Bonneville 10

Fireproof Matt:

 

 

 

So I’m all saftey’d up, less the helmet.  All my equipment is certified to protect me from a blazing inferno of a motorcycle.  My arm restraints are so advanced, they’re from the future:

 

 

 

I couldn’t get a good picture, but they’re stamped as though they were manufactured in February 2009.  Granted, they are manufactured back east, but I’m sure the time difference is only three hours, not several days.

 

Also, Matt has a new web site!  SuperfastMatt.com!  Also, SuperfastMattMcCoy.com!  Either one, they both go to the same place!  It’s still in the manufacturing process.  Stay tuned!

 

 

 

Rolling Chassis is planned for next weekend; hopefully there will be a video of me rolling down a hill.  The land speed soap box derby.

Bonneville 9

Well, I have just purchased a full fire suit that is rated beyond what I need. I am required to have an SFI 3-2A/15 suit, and I bought a 3-2A/20, which means I can be on fire a full 40 seconds before I get a second degree burn, ten seconds more than the /15 suit. My aversion to spending craploads of money on fire suits turned out to be less than my aversion to being on fire. That coupled with the fact that I got a really good deal on the suit, and the fact that I got a donation from an adopto-mom who probably doesn’t want me to be on fire, meant that a good fire suit was the way to go.

Speaking of pictures, check out my magical ability to make a $7 ebay throttle body into a custom, shiny racecar part in less than an hour:

Tires are becoming an issue. I’m getting a lot of objections on the message boards about the front tire. Apparently people don’t trust aircraft tires. I talked with the motorcycle streamliner tech inspector and he basically said that if I think it will work, and I have evidence to show it, they’ll let me run. Of course, if the tread starts chunking, I’m done, so I’m looking for a plan B. Possibly a solid aluminum or a fiber-reinforced plastic tire/wheel. My other option, which I am seriously considering, is to sell the F4i and buy a 50cc engine. It’s actually a pretty competitive class, and I’m sure I could take the record if I really tried. It would also cost less, because I would only need one chute and one fire system. But alas, I would only be going 150-ish MPH. Also, I’m looking for website URL ideas. Something that is all around Matt. Something that can point to a site about my motorcycle, my writing, and other Matt related things. Something easy to remember and sounds good in an email address matt@---.com. Also, it has to still be available. Let me know if you think of anything.

RCE Jan 09 - Getting the Balance Right

Some people are lucky enough to turn their hobby into a career and spend their weekdays doing what they love. Others work eight hours a day just to spend all their hard earned money on their hobby when they get home. More than a few of my colleagues ask “Can’t it be both?” They spend their weekdays building someone else’s racecar so they can spend their weekends building and driving their own.

These two areas are mutually beneficial. Your professional experience will certainly help your amateur endeavors, but you might be surprised at the knowledge and perspective you can gain when you get away from the money.

In amateur racing, like professional racing, the game is easy: find a place that fits your experience, your budget, and your interests. For me, an engines engineer with experience in aerodynamics, living in Southern California, Land Speed Racing seemed the obvious choice. Yes, people still do that. But with racecar engineering as a job, and racecar engineering as a hobby (and writing for racecar engineering on the side…) would I get burnt out spending all day every day designing and building racecars? Not likely; amateur and professional racing are so far removed from each other that I might as well be building a sailboat. At work the game is incrementing the performance of a component by some small percentage within the rigid framework of the rules. In Land Speed Racing, there are no rules. Well there are lots of rules, actually, but they’re all on the safety side of the vehicle. As far as the engine goes, you can do pretty much whatever you want. Adding methanol injection and a turbocharger will simply move you to a different class.

This blew my mind when I first started designing. I had to take a completely different approach. What is horsepower, really? What is the cheapest way to make it? How much cylinder pressure can I make before my engine explodes and my cylinder head gets sent into low earth orbit? Just because you can spray nitro-methane into the cylinder with a fire hose doesn’t mean you can.

My former boss taught me that, while it’s good to see what everyone else has come up with for a solution, it’s good to come up with your own first, and then compare. There is a delicate balance for professional racecar engineers in amateur racing: we must be able to bring our expertise to the design without ignoring the clever and well thought out solutions that have emerged from years of that vastly important cache of knowledge: experience. That experience may not directly translate to our nine-to-five racecar, but it has become clear to me that the design challenges and added perspectives are a great benefit in the increasingly competitive world of professional auto racing.

Employees of auto racing often get so focused on the iterative development that they forget the bigger picture. And while we may sometimes look to other competitors or even other racing series for ideas, it’s hard to beat the accumulated knowledge and experience of dozens of people with open rules who aren’t looking at each other’s design for that extra 0.1%. People often talk about thinking outside the box, but don’t forget the value of rummaging around in someone else’s box.


This article originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Racecar Engineering.
Copyright © Matt Brown 2009
Cannot be used or reprinted without permission.

SCE Jan 09 - Parity of Purpose

How do you make a small fortune in auto racing? You start out with a large one. It’s an old saying, but I think it says a lot about my chosen profession. It is true, first of all; racing is not likely to be offered as an investment option in your 401k. It is true because money equals speed, which means every race has 42 cars on the track that aren’t spending enough money. In an effort to combat this, NASCAR has a history of making rules that try to limit cost, all of which are obtuse and futile. With most components on the car, there is some level of cost, just above your current level, that will give a performance advantage. Limiting the cost of one component will only have the effect of increasing the available budget for another component. Such will be the result of the rumored “minimum valve mass” rule. It’s only real affect will be a bad day for the valve maker, and a good day for some other widget maker. Occasionally, and I love seeing this, one of these rules will inadvertently have the effect of dramatically increasing the cost of a part. I won’t get into the details, suffice it to say that some very expensive metal matrix composites qualify as “magnetic steel”.

The only real way that this approach could work is at the extreme of fully spec cars, and I am afraid this is the path NASCAR has set itself on. So many components are limited to a few pre-approved part numbers, very specific dimensions and alloys, or are flat out handed to the teams prior to a race. It is approaching point where there is no car left, not in any competitive sense. It seems destined to become a driver personality sport, leaving roaming bands of unemployed racecar engineers wandering the east coast looking for employment, standing on street corners with signs that read “Will perform gas exchange analysis for food”. As a professional racecar engineer, I don’t want to see this happen, but I don’t think most race fans do either. When you spec out the cars, you really do take the cars out of the race. We have a connection with cars, a culture of cars and speed. NASCAR takes a bite out of that with every added spec, every time they homogenize the cars into one big loaf of boring. So how can we ensure that the big money teams won’t win every weekend? We don’t, we can’t. The only way to ensure a level playing field is to control the flow and distribution of money to the teams, and the only way to do that is to franchise the teams. That’s right, I said it. Of course this is not a new idea. More importantly it is also not popular, easy, or likely to happen anytime soon, which is unfortunate given the problems it would solve. Consider the parity in a franchise series like the National Football League existing in NASCAR. Teams will all have a more even budget, minimizing the money advantage and leaving gusto as the division between first place and one of those less important places. The playing field will level, increasing excitement and spectator interest. The troublesome top 35 rule will be history; every car would race every weekend. Most importantly, the cost limiting rules will be unnecessary and development of the cars will once again be paramount. Exciting component designs, setups, materials, and test beds will be the norm, and the best use thereof will determine next week’s winner. The trend of abstruse and irrelevant designs will be replaced with development that may actually have correlation to the other cars at the event. You know, the Impalas, Chargers, and Camrys in the parking lot.

Okay, that last part might be wishful thinking, but for sure the developments will be more interesting and diverse. Think of how much more exciting that will be for the fans and, perhaps more importantly to you, the racecar engineers. The obstacle between us and this, possibly slightly embellished, fantasy future is the same obstacle creating all these problems to begin with: money. Well money and control. But the same three teams really are winning every week, and the fans really are leaving. When the fans go, the money goes, and when the money goes, change happens. There is no happy ending to the cost limiting path.

It’s only a matter of time before NASCAR finds itself backed into a corner where racecar engineering is a distant memory, a position replaced with the excitement and passion suitable for the Maytag Repairman. And then what?


This article originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Stockcar Engineering.
Copyright © Matt Brown 2009
Cannot be used or reprinted without permission.