teams are looking to suppliers for design work; full systems to drop into the car. And the suppliers are more than happy to give, offering different off the shelf systems for the mid-level teams or the ultra-new design for whoever wants to spend the money. Next year the new design will be the off-the-shelf system, and five years later it will be an option on your 335i.

It’s a good time to be a supplier, and to be an engineer for a supplier. Based on all accounts the future will hold even more design work for the supplier. It just makes sense; when you buy a brake system from a company that makes brakes, you have a brake system that has been designed by engineers who do nothing but design brake systems. And that company has all the facilities to design and test those systems. Also they know what everyone else has, and while that may not translate to the best system, it almost certainly translates to a competitive system.

I currently work for a supplier and I have worked for a racing team in the past, and while I did some design work on the racing team, most of my time was spent sourcing suppliers. Either that or trying to convince my boss that spending the money to buy the supplier’s off the shelf system was a better bet than in house designing and testing. “These guys can do it better and cheaper than we can do it here.” I would say. “Then what am I paying you for?” He would ask. And I would stand there staring blankly at him, wondering the same thing.


This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Racecar Engineering.
Copyright © Matt Brown 2008
Cannot be used or reprinted without permission.

SCE Oct 08 - Irrelevant Engineering

Auto racing is an esoteric exercise in engineering. Most of the advanced technologies and materials share only an ancillary connection with airplanes and very expensive bicycles. The practice, the development process, however, is a useful and valuable skill outside of racing. This is where the OEMs get the benefit from; engineers learning to designing parts that don’t seem to fit into the small window of performance and cost requirements, and yet somehow managing to succeed, making the car lighter faster and more cost effective. Or at least two of those things.

However, the advancement of technology in stock car racing existing within the unpredictable rules environment has created a culture where even the development process is an esoteric and irrelevant exercise. The teams have advanced significantly in the past fifteen years, now using very precise and expensive design techniques while the rule enforcers are making reactionary pass/fail decisions based simply on whether or not something looks a bit too fancy.

The progression of the front splitter supports in NASCAR Cup last year is a perfect example of this phenomenon. In the 2007 rules, the only stipulations on the splitter supports were that there had to be five and they had to be in specific locations. At first, most of the teams had simple, lightweight turnbuckles. As the season progressed and more aero testing was done, some different shapes started to show up. The same teams would bring very different supports for the downforce track than they would bring to the superspeedways. In all of these cases, the fancy looking/carbon fiber/aerodynamically shaped pieces were shot down by the tech inspectors immediately. Meanwhile the more clever teams were making parts that looked like they were purchased from the hardware store. At the tracks where it was aerodynamically advantageous, teams would have large bulky supports, using unnecessary quick-release pins and fasteners that were orders of magnitude stronger than the pieces they were connecting.

So the engineering challenge for these parts, as it is for many parts in stock car racing, is to spend hundreds of hours and truckloads of money designing components that meet performance requirements while at the same time looking like they were hammered together by a hillbilly in a garage in North Carolina. It’s actually kind of a fun exercise; it’s just not helping anyone. It’s expensive and time consuming to have to dumb-down a good design for the sake of passing what might be an arbitrary rule decision.

Teams are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing aerodynamics in European wind tunnels, why do we have to pretend like we’re not? In 2008, rules were added regarding the front splitter. And while I appreciate the attempt at putting the rules on paper, they still failed to define a window of development. The resolution to make rule decisions based on what the teams show up with presents a clear lack of any attempt at foresight, and ultimately results in costing the teams oodles of money developing designs that may be arbitrarily shot down for no better reason than that it looks different from everyone else’s. The culture of the sport and the mentality driving rule decisions needs to advance and catch up with the times. Big money teams are going to spend big money on development in whatever areas they see opportunity for improvement. Those areas become irregular and obscure with rules that try to hold back hundreds of millions of dollars in development money like a cartoon dam springing more leaks that Daffy Duck can plug with his fingers and toes.


This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Stockcar Engineering.
Copyright © Matt Brown 2008
Cannot be used or reprinted without permission.