Racecar Engineering

In my years as a motorsport engineer, a particular memory that will stay with me is a time I attended an MIA conference in 2019. It was held at Force India’s HQ and lots of senior motorsport representatives were present. It was a great event as I had

On face value, Andrew Green and his design team at Racing Point have done an exceptional job in producing a 2019 Mercedes-like car, a move which has propelled the team to much nearer the front of the F1 grid. However, results haven’t quite met initia

For the second season running, one of the most interesting cars in the Formula 1 pitlane is not a Mercedes or a Ferrari, but an Alfa Romeo. Cast your mind back to the beginning of the 2019 season, when the technical regulations encouraged simplified

Mechanical inerters, comprising a rotating mass on a ball screw, first appeared in Formula 1 in 2005, and for some time McLaren had a monopoly on the technology, thanks to a smart commercial agreement with the original inventor of the device, Profess

It is now a long-debunked theory that oval racing is just about making a car turn left around four corners. Preparing the car for one of the greatest races on earth, the Indianapolis 500, is as complicated as any other racetrack, more when you consid

In the qualifying session the cars run alone for four laps and the average is counted as the overall speed and lap time (writes Paul Thomas). Given the variation, not only in car performance but also tyres, during this run this is no matter of chance

Ricardo Divila’s first article about the Nissan GT-R LM was the first of three planned to outline the audacious concept, revealing the promise of performance, the complexities involved and the compromises made. Divila, known to us as ‘the advisor’, w

Q I was looking at the pic of the DSR racer in your column in the February 2020 issue of Racecar Engineering and one thing about it struck me – they were using a cog belt drive. Cog belt drives are seven to 10 per cent more efficient than a chain dri

The German idealist philosophers were right when they said anything is possible. You just have to say the magic words, ‘Nobody would ever do that.’ Look what Doug Milliken sent me in response to my recent articles on differentials. In Jan-Feb 202

You’re probably familiar with the name Multimatic, and I bet you it’s for several different reasons. That’s because Multimatic is a company who have been involved in almost every aspect of racecar development for the last 28 years. In that time, the

Wind tunnel testing has a fascinating history, beginning in the aerospace industry. As testing methods became more sophisticated and laboratory testing evolved, a need was identified to provide a method of validating design concepts. The Wright broth

To say motor racing has a Jekyll and Hyde relationship with technology is an understatement. When things get tough, the technology that exists is always the first scapegoat for why things have gone awry. A recent example of this has been the banning