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 THE DIFFERENCE IN BRAKING

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CONTENTS AND WELCOME
W
e have been here before. In
1999, walking the paddock, it
was hard to find anyone to bet
against Toyota in the lead up
to the Le Mans 24 hours. The Toyotas were
fastest in both sessions during pre-qualifying,
Martin Brundle was on pole position for the
race, and Ukyo Katayama finished the weekend
with the fastest lap of the race. The team had
the speed, the drivers and the reliability to win
against competition from Mercedes, Nissan,
BMW, Audi and Panoz. However, the cars were
unable to beat the ultimate competitor; the race
itself. Brundle crashed out on Saturday evening,
Thierry Boutsen was hit from behind during the
night, while a puncture on Sunday prevented
Katayama from catching the victorious BMW.
This year, Toyota has everything in its favour
once again; speed, drivers, reliability and above
all, experience. However, as one rival put it,
they have found new ways of not winning, and
it could just be than an anvil falls from the sky
onto one of its cars while the other breaks down.
Estimates of how much time Toyota actually
has in hand range from two to three laps
and that is easily lost with a bad pit call, a
misjudgement in traffic or a simple mechanical
failure. This could yet still be a race, even if
the EoT is stacked artificially in Toyota’s favour.
If the team was telling the truth at the test
session in June, its race pace is around 3m19s,
quicker than last year and necessarily so. It has
fewer tyres than last year, and will make more
pit stops due to the regulations. That means it
will have more time on full tanks and used tyres,
which is what the team focussed on in testing.
Yet, Rebellion was second fastest, also
in race trim and could have gone quicker.
Toyota estimated that a qualifying run would
have yielded an extra two seconds on a green
Leading-Edge Motorsport Technology Since 1990
circuit that is traditionally found at the test day.
Rebellion, we could guess, would equally find
an extra two seconds in the right conditions.
BR Engineering had to modify its bodywork
to reduce the impact of pick up and, therefore
according to Dragonspeed, increased drag.
Le Mans
2018
Ginetta has yet to show its true colours, but
without having competed at Spa and with a
relatively small amount of running in the test for Step erth ert drtert
hse rgs ergseg sdf
its two cars, completing the race must be their gdfgxd fgxd fgs
focus rather than challenging for the overall win.
It is hard to see how teams with new cars
could challenge yet, again, we were here just
4 Toyota TS050
Nowhere to hide for the Japanese
12 months ago, when the LMP2 Jackie Chan
this year against the privateers
Racing ORECA came oh, so close to beating
both Toyota and Porsche against the odds.
10 LMP1 privateers
A round up of Toyota’s challengers
The focus of the race will be on Toyota’s
and how did they get here?
reliability at the front, but mid-field we have
the GTE Pro battle that is proving to be as 16 Aston Martin Vantage
contentious as it is fascinating. The Balance of First race for the new car built
Performance is based on last year’s race results,
(quickly) in Banbury
except that Aston Martin and BMW have since 24 BMW M8
developed new machinery and their true pace is Giant car makes its Le Mans debut as
a mystery. Ferrari estimates that the BoP penalty performance arguments reign
for its update kit will leave it 3.5s off the pace. 32 Strategic options
It’s all game playing, still, but Aston Martin How does a team keep up with its
has a race to get itself ready for the 24 hours car and the opposition at Le Mans?
following a heavy accident for Dane Marco 36 Reventec
Sorensen. The team took the decision to New tech allows teams to monitor
build a new car from scratch; no mean feat in fuel consumption accurately
less than a week before the car goes through 42 Dunlop
scrutineering. Meanwhile, up front, Ford, We delve into the world of tyres and
Porsche and Corvette will monitor their rivals’ changing race conditions
performance with interest. Ford set its times in
the morning of the test, Porsche in the faster
afternoon session as the track rubbered in. The
game of cat and mouse continues.
ANDREW COTTON
Editor Produced by ANDREW COTTON, PETER SMITH
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 3
 LMP1 – TOYOTA TS050 HYBRID

TECH SPEC

Failure
Toyota is a strong favourite to
win Le Mans this year but, as
Racecar discovered, the team is
taking nothing for granted and
its ageing TS050 has now been
beefed up, while a radical battery
development is also on the car
By ANDREW COTTON

Toyota TS050 Hybrid

Bodywork: Carbon fibre composite.
Engine: V6 direct injection twin-turbo; 2.4-litre; power 368kw/500PS; fuel, petrol.
Hybrid power: 368kw/500PS (front and rear combined); battery, high-powered Toyota
lithium-ion battery; front motor, AISIN AW; rear motor, DENSO; Inverter, DENSO.
Transmission: Transversal 6-speed sequential gearbox; constant velocity tripod plunge-
joint driveshafts; multi-disc clutch; mechanical locking differential.
Suspension: Independent front and rear double wishbone, pushrod-system;
torsion bars; anti roll bars front and rear.
Steering: Hydraulically assisted.
Brakes: Monobloc light-alloy calipers with carbon ventilated discs.
Wheels: RAYS magnesium alloy, 13 x 18in.
Tyres: Michelin radial (31/71-18).
Fuel capacity: 35.2kg.
Dimensions: Length, 4650mm; width, 1900mm; height, 1050mm.

With both Porsche and Audi out of LMP1

Toyota is the lone hybrid entry and it’s
never had a better chance to win Le Mans

4 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

is not an option
T
here is, for Toyota, this year nowhere
to hide. The loss of Porsche and Audi
from LMP1 has left Toyota alone
and exposed. The FIA WEC has faced
the need to bring the LMP1 privateers into
a window that they could win at Le Mans.
The emphasis is still on Toyota to make a
mistake before the non-hybrids could think
about anything more than a podium finish,
and Toyota has worked hard to avoid this
happening, simulating failures, encouraging
the team to react to non-existent problems
in testing and running rimless around a track
to simulate wheel speed sensors and how
they would react to such drama. They have
even tested the drivers’ knowledge of the
instruction manual, and found them wanting.
Toyota’s concentrated its pre-season testing programme
on racecar reliability and coping with failure modes
Of course, Toyota is still pushing the regulators
to ensure that there is a performance
differential between the hybrid and the
non-hybrids, and the non-hybrids are playing
that game well, too. However, all things being
equal, this should be Toyota’s year.
Balancing performance is a controversial
process. The system is based on the
Equivalence of Technology (EoT) table – which
is more commonly known as Appendix B –
which balanced diesel and gasoline when
Audi was racing its R18. The EoT now caters for
hybrid and non-hybrid concepts. Furthermore,
at the shorter circuits there may yet be more
performance balancing which will be based
on the track layout, and here the potential for
politics to win races is overwhelming.
Toyota was the manufacturer that, in 2012,
stepped into the breach left by Peugeot when
the French manufacturer ran into financial
difficulty and was forced to cancel its LMP1
project right at the start of the WEC. The
Japanese firm therefore abandoned a year of
development to go racing instead, and has
remained faithful to the series to date. It is now
the last manufacturer standing following the
withdrawal of Porsche, Nissan and Audi from
the series, and with no new manufacturers
willing to come in without a major change in
the regulations it stands alone against new
challenges from Dallara, ORECA and Ginetta.
Toyota needs to win to justify the investment
since 2012, having had the fastest car, the best
technology and sometimes the worst luck.
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 5
LMP1 – TOYOTA TS050 HYBRID
Above: There’s very little to distinguish this year’s TS050 from
last year’s example, but the car has had lots of reliability work
Right: Pit stops are a major discussion point with the EoT and
Toyota has negotiated a clear advantage with its refuelling times
‘We have completed
laps on three wheels,
and we have also faked
a lot of possible problems,
just to see how the
team reacts to them’
There is very little that is new on the Toyota this
year, with the majority of components being
tried and tested over multiple tests last year,
but what they have changed will, they hope,
make the difference. A new cooling layout was
tested at the pre-season test at Paul Ricard, but
otherwise the car is largely the same.
Be prepared
Toyota has concentrated its pre-season testing
programme on reliability and coping with failure
modes. In design, it has beefed up the clutch,
the wheel arches and the bodywork, as well as
practising those failure modes with its drivers in
testing (and in some cases found them out). ‘We
have completed laps on three wheels, faking a
lot of possible problems to see how the team
reacted,’ says technical director Pascal Vasselon.
‘At the moment the general feeling in the team
is that we are better prepared.
‘The game in the previous years was first
to achieve performance because to beat Audi
6 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
and Porsche we first had to out-perform them,’
Vasselon adds. ‘There was no way to be slower
but more reliable. So, first performance, and
then make this performance reliable and we
achieved that. In 2014, ’16 and ’17 we had the
performance to win and fundamentally we
had good reliability in that we were not failing
engines, gearboxes or batteries.’
Reliability drive
But the car was still failing, and for similar
reasons each time. ‘In 2014 we did not have the
speed, but the others were quality issues, or
difficulty to handle exceptional circumstances,’
Vasselon says. ‘This time we could handle things
differently, with less priority on performance. We
have done some, but nothing that compromises
reliability. Reliability has been a major priority,
but we have a baseline car that is reasonably
reliable so we did not need to pile up massive
mileage. Then we could dedicate more time
and effort to the third item, which was the
training of the team to handle the exceptional
circumstances. And we have been sacrificing
endurance mileage to train the team for things
that are outside the normal working range.’
The car is essentially the same design as
before, and even the bodywork has been carried
over from last year, while just two kits have been
homologated; low and high downforce. This
may have frustrated the development team,
particularly for a manufacturer that has targeted
technical development as the reason for staying
in the WEC, but on the grounds of costs and lack
of manufacturer competition it makes sense.
The tub is the same as was first introduced
in 2016 along with the new engine and
battery storage system, so there has been no
weight saving there; by agreement the three
manufacturers would run three seasons with
their monocoques, meaning a new one was not
due for Toyota until next year anyway.
But does all this mean Toyota has done no
technical development for this year? At the
Toyota’s Le Mans prep has gone beyond racking up laps and it
has simulated a whole host of possible problems before racing
Right: The team ran at race pace during the Le Mans test and
does not expect to match its 3m14s lap set in 2017 this year
‘What we have done was
mainly on the hybrid side,
on the battery and the
cooling of the battery’
pre-season test at Ricard much was made of the
improved lap times (five seconds faster than
2016, the last time that the WEC tested here),
and Toyota admitted it had turned everything up
to the max to stress its cooling system. Yet that
cooling system was actually the removal of the
air conditioning system that the manufacturer
used to cool the hybrid battery; possibly, the
reason why it failed to win at Le Mans last year.
Conditioned response
Project leader John Litjens explains: ‘What we
have done was mainly on the hybrid side on the
battery and the cooling of the battery. The air
conditioning system is out now because from
a weight point of view, and we saw at Le Mans,
if you have to change the front motor [it took
longer]; people said that Porsche was quicker,
but they didn’t have an air conditioning system.
‘You needed half an hour,’ Litjens adds.
‘Because there was gas inside that you have to
evacuate, you have to dry the system and then
put it all back again. The compressor was driven
by the front motor and was part of the unit so
when you change the front motor you have to
disconnect the lines and you have to open the
system. We then changed the battery too. It is
now air- and water-cooled, so normal radiators.
‘We had to change the radiator installation
because we changed the radiator sizes,’ Litjens
says. ‘The radiators are bigger, but you don’t
have the condenser or compressor. We asked
our Japanese colleagues to work on the
temperature because that is how it works.
The temperature that the cells work at is now
much higher because of the lack of the air
conditioning system. We don’t have an air
conditioning system at all. In the cockpit we
have the normal venting and fans.’
This change to the battery is a further step
change in the operating temperature of the
cells. Toyota was already proud of itself at the
start of the 2017 season that it had increased the
temperature by 10 per cent, and says that this
year it has another 10 per cent improvement
through the advanced cell technology.
Total confidence
The change in fuel supplier to the championship
could have caused a drama for the teams, but
Total has produced a blend that is very similar
to that of Shell, which had partnered the WEC
from the very beginning. ‘The development
of the engines is done in Japan, but from a
fuel perspective there is nothing to adapt,’
says Litjens. ‘For sure the risk is the refuelling,
and even there we didn’t see any surprises.
But it could have been major. The target was
to get a smooth transition. Total was given a
target to make the fuel so that they could not
do something out of control. We get the data
sheets of the fuel, and the specific calorific
energy and things would have been adjusted.’
Number crunching
But beyond all this the big topic of discussion
at the pre-season test was the Equivalence of
Technology, which limits the Toyota to 11 laps
at Le Mans, three short of the distance it claims
to be able to go without such a restriction. Lap
time will also be tilted towards Toyota, to the
tune of half a second to a second per lap at Le
Mans, and refuelling times favour the Japanese.
The final figures were not yet published at
time of writing, and nor is there confirmation
of how further balancing of performance will
be managed at the shorter circuits on the WEC
schedule after Le Mans and Silverstone.
‘When we develop performance we count
in tenths of seconds, and the unit of EoT is 10
seconds,’ says Vasselon. ‘We did not plan to
tackle the EoT circumstance with performance
development. EoT is a process that has to be
right. Mistakes can be very big because you
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 7
LMP1 – TOYOTA TS050 HYBRID
The TS050 was five seconds faster at Paul Ricard than it was in
2016, thanks in part to car development and a new track surface
‘It is okay to have LMP1
closer, but not to the
point that we are fighting
and banging doors’
manipulate the major performance drivers and
you cannot afford to be wrong because you
cannot recover from that. If the EoT is wrong, it
is not because we have developed this or that,
it is a process that has been clarified, and it has
to be right and achieve its targets.’
Delicate balance
But the EoT doesn’t really give Toyota anything,
Vasselon claims. ‘It is giving performance to non-
hybrid cars. It prevents us from running 14 laps.
Then it is tuning weight and fuel flow for the
non-hybrid cars. It is difficult to say if it has been
done right so far. We have never been running
in controlled conditions yet. It looks like the
privateers are competitive. But if we were on the
same regulations, then there would be no race.
It is not that someone wants a manufacturer
to win or not. It is agreed that there was an
interest to bring the field closer together. But
Our competition is not the non-hybrid cars; it
is Le Mans. So, it is okay to have LMP1 closer,
but not to the point that we are fighting and
banging doors. We need EoT to bring it close,
but there should still be a gap.
‘It could be a bit less than a second per lap,
maybe half a second per lap and five seconds
in refuelling, and one lap more per stint,
Vasselon adds. ‘Everywhere it is bringing us in.
8 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
The aero kits have been carried over from last year. This is despite the fact that new radiators have been
fitted to make up for the removal of the air conditioning, which had previously cooled the car’s battery
We could refuel 18 seconds faster, we go to five
seconds, so everywhere we come with a gap
within reason. But in principle we agreed to
bring the LMP1 cars closer together.’
Table manners
In the past, a simple calculation has seen the
EoT tables adapted to the WEC races based on
track length, but they have traditionally mainly
dealt with the differences between gasoline
and diesel. Otherwise, the LMP1 concepts were
similar in that they were hybrid, four-wheel
drive and all had equal access to development
potential. Now, the table has to be adjusted for a
car that is not a hybrid and therefore not subject
to the same fuel saving strategies.
‘There will be a tuning for WEC,’ continues
Vasselon. It will be different to what happened
before, based on simulations, of the relative
pace of the cars on the WEC track. Circuit length
will still be the main criteria and there will be
tuning. It will be complex, but then nothing is
simple when you try to balance things.’
One of the big issues that Toyota expects
to see is at the end of the straight where the
hybrid will have a fuel cut, the non-hybrids will
not. That was partly the reason why Nicolas
Lapierre crashed out of the Le Mans 24 hours
in 2017; as he approached the first corner he
passed an LMP2 car, the fuel cut came in, and
the LMP2 ran into the back of him. This year, as
well as the threat of an LMP2 car, there is also
the threat of a similar speed LMP1 car dive-
bombing the Toyota into the corners.
Privateer threat
So, with the team having practised coping
with unforeseen problems, and with the EoT
balancing performance in its favour, this year’s
WEC is Toyota’s for the taking, right? Maybe. But
Toyota is conscious that the privateer cars are
well designed and capable of challenging. The
BR Engineering Dallara has a lot of test miles
under its belt, while the ORECA showed pace
at the pre-season official test. So this year’s
Le Mans might yet be a race after all.
ENDURANCE RACING – LMP1 NON-HYBRID

New Order
Le Mans regulations favour the hybrids, but this is the best chance
for many years that a non-hybrid privateer could yet win overall
By Andrew Cotton

10 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

T
here are few places in racing today
where the chassis regulations permit
open competition; in Indycar the
Dallara chassis is king, LMP2 (and DPi)
is open to only four chassis manufacturers,
while even the DTM and Super GT series share a
common platform on which to build their cars.
One place that does enjoy freedom,
however, is the LMP1 field at Le Mans and,
since the withdrawal of Audi and Porsche, new
manufacturers have stepped in with the hope
of taking overall victory. They include ORECA,
Dallara as BR Engineering and Ginetta, which
has joined ByKolles in the privateer ranks.
ORECA has adapted its LMP1 chassis into its
LMP2 customer project, and then changed it
back into an LMP1 ready for the 2018 season
with Rebellion, powered by a Gibson engine.
Dallara took the learning from its LMP2 car, but
built a lighter and better LMP1 car, with the IP
owned by BR Engineering so the cars are known
as the BR1 and their power unit is AER for the
SMP team, Gibson for Dragonspeed. Ginetta
submitted an entry to become an LMP2 chassis
constructor but was not successful and instead
has developed an LMP1 chassis, powered by a
Mecachrome engine with an engineering team
around it led by Ewan Baldry.
The equivalence of technology may not be
in favour of the privateers (see RCEV27N7).
The balancing system artificially favours the
hybrid cars, although that has itself been
restricted back from its full potential to allow
the privateers to race. However, there has
been some discussion over what was initially
promised to the privateers; they say that they
were promised a level playing field, at least in
year one, while Toyota says that it must be able
to develop its car to maintain interest.
The FIA has sided with Toyota, keen to
demonstrate the capability of the hybrid
system in competition. The fact is that the
Main picture: Rebellion
ORECA appears to have
the speed to lead the fight
against Toyota on pace
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 11
ENDURANCE RACING – LMP1 NON-HYBRID
hybrid will race at Le Mans with almost half the
fuel consumption compared to the non-hybrids,
and will be able to go further on every tank of
fuel. Therefore, on paper and with a perfectly
clean race, the hybrid will win handsomely. Yet,
Le Mans rarely goes to plan, with changes to
the weather and track conditions, competitors
in three other classes, and basic reliability that
could leave a driver stuck out on track through
an innocuous malfunction but out of the
biggest race in endurance racing.
The privateers don’t have the hours of testing
that has been enjoyed by Toyota, and at Spa
in May was subject to normal delays, such as
pit stop driver changes which have to take
place as the same time as refuelling. The careful
choreography needed to hit the minimum pit
stop timeframe had yet to be perfected by the
time the cars lined up at the pre-race test.
‘We used more extreme
materials in the
monocoque, so we went
extreme with everything’
12 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
The non-hybrid cars were hit with a fuel
limitation before the test; reducing the
maximum flow from 110kg/h to 108kg/h with
a view to preventing them from getting within
half a second of Toyota without a ‘fuel lift’. At
Spa in May, Neel Jani set fastest time in the
Rebellion ORECA in third practice without lifting,
which meant he exceeded the maximum fuel
permitted per lap for the privateer. At time of
writing the ACO and FIA were yet to announce
the final EoT table for the 24 hours.
BR1
The BR Engineering design had a troubled
start to its life, with two heavy crashes at the
opening round of the WEC at Spa in May, both
of which led to FIA investigations. One of those
involved the SMP car, in Le Mans bodywork,
taking flight due to a combination of reasons.
However, Dallara had to react and produced a
new front wheelarch design, as well as a larger
hole over the front wheels to negate the impact
of reduced airflow through the area due to pick
up. Dragonspeed reported that the new kit
increased drag and therefore reduced straight
line speed, but the BR1 with the turbo engine
was still second fastest, behind the Toyota,
through the speed traps.
The low weight of LMP1 has pretty much driven
the chassis design concept, with almost 100kg
having to be taken out of the Dallara LMP2
design (930kg) to reach the 833kg base weight.
Russian engineers have worked with Dallara
to create the BR Engineering car, which was
designed around the SMP Racing team’s all-
professional drivers from the outset.
The team has gone down the newly
established route of having spring-loaded
pedals and a fixed seat, rather than the seat on
runners. ‘The driver can unlock and lock the
pedals from the dash panel, getting 50mm
of travel for fine adjustment,’ says Dallara
programme manager, Antonio Montanari. ‘This
is obviously in addition to three fixed positions
on the monocoque hard points, getting a total
adjustment of 130mm. We intentionally decided
to squeeze the monocoque as much as possible
for weight and aero reasons, therefore there
is not a huge amount of room for tall drivers.
Nevertheless, we had pretty tall drivers onboard
and so far it looks good.’
Designing for these drivers, and with the
general fitness levels required to run at LMP1
pace, meant fewer compromises needed to be
made in terms of accommodating larger drivers
than in Dallara’s LMP2 design. That led to a new
 The SMP BR Engineering chassis that
took flight at Spa was hardly damaged
and was used again at Le Mans
tub design, with lightweight materials, a higher
footbox, improved front suspension design and
a new steering rack design to be housed in the
narrower nose compared to the LMP2 base car.
‘We started from the LMP2 monocoque that
was already good, but the name of the game
in LMP1 is weight saving, more than anything
else,’ says chief designer Luca Pignacca. ‘The car
must weigh 100kg less than the LMP2 and that
is a lot. Fortunately, we had a good base from
which to start, because the LMP2 car carries a lot
of ballast with the Gibson engine, but we had to
redesign everything to save weight. We had to
use different materials for the monocoque, so
we went more extreme with everything.’
As detailed in RCE V27N4, the LMP2 Dallara is
focussed heavily on being a customer car, and
therefore does not go to the same lengths as
the Audi R18 chassis that was also built by the
Italian company, in terms of materials and safety.
The Dallara LMP2 design already incorporated
the Zylon panels into the chassis, which meant
a saving of weight and increase in stiffness, but
Montanari was clear that these are two different
concepts. ‘The monocoque shape is different,
smaller, narrower, everything is designed with
the weight target in mind,’ he says. ‘We have
used different materials, but we also changed
A new aero package was designed to reduce the impact of pick up on front downforce after a flight at Spa
the production process in order to optimise
every carbon layer overlap. There is a massive
effort behind it, as the weight target is very low.’
The front suspension is also optimised, in
part because of the narrower monocoque at the
front, in part because of the different size tyres,
and in part because of the weight. It is also, says
Pignacca, the IKEA philosophy; the second time
you do the job, you will do it better. The third
element is more sophisticated, says Montanari,
but overall the system is based on the LMP2
car. ‘We had a good base from LMP2, which we
believe the car is a very good car,’ says Pignacca.
‘We had a small problem with the front splitter,
but the rest of the car was a sound car; Cadillac
love the car and goes fast with it. We didn’t
need to change a lot the suspension pick up
points; it was a general optimisation. We went
lighter, more extreme with the geometry of the
monocoque to reduce the drag, and we have
used all the possibilities that the regulations
gave us, but this was mainly with the aero.’
The new tub needed to be crash tested, but
passed with flying colours. ‘The crash tests,
both static and dynamic, are quite demanding,’
says Montanari. ‘Nevertheless, we are proud
to say, we did pass all the mandated crash
tests at the first attempt, and saved quite a lot
of weight at the same time. We are investing
a lot in composite material research and FE
analysis, and these are what push you to do
more and more in that direction.’ This approach
undoubtedly contributed to both drivers
surviving their accidents at Spa.
The company leaned heavily on its simulator
to help with the design process, and there are
actually two slightly different chassis designs;
one for a turbo installation from Mecachrome
or AER (SMP’s approach), the other for the
normally aspirated Gibson engine (fitted to
the Dragonspeed car). ‘The aero package is
different, the cooling and radiator ducts are
very different; there is no intercooler, but the car
from outside does not look really different,’ says
Pignacca. ‘There is no drag penalty for carrying
a turbo engine and I am curious to see which is
going to be the winning engine. At the moment
The ‘IKEA philosophy’
means that when you do
something a second time,
you will do it better
the fuel flow is the same for both engines. The
AER is quite a light engine, so at the end of the
day the weight will be similar because with the
turbo engine you have to carry the intercoolers.
Aero-wise, there is not really a big difference.
AER requires not so much cooling.’
Also carried over from the LMP2 car is the
power steering system from Kayaba, and
the gearbox concept from Xtrac, although
the internals are different even from turbo
to normally aspirated due to the different
rev ranges. The casing, and therefore the
rear suspension design, however, is similar
regardless of engine installation. The car has
been designed with the Cosworth electronics,
another carry-over from the LMP2 design,
although with the AER engine Life Racing will
be used as the control unit. Brakes are Brembo
calipers and master cylinders and, while the
company also supplies the brake material, there
is no homologation period as there is in LMP2,
and so it is possible for a team to switch and run
with another company such as AP.
While Ginetta has focussed on front aero
and switching on the front tyres, Dallara took a
slightly different approach, looking for overall
car balance. ‘With the new rules, it is always
difficult to have enough front downforce,
but you have to have a car that is efficient, so
it has to be the right balance of downforce
and drag to have a winning car,’ says Pignacca
diplomatically. ‘With the regulations, they
facilitate the front end with respect to LMP2,
you can use a lot of features that are not allowed
in LMP2, but because we had a lot of experience
with LMP1 cars in the past with aerodynamics
we already had some good ideas.’
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 13
ENDURANCE RACING – LMP1 NON-HYBRID
Ginetta has gone for a high nose box and lightweight design, with the chassis weighing in at an estimated 750kg overall
ORECA R13
ORECA has taken a keen interest in the running
of this new car, and many of the Rebellion team
members now sport French accents. They have
not been to the ‘Allo ‘Allo school of learning
French, but are in fact many of the ORECA team
members, including some that used to work on
the Toyota programme (ORECA also provides
track support for Toyota).
The ORECA tub in the new car is now five
years old, having been designed to new
regulations in 2014 as the original Rebellion
R-One. As is now typical with ORECA’s way of
working, the green light for the R13 was given to
the 2018 project late, which compromised some
of the performance upgrades that ORECA’s
technical director David Floury would have
liked, including a weight saving programme
of approximately 10-15 per cent. ‘We would
have liked to have redesigned the tub, but
14 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
considering the timescale to do the project from
the start this was not an option,’ Floury says.
‘We had six months from the day we started the
project to the day the car hit the track, so in this
timescale we did not have time to redesign the
chassis. Had we had 12 months extra for sure we
would have considered it.’
The chassis didn’t need the same amount
of reworking as Dallara undertook with its
programme for BR engineering. Much of the
saved weight came from the Gibson GL458 4.5
litre V8. The unit itself is a development of the
4.2-litre GK428 V8 that powers the LMP2 cars in
European specification. ‘It was not realistic to
redesign the whole engine but we had a good
collaboration with Gibson,’ Floury says.
This being a customer chassis in concept,
there was very little work needed for engine
installation. ‘We had good experience working
with Gibson because we have been working
with them on the LMP2 side at the start in 2011
and when we used the Gibson engine in the
ORECA 07,’ Floury adds. ‘The other factor was
that we had experience with the engine in the
LMP2 car and the LMP1 engine is in many ways
similar. The installation is the same philosophy
so you have already been through the
difficulties. It needs more cooling. The car looks
from outside [to be the same] philosophy as
the ORECA 07, but the airflow structure is quite
different, because the car in detail is different.
We had to work towards improving the cooling
and this has been a challenge.
‘The front of the car has quite different aero
and that impacts the flow to the radiators,’
Floury adds. ‘The flow from the front to the back
is quite different and that is why in many details
you see differences between the R13 and the 07.’
The target lap time set by the ACO and
FIA around the Le Mans circuit is already
significantly faster than the old R-One. Then, the
factory cars qualified in 3m21s and the R-One
in 3m29s, but already the LMP2 cars in 2017
were qualifying in 3m25. The R13 is targeted as
being ‘significantly quicker than that’, according
to Floury, and the estimation is that the ACO
has targeted them to be hitting around the
3m13s mark, which the ACO and FIA believe
that the Toyota is capable of this year. ORECA
denies this, and is targeting race laps of 3m19s,
but the huge hike in performance has affected
everything from the weight distribution to the
suspension design and the steering concept.
Although the tub is the same, the rest of the
car is completely different, due to this 10 to 12s
lap time improvement target at Le Mans. The
splitter, floor, and flow to the tightly regulated
rear diffuser is all a major area of development
and ORECA says that there is hardly any
carryover of bodywork from one car to the
next. ‘The steering is different, the suspension
geometry is different because we don’t use the
same tyres, and it is not the same characteristics
in terms of weight, cornering speed and so on,
or in terms of engine characteristics,’ says Floury.
‘Weight distribution is different, and from the
P2 we had to save a lot of weight, so if you keep
everything the same then you don’t hit the
target. We carry quite a lot of ballast in P2, but
we still had a lot of weight to save for the P1.’
Another area of development was the Xtrac
gearbox, where weight saving was again a
key performance target, as well as improving
efficiency. ‘All the details have been looked at,
but conceptually it is not a new gearbox,’ says
Floury. The short timescale for the development
of the car meant that anything that appeared
too risky was rejected, and the team knows that
it has to be reliable if it is to stand any chance
of getting onto the overall podium this year. A
podium at Spa boded well for the first time out.
Ginetta
Ginetta presented its new car at the Autosport
Show in Birmingham, in January, 2018, with
an impressive engineering support team. The
project was launched at Silverstone, 2017, with

Mecachrome announced as engine suppliers,
Williams Advanced Engineering to provide
support, along with Paolo Catone as the
designer of the car. From the outset it was clear
that this was a serious programme, with the
engineering team led by Ewan Baldry.
The team had hoped to be one of the
four LMP2 chassis suppliers, and when their
application was not accepted, they moved to
an LMP1 project. They were briefly threatened
by the so-called ‘LMP2 Plus’ project, to take the
LMP2 chassis, open up engine development,
introduce non-confidential tyres and some
aero development, but that idea was quickly
shelved. By then, Ginetta was already well on its
way with the LMP1 programme, and Manor was
announced as a partner team for this season.
One of the first striking things about the car
is its high pedal box. ‘Early on in the project we
CNC cut an MDF mock up that had an adjustable
footbox height and we had a range of drivers
who sat in it and really decided what the limit
was in terms of how high to go,’ says Baldry. ‘It is
all about giving you the best possible front end.
We are quite a different concept to the Audi in
the way we deal with the front end, and closer
to what Porsche and Toyota have done, but it
is about giving clean passage at the exit of the
front diffuser sections. Making rear downforce is
relatively easy because you have the rear wing,
although the diffuser is controlled, but for the
aero guys it is about getting the front end good,
and then balancing the rest with the other
things that you have got.’
With the high nose, the front suspension
kinematics were more challenging, previous
experience from employed personnel helped to
shortcut the issue. ‘With the high nose, you have
to attach the wishbones to the tub somewhere,
but we had a good bit of data on that from one
of our employees who was working somewhere
else before. We also had Paolo [Catone, who
designed among other things the Peugeot
908] involved too, so we spent quite a long
time in the iterative loop to get the suspension
kinematics how we wanted them, but it wasn’t
hugely challenging,’ Baldry says.
The car weighs in at 750kg, we are told, and
its tub is significantly lighter than an LMP2
chassis, thanks to heavy investment by Ginetta
in structural analysis and material choices, which
the team estimates has saved 30 per cent of the
weight compared to an LMP2 car.
With engine supplier Mecachrome signed
up early, the car was designed around the
French manufactured engine, which led to
further weight saving. There is no integral
bellhousing and the gearbox bolts directly to
the engine. The gearbox itself, from Xtrac, uses
higher grade materials than those used in the
LMP2 gearboxes, saving further weight, and
the cluster has been rotated, the team tells
us, bringing the weight further forward in the
car. Megaline provides much of the electronic
components to the car, including the e-clutch,
gearshift mechanism and steering wheel
internals, allowing it to be fully configurable,
while Bosch takes care of the management
systems, including the PDMs and data logging.
ByKolles
The German team introduced its own chassis
in 2014, badged as the CLM/01 and powered
by the AER engine. The team claims to have
designed and built its own chassis with a view
to becoming a customer supplier. ‘It is built by
ByKolles,’ claims lead engineer Boris Bermes.
‘Everything on the car is ByKolles. The team has
everything, from the design to the car on the
race track, so it is like a Formula 1 team. We are
a manufacturer with our own car, buying an
engine from somewhere, and running the car
itself, which is unique as there is no one other
than Toyota doing the same as us.’
The team runs an Xtrac gearbox, similar to
every other LMP1 non-hybrid car, has beefed
up its AP clutch, and has switched from Brembo
to AP as brake supplier. The team is notable
this year for an extensive aero development
programme. The team had no intention of
competing in the full WEC in 2017, despite
being encouraged to submit a full season entry,
and instead spent the second half of the year
track testing. That has now been translated to
race conditions, but the car was still lacking in
the pre-race test on pure pace compared to the
opposition from the newcomers.
‘I would say that for sure aero has improved
a lot, and we are five seconds faster than here
[at Spa] last year,’ says Bermes. At Le Mans, the
car was four seconds faster than at the test at
the same point in 2017. ‘Engine installation was
working well here last year, so there are no big
changes. [There are changes to the guidance of]
Ginetta’s car has limited running ahead of the 24-hours and is targeting a finish, not expecting to challenge for victory
The team is annoyed that
the new regulations force
a wind tunnel programme
the air, piping and so on, but the installation is
very much the same. Basically this is just more
efficient, and we have more downforce.
‘We did quite an extensive test programme
with Michelin which was interesting, and
Michelin made a good tyre out of it, which is
helping the others a bit too,’ says Bermes.
‘Our target was to make something much
more suitable for the non-hybrid cars.
The front suspension is largely untouched,
save for some changes to the kinematics to
cope with the new tyres. ‘The tyre itself has been
adapted to non-hybrid and non-manufacturer
cars which are less complicated and less in
detail, more like normal race suspension
kinematics,’ says Bermes. ‘When you look at
the Porsche front suspension last year, it was
something which kept quite a big office busy
to get it done and set up properly. Michelin
also adapted to this, but it is very similar to all
the non-hybrid cars.’
The aero was developed in CFD, but the team
is annoyed that the new regulations effectively
force a privateer into a wind tunnel programme.
‘We asked to restrict wind tunnel testing as
straightline testing, but they didn’t
do it,’ confirms Bermes.
The stage is set for the privateer revolution.
Their chance of overall victory relies on Toyota
and their reliability, but you have to be in it to
win it, and they all fancy their chances.
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 15
 GTE – ASTON MARTIN VANTAGE

AdVantage Aston
It’s been a long time coming – and there’s quite a while before it
will actually race – but early signs are that Aston Martin’s all-new
Vantage GTE car has been well worth the wait
By ANDREW COTTON

The Aston Martin GTE is both longer and wider than

the previous version but, despite appearances, it has
a similar frontal area. The car was in action at Spa in
May, but was off the pace at the Le Mans test

16 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

T
he timing of the road car launch on
which the new Aston Martin Vantage
is based, and the development of the
race-going GTE Vantage that contests
the FIA World Endurance Championship at
the Le Mans 24 hours, meant that the team
could not get its car tested alongside its rivals
at the Ladoux test in France in September,
and was developing the racecar right up
until it completed its homologation process
at the Windshear facility in North Carolina in
November – all the new cars and evo kits
had to be tested at either Ladoux by the FIA,
or at Windshear by IMSA with FIA observers.
Despite a thriving US market for road cars,
the team elected not to undertake an IMSA
programme in 2018 and instead focused on the
WEC. The car therefore debuted at the opening
round of the WEC at Spa in May, and its first real
test in 24 hour racing will come at Le Mans with
two all-new cars for racing’s toughest challenge.
The 2018 Vantage is almost completely new – Aston Martin Racing
says that there are just five carry-over parts from the old model
The car has proven to be off the pace thus
far in racing and in testing, but rivals point to
sandbagging and BoP games ahead of Le Mans.
Since 2012, Aston Martin has relied on its
V8 Vantage to carry its banner in GT racing, and
with some fairly major upgrades – mechanical
in 2013 and aero in 2016 to meet new
regulations – the car has remained competitive,
thanks in no small part to the FIA’s Balance of
Performance system. But many have criticised
Aston Martin’s ability to remain competitive
on pure pace with such an old car against
models that are designed specifically to the new
regulations. But now the British team has finally
launched its newest model.
The 2018 Vantage is almost completely new.
The team says that there are just five carry-over
parts from the old model, and a list of major
changes in supply companies goes along with
a complete change in philosophy for Aston
Martin Racing. Michelin replaces Dunlop as the
tyre supplier taking out one of the variables that
was present in previous incarnations of the car;
Ohlins takes on the suspension manufacture,
Alcon the brakes, along with a completely
different AMG twin turbo engine and all-new
aero, not to mention a new body and bespoke
mechanical components.
Stiffer chassis
The out-going Vantage featured the old VH
architecture for its chassis. That meant that, in
road car guise, the chassis could be stretched
to DB9 or even four-door Rapide length, but for
racing it lacked a certain rigidity. The old chassis
was also a modular design, and while that has
helped the team to complete repairs following
accidents, it also meant a chassis that was not
stiff enough to match the current competition.
Aston Martin Racing (AMR), believes that the
all-new lightweight aluminium chassis, based
on the latest Vantage road car, is twice as stiff
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 17
GTE – ASTON MARTIN VANTAGE
The Vantage cocks a wheel during Sebring testing. Prior to launch it amassed more than 10,000 kilometres, including a 30-hour test. AMR has switched from Dunlop to Michelin tyres
as the outgoing model, thanks in part to closer
links with the production line. ‘The stiffness of
the chassis has improved vastly, and we have
also done more with the roll cage,’ says AMR
technical director Dan Sayers. ‘Being involved
with Aston at an earlier point means they have
done the first three shells on the prototype line,
and we have been able to get parts in there
and modify them before they go in, such as
floor brackets, exhaust brackets, lightening and
things like that. In terms of stiffness, the chassis
is close to double what it was.
‘The old car was modular, which had its
benefits, because we had some heavy prangs
in the old car and you can then unbolt part of
it and bolt a new part on,’ Sayers adds. ‘But a
bolted part is inherently weak.’
The new car is both longer and wider than
the previous version, leaving it with a similar
AMR is experimenting
with torque sensors that
may in future become
part of the balance of
performance process
18 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
frontal area than the outgoing car (despite
appearances to the contrary), and Aston Martin
Racing hopes that this will help to improve
the handling of the racecar, particularly on
the tight and twisty high downforce sections
of track that was a real weakness with the
previous Aston Martin GTE racer.
There are also major changes that will help
improve the handling that have been made
under the skin. AMR has worked hard on the
detail, lowering the centre of gravity through
dropping the engine and fitting a bespoke Xtrac
gearbox to the point that they are touching
the all-new five-piece floor. The carbon fibre
and steel floor features a splitter, three mid-car
sections, and a diffuser.
Conventional layout
The team did not consider an extreme concept,
such as Porsche’s mid-engine, in the latest GTE
and forthcoming GT3 car, saying that it could
achieve its targets with a conventional layout,
but there have been some major changes.
‘We have stretched the wheelbase to allow
us to package everything nicely, and that was a
regulation change part way through the design,’
says Sayers. ‘The GT3 regulations say that you
could move [the wheelbase] 60mm and GTE
was 50mm, and [following the convergence
talks] now they have consolidated them to
say both are 60mm, so we eked it out. It is a lot
wider than the current racecar, hence the similar
frontal area, and it is longer, so it is by no means
BMW M8 style, but it is a big car.’
AMR goes AMG
The biggest component change, however, is
the engine. Gone is the V8 naturally aspirated
powerplant, replaced by a 4-litre twin turbo
engine from AMG. AMR has made modifications
to the base unit, including fitting new, smaller
Borg Warner turbos than the road car due to the
boost pressure regulations that mean the turbos
don’t have to work as hard as in the production
car, plus new pistons and valves to increase
the compression ratio and improve efficiency.
However, the ‘hot-side inside’ turbos, nestled
within the V-angle of the engine, have led to an
extensive re-packaging exercise within the car.
Under the bonnet the car is tightly
packaged, although the team says that cooling
is not an issue following some careful planning.
Large ducts channel air through the radiators
and out ahead of the engine. One major design
target was to keep the charge air temperature
as low as possible, and the team believes that it
has achieved that goal. ‘We have insulated the
exhaust, the turbines in the turbos, and so we
have taken as many precautions as we can,
and with so low boost it helps because they
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GTE – ASTON MARTIN VANTAGE

The Vantage GTE alongside its road car cousin. AMR benefited from access to the standard car on the prototype line and was able to specify some race components very early on

Gone is the V8 naturally

aspirated powerplant,
replaced by a 4-litre twin
turbo engine from AMG
are not working massively hard, so they are
surviving reasonably,’ says Sayers.
‘The engine is not ideal from an installation
point of view [with] the turbos and the
intercoolers, it is a huge packaging exercise in
the front. The guys here have done a great job
on the engine, and already in testing we have
more mileage on the engine than we had on
the current one. The two turbos are quite small,
and although they are slightly higher than you
want them due to the V-angle, AMG have been
excellent. They gave us the base engine and told
us to get on with it. I thought that they would
try to control it and define what we could and
could not do, but they let us get on with it.’
Boost control
With the Balance of Performance boost tables,
the FIA is able to marry the behaviour of a turbo
engine closely to that of a non-turbo. However,
Aston Martin has had to do a lot of work to
improve driveability from its new engine.
While IMSA measures the boost pressure from
2000rpm, the FIA goes from 4000rpm, leaving
a little room at the bottom of the rev range to
exploit. AMR says that is less of a problem than
over-boosting, and avoiding the penalties that
could arise from that phenomenon. ‘There is a
huge amount to learn – we have never been
policed on over-boosting and you don’t want to
be pinged,’ says Sayers. ‘At the exit from corners
you have enough boost anyway, so you have
to control how the boost comes in.’
All-new lightweight aluminium chassis is twice as stiff as outgoing model while roll cage has been beefed up
Prior to the launch AMR had amassed more
than 10,000kms, including a 30-hour test,
something that’s all the more important given
the amount of change the team has to adapt
to. One of the biggest of these is the switch
from Dunlop to Michelin rubber for the new
car. The French manufacturer is the supplier for
the Valkyrie hypercar and Aston Martin wanted
the racecar to reflect this. The decision was
taken relatively late in the programme, after the
suspension geometry had been fixed for the
racecar, but the team already has experience
running with Michelin with its previous car –
Dunlop had come on board in 2016 with an
aggressive development strategy that the team
felt would help it remain competitive against
the Michelin runners with its aged car.
New tyre regulations introduced this year
saw the development process slow dramatically,
and with the ‘joker’ tyre banned in 2018, the
mid-season development cycle has effectively
stopped. ‘We are doing the testing anyway,
so arguably we just add to the mileage,’ says
Sayers. ‘[Michelin] know what they are doing,
and we have the WEC ranges so can go through
the normal development process over the
year. If we had sat with Dunlop [at the start
of the relationship], and said we would win a
championship and Le Mans, we would have
been sceptical, but it worked. Now, we have a
new car, it should be competitive.’
Gone also, then, is the link up with
OptimumG, which was involved in tuning the
car to the tyres at the race track and provided
dedicated support to the team.
Filling up
A change in the tyre regulations will have a
major impact on another area of the car; the
refuelling coupling. Regulations have yet to
be announced at time of writing, but the GT
cars will be allowed to refuel and change tyres
at the same time in 2018, which means that
the importance of all the work that has gone

20 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

GTE – ASTON MARTIN VANTAGE

into speeding up the wheel change time has

been reduced dramatically, and the refuelling
coupling, which was switched from Staubli to
Krontec to avoid the time wasted latching the
probe to the car, is also now a concern.
‘We spent a lot of time perfecting wheel
changes, and it won’t be wasted effort because
if it rains, or you are short filling, you will need
to change the tyres quickly, but it does change
it,’ Sayers says. ‘It changes it for the team; it is the
one bit of competition that they have in the pit
lane, and they thrive on that, and so we put a lot
of effort into making it as slick as we can, so we
have the captive wheel nut, same threads.
‘The refuelling point is a single point and we
have changed to the Krontec valve. Primarily it is
for the pit stop but ironically, because now you
can refuel at the same time as change the tyres,
you have to get the car into the air as quickly as
possible. The Staubli system had the latching
on, and the latching wasted three quarters of a
second each time, so we got rid of it, and now
we have to see how easy it is to hold it on there
while the car is moved into the air. It sounds like
not a big change, but there are a lot of decisions
which are driven by the pit stop procedure,
because that is where you can gain time.’

New AMG 4-litre twin turbo powerplant sits far back in the engine bay. The packaging of this unit was a challenge for AMR Centre of gravity
Lowering the centre of gravity was a major
design target for the team, and it went to
extreme lengths to achieve this. That included
an all-new fuel tank that lies low in the car, and
stretches into the cockpit, replacing the upright
tall tank in the previous car. AMR estimates that
the new magnesium case Xtrac gearbox is up
to 15kg lighter than the previous ’box, having
got rid of the drop gears that were run before,
and it sits lower in the chassis. The team has
also switched to an electronic gear change
mechanism, replacing the pneumatic system
which was in the older racecar, and has an
electro-hydraulic power steering system.
‘We have moved the engine as far back
and down as we can,’ says Sayers. ‘Basically it
is now not quite touching the bulkhead but it
is close. We use the standard road car crank
so you have a natural throw on that, while
the dry sump is as low as possible, and that
literally touches the floor.
‘Serviceability is unquestionably slightly
compromised, but if you have a problem with
the car, and you have to go to the garage, [with
the level of competition] you are out anyway,’
Sayers adds. ‘If it takes a few more minutes [to
repair a fault], it is not the end of the world.
Suspension is not too bad in that respect, and
the coolers are on the front end, so that won’t
AMR has switched to Alcon brakes, which has produced bespoke kit. Car will still need a pad change during the 24 hours take much longer than the current car. The
steering rack is slightly more hidden by the
Lowering the centre of gravity on the car intercoolers but you can whip it out of the side.
You can either make it very serviceable, but
was a major design target for the team your aero will be worse, or not.’
The team has switched to Ohlins for
the dampers, but the major change in that

22 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018


Carbon fibre and steel five-piece floor features splitter, three mid-car sections, and runs into a whopping diffuser at the rear
TECH SPEC
Aston Martin Vantage GTE
Chassis: Lightweight aluminium chassis; steel roll cage
to FIA safety numbers.
Engine: 4-litre V8 twin turbo, Borg Warner turbos with
integrated electric wastegates. Dry sump. Power 400kW
(variable by boost). Torque 700Nm.
Driveline/Transmission: Rear-wheel-drive with traction control;
Xtrac 6-speed sequential transmission; Alcon motorsport multi-
plate clutch; mechanical limited slip differential; semi-automatic
paddleshift; direct acting electric gear shift actuator.
Suspension: Double wishbone front and rear; Ohlins
5-way adjustable dampers.
Steering: Electro-hydraulic power assisted steering.
Brakes: Alcon monobloc 6-pot (front), 4-pot (rear); integrated
caliper temperature and pad wear sensors front and rear.
Fuel system: 100-litre fuel cell to FIA standards; single
point Krontec fuel coupling.
Wheels: TWS forged magnesium 12.5in x 18 front, 13in x 18 rear;
captive wheel nut design.
Tyres: Michelin 30/68-18 front, 31/71-18 rear.
Weight: 1245kg (regulated base weight).
area is with the brake supplier, which is now
Alcon. ‘That’s a highlight for me,’ says Sayers.
‘Everything on the car from them has been
designed specifically for us, so front and rear
calipers, clutch, everything, has been optimised
and designed around our geometry. They have
been brilliant and the braking performance is a
step forward, not just because of the brakes, but
also because of the geometry and the aero.
‘[We have] bigger discs on the front, which
means a bit more heat, but you have more pad
volume and hopefully you can get away with
minimal changes. We are still far away from not
‘We have moved the engine as far back
and down as we can, it is now not quite
touching the bulkhead, but it is close’
having to change pads at Le Mans. This car, with
the centre of gravity now lower, and with the
geometry we are using, it means the rear brakes
[are used] more, so that should even up the
wear. It is a promising start.’
The rear suspension is also easier to work
with as the production car has a trailing link
suspension, which translates into a freer double
wishbone design at the rear of the race version.
The team has also designed in some ‘contact
cases’ which are designed to protect the vital
components, such as the steering arms and
driveshafts, in the event of a side-impact.
Torque sensors
Driveshafts are lightweight, and Aston Martin
Racing is experimenting with torque sensors
that may in the future actually become part of
the balance of performance process as they
measure output to the wheels, rather than
inputs into the engine. This, believes Aston
Martin, is far more accurate than the current
system and it says that it may race with the
torque sensors, if only to provide the FIA with
some real data in advance of such a change.
Cosworth provides the electronics for the
car, including the power steering and gearshift
mechanisms, as well as new injector drive boxes.
The new car will also feature the GM-developed
side impact protection for the driver, which is a
mesh designed to stop objects from penetrating
the cockpit and damaging the driver’s legs. Also
featured is the rear view camera with collision
avoidance, developed by Bosch. This is a big
push for Aston Martin with a new car that will
take it into the next decade.
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 23
 GTE – BMW M8

The vast
and the furious
BMW has had to jump through a few regulatory
hoops but its rather large and quite controversial
M8 GTE is now fully sorted and ready to race.
Racecar traces its troubled development
By ANDREW COTTON

You can always rely on BMW to be

different and while its rivals campaign
regular sports and GT cars its GTE
weapon of choice is the gargantuan M8

24 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

B
MW’s history with endurance racing
has been somewhat chequered in
the last 20 years in that, while it won
the 1999 Le Mans 24 hours overall
with the V12 LMR, one of the best-looking
prototype racecars the world has seen, in GT
racing the picture has been more complex.
From the M3 GT2, featuring a 4-litre V8
engine which did not exist in true production
form, to its new car, the M8 which is launched
in roadcar spec at Le Mans, the firm has often
not had a car that fits with the traditional GT
philosophy along the same lines as Ferrari,
Porsche, Aston Martin or Corvette, with their
sportscar derived racers. So it has consistently
required the agreement of rival manufacturers
to be given waivers to race – and the brand
new M8 GTE is no exception.
Previewed at the Frankfurt Show in
October, 2017, the base car for BMW’s new Le
Mans racer is huge. But that size has almost
proven to be its undoing, as major changes
were required to the racecar, demanded by
the FIA and the ACO after consultation with
rival manufacturers, before it could even start
to consider balancing its performance against
its sportscar-fielding rivals.
By that October launch, of course, the
car had already undergone some extensive
test and development work, starting in early
July at Germany’s Dingolfing test track.
There were some issues early on in the
The four months of lost time put the team
under immense pressure, and perhaps
compromised the ultimate set-up for the car
testing, with the flat crank engine causing
vibrations that needed to be solved before
proper testing could begin in earnest, but the
biggest challenge, as usual, came from BMW’s
competitors, who were required to agree
to the base concept. They left it as late as
possible to do so, and cost BMW an estimated
four months of development time.
The programme for the M8 is as large as
the car itself. Two cars are entered into the full
IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship
that started in January at Daytona, Florida,
and there is a two-car entry in the FIA World
Endurance Championship’s so-called ‘Super
Season’, that started in May at Spa and runs
through to the Le Mans 24-hours, 2019.
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 25
GTE – BMW M8
The engine is based on the 4.4-litre unit that saw service in the M6 GTLM car last season, but capacity has been cut to 4 litres and moved away from the production powerplant
There is some carry-over from the M6 GTLM
that has previously run in both GT3 and GTE trim
in the States, but much of the car is new. The
engine, for example, is based on the 4.4-litre unit
used last season in the M6, but with reduced
capacity to four litres with a twin turbo layout.
That meant that the company had to abandon
its much-vaunted claim that 95 per cent of the
race engine featured production car parts, and
instead build a race-spec unit.
‘Overall, on the engine side we started with
the base engine that has also run in the M6 GT
and GTLM and brought that down to four litres,
with full accordance to the regulations and in
that respect we also went away from the 95
per cent production parts concept to 30 to
45 per cent production based,’ says BMW
Motorsport director Jens Marquardt. ‘It is still
based on the production engine, but with
very different components involved. We also
changed the crankshaft, cylinder heads and
everything and worked on efficiency and power.
I think that we have done a pretty decent job.’
M-powered
The inlet system is completely different, as are
the turbos and wastegates, but the changes and
the installation led to vibration issues early on in
the test programme. The company admits that
bits fell off the car during testing, but the official
26 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
line is that this was more down to a materials
issue than the engine vibration. ‘With the flat
crank engine we encountered some vibration
issues at an early stage that we had to address
and solve,’ says Marquardt. ‘Other than [these]
vibration issues, we have not encountered
anything that I would consider to be a major
issue. I think I have been really surprised, we
have done a lot of work on the dyno.
‘We have had [the vibration] in the M3 and in
the DTM car so it is nothing that is unusual. It is
down to the concept of the engine,’ Marquardt
adds. ‘You can do a lot of simulation, but the
vibration itself is not an issue at all; you can
run that engine to death on the dyno with no
issue, but when you have installed it into a car
and you get into resonance issues, that’s where
you have to figure out, does it cause any other
issues? We had much more vibration on the M3
GT2 than we have now, but they never caused
natural same frequency issues. It might not be
comfortable for the drivers when you are going
through those resonance peaks, but it is not an
issue that would hamper the performance. We
handled the problem in a normal way.’
Unlike its rival Aston Martin, the engine bay
is plenty big enough to house the turbocharged
engine and there are no packaging dramas.
‘Our engine bay is huge, there is no issue there,’
says Marquardt with a laugh. ‘The thing about
the base car, it has a pretty big front. There is a
lot of space under the bonnet that isn’t used,
especially as you drop the engine and move it as
far back as you can. Intercooler-wise it is not an
issue; cooling is not an issue.’
Power is delivered to the rear wheels
through an Xtrac gearbox, the company
choosing to switch from Ricardo, which
continues to supply the GT3 customer car.
BMW felt that the Xtrac gearbox offered ‘more
potential in the current package than we had in
the package in the M6,’ Marquardt says.
On balance
The M8 weighs in at 1220kg, down from an
estimated base weight of 1800kg of the road car,
and races at 1250kg, heavier than the previous
car by regulation, while it also has smaller air
restrictors on the smaller-capacity engine. BMW
says that this contributed to its apparent lack
of speed in the ‘ROAR before the 24’ event, and
after extensive analysis, the BoP table for the
race saw an increase in power, less weight, a
larger fuel capacity and faster refuelling.
The M8 has had to undergo the usual
balance of performance testing, at Daytona in
December and January. However, IMSA started
with all new cars in a conservative set-up and
will need a season of running before they are
able to balance the cars perfectly.
 The auto BoP that will be used in the FIA
WEC will cause more of an issue as there is only
the test session in France in April, and the Spa
6 hours in May, to see the car in full race trim
ahead of the Le Mans 24 hours in June. The
FIA’s method of balancing the performance
is to rely on the manufacturer to explain how
much better or worse the new car will perform,
and that information will form a baseline. Also
available to it will be the data collected by IMSA
from the Daytona and Sebring races.

Raising issues
Bringing such a car to GT racing has led to the
usual gamesmanship from BMW’s rivals, who
recognise the importance of having the name
in the series while not necessarily agreeing
to the base concept. BMW worked with the
FIA in the early stages of development to The M8 has had access to BMW’s mighty resources including its huge Aerolab wind tunnel but the aerodynamic effort was
produce a concept that would be acceptable massively set back after a late decision by rule-makers and rivals to ask BMW to raise the ride height of the car
to it in terms of the BoP, but having lowered
the car to the lowest possible level, it was then
required that the car be raised slightly. It was
‘With the flat crank engine we encountered
not an innocuous decision; rivals deliberately
waited until the last minute, and completely
some vibration issues at an early stage
compromised all the aerodynamic work that
had already been conducted on the car.
that we had to address and solve’
‘It is the typical game,’ says Marquardt,
although it is a game that clearly rankles with
him as it cost time, performance and money. ‘It

LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 27

GTE – BMW M8
Much of the early testing was conducted with an adapted M6 GTLM,
which allowed the team to evaluate key components for the M8 GTE
is competition. Our approach is to be as open
as we can with everyone with the FIA, ACO
and IMSA, and the other competitors. It doesn’t
help anyone if you pull the rabbit out of the
hat, and then the rabbit doesn’t walk. Obviously
the car has a certain frontal area, and the FIA
wanted us to be in a certain window so that
they could balance us properly and so we made
proposals, had a pre-agreement and worked
towards that, and then it turned out to be
not acceptable to the FIA. We had to redo it to
what they said was [now] acceptable for them,
and that cost four months, and a little bit of
The WEC has adopted IMSA’s pit stop rules, allowing refuelling money, and that was not a small amount of
and tyre changes simultaneously; emphasising slick pit-work work, which is why it cost us four months.’
The car struggled for outright pace during Daytona testing. BMW fields two M8s in IMSA plus another brace in WEC
Suspension is conventional double wishbone set-up with 4-way adjustable shocks front and rear. Car body is composite
28 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
That four months of lost time put the
team under immense pressure, and perhaps
compromised the ultimate set-up for the car
as key decisions had to be reached quickly
and without the usual analysis. ‘We have tried
to be as early as we could, and obviously not
everyone responded as early as they could,
which is normal,’ says Marquardt. ‘With regard
to the discussions, we have good ones with the
FIA and ACO and everyone involved regarding
calendar changes, and homologation changes;
we can make our lives easier if we do a slightly
different process where you get concept
approval, intermediate approval and then final
approval. [The current system] puts a lot of work
onto the people that we are responsible for, no
matter what manufacturer, and we have to keep
the workload, which is already high on them, to
a reasonable level. It doesn’t help if you delay
things artificially and make things more difficult.
It increases the workload, brings the cost up and
it doesn’t make the racing any better.’
Motive 8
BMW had not yet reached the stage of building
parts for the car and so it was not all bad, but
the company had to ditch all of its aero work
and start again. ‘Everything that we did before
went into the bin, and once the concept was
approved we could really start to work on the
aero design and everything,’ says Marquardt. ‘We
were not far enough yet that we had to make
things again, and we didn’t have a final concept,
but we were already quite advanced and had
some ideas and those we had to scrap.’ The
team was helped here by extensive use of rapid
prototyping and 3D printing.
Work on the aerodynamics relied on a new
algorithm that allowed a significant increase
in CFD calculations, thus making it possible
to use greater computing power to increase
the number of possible simulations, before
progressing to the wind tunnel. The same 3D
measurement technology that was used on the
BMW M4 DTM is also used on the BMW M8 GTE.
The measurement system provides the perfect
quality control once the racecar has been
assembled. With such a complex car as the BMW
M8 GTE, which is built completely by hand, it is
essential that all the dimensions are correctly
adhered to and implemented.
Delayed testing
The enforced delay meant that the car had to
test later in the year than originally planned and
in less than ideal conditions. However, much
of the early testing was conducted with an
adapted M6 GTLM, which allowed the team to
evaluate key components for the M8 GTE.
High Tech | High Speed | High Quality

Pankl Systems Austria GmbH

Engine Systems
A-8600 Bruck/Mur, Kaltschmidstraße 2-6
Phone: +43(0)3862 51 250 0
Fax: +43(0)3862 51 250 290
e-mail: engine@pankl.com www.pankl.com
 GTE – BMW M8
Work on the aerodynamics for the M8 GTE relied on a new
algorithm that allowed a significant increase in CFD calculations
‘If you ask the engineers, it was a disaster, too
late, and they always need three more months,’
says Marquardt. ‘I have to say that if we would
not have lost the four months a lot of things
would have been easier. Better? I don’t know.’
‘We had to cut a few corners,’ Marquardt
adds. ‘Whatever issue we had, we couldn’t
examine the options of maybe A, or B, or C,
as you normally would do, and find the best
in terms of performance or efficiency. If we
had an issue, we had to then decide what will
solve the problem, and get it done, maybe
not done in a fancy way, but just to solve that
problem. We have managed very well to resolve
the issues that came up and so far we haven’t
encountered anything major that I can say is
down to not having the time to sort things
Jens Marquardt says the four-month delay after the late ride height
change decision meant BMW had to alter its approach with the M8
In the cabin the seat is fixed, with the pedals adjustable, while it has also been moved a little closer to the centre of the car
30 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
properly, so it is only things like the body fit on
the car and small pieces like that.’
BMW has switched to Bosch electronics,
leading to a very different cockpit layout, plus
the rear view camera and collision avoidance
system that was developed by Corvette and has
since become widely adopted in GT cars. The
system is able to recognise different classes of
car, and their closing speed, aiding the driver
in identifying where and when they will be
passed. Audio warnings in the earpieces are also
available in the Bosch system. ‘We also felt that
we had more potential upwards with regards to
functionality processing capabilities and so on
with Bosch,’ says Marquardt.
Safe seat
In terms of driver safety, BMW has, like Porsche,
fixed the driver seat and the adjustability of
this now comes from moving the pedals via a
spring-loaded system, rather than an electronic
system. The driver seat has moved closer to the
centre of the cabin, although this movement
was restricted by the transmission tunnel.
‘We have moved the driver seat as much
inboard as you can in accordance with the
regulations, but in our case, we have the
transmission tunnel and that puts limits on
what you can do,’ says Marquardt. ‘The tunnel
is sacred and there is no modification allowed
in this area at all. Even though there are other
racecars without the tunnel now, I don’t know
why [the GTE regulations are] so strict on
those things, because moving the driver to
the centre only helps safety and doesn’t have
much impact on performance. People tell you
about polar moment and all of that, but if you
calculate the potential lap time gain for moving
the driver 10cm inboard, it is not even visible.
But, in terms of passive safety, we have done
everything that we could.’
Hot laps
One of the major issues faced by the team is
the car’s large greenhouse, the cockpit area
that needs to be air-conditioned to a maximum
temperature at the hot races. Porsche faced a
similar problem and rectified it with a screen
that effectively cut the cockpit in two and
reduced the volume of air that needed to be
cooled. BMW considered a similar solution,
but then abandoned the idea. ‘You have to
work a lot at blowing air onto the driver,’ says
Marquardt. ‘To get such a big volume cool is
one thing, but to get flow is the main thing. It’s
completely different to a road car. We looked
at splitting the cockpit, [but] we found more
improvement with cooling the drivers. The
cockpit temperature is one thing, but if a driver
doesn’t feel cool, it doesn’t help things.’
BMW has decided to bring something
completely different to GTE. For now, it has
pulled the rabbit from the hat. Whether it
walks the walk has yet to be seen.
TECH SPEC
Chassis/body: Composite body with carbon core and
DMSB-approved safety roll cage; CFRP outer shell
with quick-change concept.
Engine: V8 engine with BMW TwinPower Turbo
Technology; 3981cc; 8-cylinder; 90-degree V angle;
bore x stroke 899mm x 80mm; cylinder spacing
98mm; engine speed approx. 7000rpm.
Transmission: 6-speed sequential motorsport
gearbox; electric paddleshift system; limited slip
differential; CFRP driveshaft; Sachs carbon clutch.
Suspension: Double wishbones on front and rear
axle; 4-way adjustable shock absorbers at front and
rear; anti-roll bars with quick adjustment.
Electronics: BMW Motorsport in-house developed
software functions for engine, gearbox and driver
assistance; steering wheel with 16 buttons and
seven dials; rear-view camera system with object
recognition; high-performance headlights with
OSRAM LED elements; live telemetry system for
vehicle monitoring during races.
Wheels: BMW Aero rims: 12.5x18in on the
front, 13x18in on the rear.
Tyres: Michelin, 30/68 R18 on the front,
31/71 R18 on the rear.
Dimensions: Length (without rear wing) 4980mm;
width (without mirrors) 2046mm; width (with mirrors)
2224mm; height 1212mm; wheelbase 2880mm.
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 TECHNOLOGY – RACE STRATEGY

Tactical advance
To win in top-level endurance racing you need the strategic
acumen of Napoleon Bonaparte – or failing that some state
of the art timing and strategy software
By PAUL TRUSWELL

If you want to know what’s

really happening in a WEC
race then you need to keep
your eyes on the screens

K
eeping track of what is going on
during a long-distance race has
been a problem that has exercised
the intellects of racing teams since
the dawn of motorsport. In the ’50s, the task
consisted primarily of instructing the drivers to
go either as fast as possible or to a pre-defined
pace that the team manager had calculated
would be enough to go further than the
competition, without putting unnecessary
strain on the mechanical parts.
Very often, in those days, no-one on
the team would know the positions of the
competitors’ cars, except by intuition, and even
the race officials would sometimes take several
hours after the chequered flag to unravel the lap
chart and produce a definitive result.
In these days of flat-out endurance racing,
things are rather different, both in terms of
what is demanded by live TV coverage, and
the facilities available. It all changed when
competing cars began to be fitted with
electronic transponders in the 1980s, which
would identify them to the timekeepers
automatically, and remove the need for
manual calculation of lap times and hand-
written lap charts of the race positions.
Timekeepers were now able to publish
real-time positions on display screens; in race
control, in pit garages and commentary boxes.
Suddenly, it would take only seconds after a
car crossed the finish line before the lap time
was displayed and any change of position
relayed to the world. This was soon extended
and additional sectors were defined around the
circuit, providing additional information.
The limitation, in those days, was that teams
could only see the information that the timing
screens displayed. Obviously, race positions
were important, but the choice of which
columns to show – laps completed, last lap
time, gap to leader, interval to car in front,
best lap time, class position, total time elapsed
– was left to the individual timekeeping
organisations, and was largely arbitrary.
Still today, official timing screens operate
to no universal standard, and although
all show the race positions, they provide
varied information depending on the series
organisation. Because of this many teams
developed their own systems of spreadsheets
and run sheets, which had to be manually
populated with data showing the lap time
for each lap, the evolving gap between cars,
countdown to next pit stop, and so on.
But the availability of a data stream from
timekeeping systems in the last few years has

It all changed when racecars began to be fitted with transponders

32 LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com
 led to the development of bespoke software
which can provide teams with a much more
configurable system. One such system is HH
Timing, created by Canadian Andrew Hall, of
HH Development. ‘The initial impetus came in
around 2011,’ says Hall. ‘I wanted to follow the
races in more detail, to have some tools for
analysis, not only after the race, but during it
as well. All of a sudden, I realised that we had a
system that provided more information to the
teams than most of them had already. After that,
we had to learn how to be a bit commercial.’

Good timing
HH Timing was incorporated in May 2014, and
its system was being used by eight teams in
the LMP2 class at Le Mans this year, as well as
by most of the GTE class. Also in their list of
customers at Le Mans was the ACO itself.
The amount of data available to race strategists is mind-blowing; the race running order and lap times are just the start of it Jota Sport team manager Gary Holland
is a big fan of the system: ‘HH Timing is a
very powerful tool indeed, providing all the
information that we need to make strategic
decisions during a race – even Le Mans,’ he says.
Jonathan Lynn is the performance engineer
at Jota: ‘We started using HH Timing at the
beginning of the 2016 season when I joined,’
he says. ‘It is an absolutely critical part of our
set-up during the race. It is relatively easy to
use, and gives us specific information for our
own racecar, as well as a good overview of what
the competition is doing: when they have their
silver driver in the car, what fuel strategy they
are running is, and so on.’

Data feed
The system takes its feed from the official
Al Kamel timing system. It’s hooked directly
into its network, ensuring that data gets stored
Monitoring the gaps to rivals is crucial. All the data is fed from the official WEC timing system so is presented in real-time each time a car crosses any of the timing
loops: whether that is at the start-finish, the
intermediate sectors or pit in/out. ‘We also get
Another useful feature is the visualisation of the race control messages, so we can match
that against the position of the car on the circuit
the gaps between all the cars in the class and decide whether it is advantageous to stop
when, for example, a full course caution is
implemented,’ Lynn says.
There are a multitude of different displays
available to choose from. Jota runs a nine-
screen display, two of which are dedicated to
HH layouts. The main display is the ‘scoreboard’,
which shows the race positions, but which can
be configured (as Jota does) to only show a
single class, and also to show whatever columns
a team specifies. In addition to standard
columns like last lap time, gap to leader, car
in front and behind, sector times, this can also
include average of best 10 per cent of laps,
worst lap in last 10, laps to next stop, etc.
‘It’s also important to us to be able to
look at all the lap times, sector times and pit
stop times for our own car,’ explains Lynn.
‘We have a separate run sheet, which I use to
maintain data from the car’s telemetry, such
Strategy overview shows each stint driven as a block diagram with the number of laps, driver’s name and average lap time as the fuel and tyre information, but if I miss

LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 33

 TECHNOLOGY – RACE STRATEGY
‘With the strategy overview we can see whether the opposition still have
to use their Silver driver, and when they’re likely to make their next stop’
a lap, then it doesn’t really matter too much
because it is all recorded in HH.’
Another key window in HH is the ‘strategy
overview’. This shows each stint driven as a
block diagram, with the number of laps,
driver’s name and average lap time for the
stint (excluding any FCY laps). As with all the
modules, the screen is configurable to show
just cars from a specific class, and best lap can
be shown instead of average lap (useful during
practice and qualifying, for example).
‘The strategy overview is really useful for
us to see what the opposition is up to,’ Lynn
says. ‘We can see whether they still have to use
The HH system was used by eight LMP2 teams at Le Mans and it helped the Jackie Chan DC ORECA finish second overall
Jota runs a nine-screen layout, two of which are dedicated to HH data. Much of this race data is also studied after the event
34 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
their Silver driver, and when they are likely to
make their next pit stop.’ This screen can also
be configured to show predicted stint lengths,
which combined with a calculation of predicted
pit stop time, enables the number of stints
remaining for each car to be shown.
Drive time
Other screens show lap times for each driver,
and driving time, showing not only whether
minimum drive time for the silver driver has
been achieved, but also if the maximum
continuous driving time has been exceeded.
Another useful feature used by Jota is the
visualisation of the gaps between all the cars in
the class, plotted as a graph, lap-by-lap, as the
race evolves. ‘I tend to have that window open
all the time, to see not only our position, but
whether we’re gaining or losing time overall,
relative to the rest of the LMP2 class,’ says Lynn.
A problem that sometimes occurs for LMP2
cars, is to know how many laps the race will be
in total. Since a normal six-hour WEC event (as
well as the 24 hours of Le Mans) ends when the
leading car crosses the line after the completion
of the allotted time, it may be that a car in one
of the slower classes has to complete an extra
lap. For example, if the LMP2 crosses the line 30s
after the allotted time, and the overall leader
goes across the line 60s later, then the LMP2
car will only receive the chequered flag when
it crosses the line for the second time. ‘HH has
a live Excel export function,’ Lynn says, ‘which
we use to export the LMP1 times to a special
spreadsheet which we use to work out which P1
car will likely win, and when it will cross the line
to start the last lap. We don’t usually run the fuel
that close, but it is useful to know, just in case.’
Post-race analysis
However, the use of the software doesn’t end
with the finish of the race. ‘After the race, we
use all the data in the HH system to analyse the
race for our post-race review,’ Lynn says. ‘We
will get together and decide what the turning
points of the race were and then look at the
data in detail to work out where we lost out,
or where we gained an advantage.’
The HH system has a whole suite of standard
reports that can be generated after the race,
showing the data in graphical or tabular form,
and enabling teams to look at everything from
driver performance in each sector, to pit stop
times for fuel only, or full service stops.
Andrew Hall, who is also involved in the
development of the software, says: ‘With the
limitations on the number of tyres available
in the WEC now, it is important to teams to
know how much of an impact tyre degradation
has, and so the reports in HH can be easily
configured to look at 20 per cent, 40 per cent or
60 per cent average best lap times. Our thinking
has always been to make HH work just how
each of our clients might want it to.’
HH Timing has clients not only in the WEC
and ELMS, but also in the IMSA WeatherTech
sportscar Championship, the Blancpain GT
Series, as well as the VLN and Creventic 24h
Series races for GT and Touring Cars, for which
interfaces to different timing services are
required. ‘Because of the architecture of the
system, HH has the same look and feel to the
user whatever series a team is using it in. We
see this as a big advantage,’ says Hall.
INSIGHT – FUEL FLOW METERS
In full flow
Leading fuel flow meter producer Sentronics talks us through
the intensive product development programme that helped it
scoop the Formula 1 supply contract for 2018/19
By GEMMA HATTON
M The challenge was
otorsport engineers are notorious
for going to any length to gain
performance. For example, the
latest fuel flow meter (FFM)
variants can achieve accuracies of better than
one per cent and yet teams have still invested
time and money to find a small advantage here.
In some cases they’ve purchased several fuel
flow sensors for testing and established which
one under-reads the most. By fitting this they
can squeeze an extra few tenths of a per cent of
fuel into the engine, while still complying with
the regulations. It’s quite clear, then, why these
devices need to be as accurate as possible.
Mechanical flow meters traditionally use an
impeller located between the inlet and outlet
of a pipe. The flow of the fluid spins the impeller
and the number of revolutions are counted;
measuring the flow rate. However, in a racing
engine a mechanical system cannot keep up
with the highly dynamic changes in flow rate
caused by moving from zero to maximum
throttle within a fraction of a second.
‘An impeller has mass by its very nature,’
says Neville Meech, director of Sentronics. ‘As
a result of this, when the impeller attempts
to rotate at a rate matching fuel consumption
the inertial effects will cause the device to
overshoot and then undershoot, resulting in
immediate measurement errors.’
Solid state
‘The other problem with most mechanical
devices is they do not respond well with
rapid reverse flows,’ Meech adds. ‘When the
brakes are applied and the engine revs drop,
typically a water hammer effect is momentarily
created within the fuel system due to the fuel
column coming to an abrupt stop. An impeller
flow meter cannot stop quickly enough, and
then reverse its direction, so once again you
introduce significant errors. These fundamental
problems were identified many years ago
during potential technology assessments and
this is why the core technology at the heart of
our fuel flow meter is solid-state.’
Solid state essentially means no moving
parts and, in principle, the most suitable non-
36 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
invasive alternative to measure fuel flow is
ultrasonic technology. The challenge, however,
to take the concept
was to take the concept of ultrasonic flow
measurement that had traditionally been
used in large oil and gas pipelines, and develop
an accurate meter which could then be of ultrasonic flow
packaged for use on a racecar.
‘At the time, highly accurate ultrasonic measurement and
devices were limited to six-inch pipe diameters
and greater, and the technology was not suited
or robust enough for motorsport,’ says Meech.
develop an accurate
‘Some said that it would never work, especially
as we needed to achieve measurements within
meter that could be
+/- 0.25 per cent error, which was at least four
times better than any similar sized ultrasonic
used on a racecar
equipment could achieve back then. As
engineers we questioned the scientific reason
behind this – was it because no one had ever
tried to develop it before? Because if so, we
wanted to pioneer the technology to make it
happen.’ The latest Sentronics Fuel Flow Elite
Sensor, which will be used in Formula 1 next
year, is specified to achieve accuracies of
+/- 0.25 per cent of reading across operating
conditions, which conforms to the technical
specification set out by the FIA since 2014.
Mission accomplished, then. But how?
Quickened pulse
Located at either end of a thin tube are two
piezoelectric transducers. These are effectively
ceramic discs, suspended in a fuel resistant
housing, which convert electrical energy
into ultrasound pulses. In principle, a pulse
is sent from one transducer to the other, in
the direction of flow. This is then followed
by another pulse sent back to the original
transducer in the opposite direction. With the
distance between transducers known, the time
of flight of both pulses is measured and then
subtracted to determine the velocity. As the
tube diameter is also known, the flow rate of
the fuel can be easily calculated.
‘One problem with ultrasonic flow
measurement is its fundamental principle is
volumetric, this means to calculate mass flow
accurately a density measurement is required.
Very accurate density measurement is typically

Sentronics is an industry leader in
the development and manufacture of
solid state ultrasonic fuel flow meters
performed using a Coriolis or tuning fork
densitometer, which just don’t work when
subjected to vehicle NVH (Noise, Vibration
and Harshness). Hopefully this will change
as densitometer technology advances but
the best option at present is to calculate
density using a very accurate temperature
measurement, and calculate density based
on fuel samples which have had the density
properties very accurately measured under
laboratory conditions,’ explains Meech. ‘If you
were 3degC out on temperature you could end
up with a 0.5 per cent error within the sensor.’
Once the temperature of the fuel has been
identified, the necessary look-up is performed
Low flow technology could
be particularly useful in
a sportscar series that
requires refuelling
and mass flow rate is calculated, which is the
final figure all the engineers are after.
But what is the optimum strategy for
sending the ultrasound pulses to achieve the
highest accuracy? How often and how quickly
should the signals be sent? And is it better to
send the signals together or one at a time?
‘The biggest complexity comes when you
have to measure the flow rate faster than 200
times a second, which is generally the industry
standard for ultrasonic flow meters,’ Meech says.
‘Acoustic energy takes time to decay away, less
time between measurements means you need
techniques and algorithms to deal with any
unwanted ultrasonic signals that have not had
time to fully decay. Our patented technology
allows us to achieve highly accurate time
of flight measurements even with all these
interfering signals being present.
‘It was established early on in development
that the industry standard measurement rates
were just not going to give accurate readings
for on-vehicle applications, we needed to
LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 37
 INSIGHT – FUEL FLOW METERS
‘We needed to increase increase the measurement rate to sample the
flow rate in excess of 2200 times a second
the measurement rate,
to ensure that any vehicle or engine borne
vibration exerted into the fluid column is
measured correctly and not aliased.’
to sample the flow A further consideration is the type of
materials used. As ever, it’s crucial to minimise
rate in excess of 2200 weight, but, for once, composite components
may not be the answer. By using a range of
times a second’ materials, the different rates of expansion
with temperature can become geometrically
complex and result in introducing a further
source of error and potential leak paths.
Therefore, to ensure consistent device-to-device
repeatability it is more effective to construct
the sensor out of one type of material, rather
than using the algorithms or calibration to
compensate for different material expansion
rates. In the case of Sentronics, the fuel flow
Toyota practices changing the FFM, located behind driver’s door on LMP1 cars. Flow meters measure average flow in WEC
All the GT and prototype cars in IMSA carry a fuel flow meters in 2018 because, according to the series, the teams’ fuel consumption reporting has been ‘questionable at best’
38 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
sensor is made purely from a single metallic
material, avoiding the need for any plastic parts.
All materials used also have to be
compatible with all the different variants of fuel
including ethanols, methanols and additives.
This is particularly important for any rubber
seals because when rubber is impregnated with
fuel it can increase in stiffness, which can effect
the ability to transmit the ultrasound pulses.
Another challenge is repeatability. ‘It’s
difficult enough to make one perfect sensor
which achieves the required high levels of
precision, but the bigger challenge is making
that repeatable, when you have to make 100,
500, or more,’ Meech says.
‘Ultimately, our aim has been to create a
technology where the sensors native response
to a flow rate stimulus is consistent from
meter to meter. This has been our biggest
achievement over our four year development
and we look forward to the devices becoming
commonplace in motorsport.’
Calibration methods
Any sensor supplier may state impressive
accuracy, but how do they know the
measurement readings are actually true? This
is where calibration comes in. Calibration is
defined as a series of interrelated measurements
and operations which compare the reading of
a device to a traceable standard. In this way, a
relationship is established between the quantity
measured by the device and the measurement
of the same quantity by the reference.
For regulatory use, each sensor is measured
against a known stimulus and, once adjusted,
the combined measurement uncertainty
cannot exceed +/-0.25 per cent of flow rate
across a range of flow conditions that will
 10
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INSIGHT – FUEL FLOW METERS
To ensure consistent device-to-device repeatability it’s more effective to
construct the sensor out of one type of material
A brief history of FFM
W
hile Sentronics was not the
original supplier of the fuel
flow meter (FFM) back in
2014, it is worth noting here that the
introduction of the technology into
Formula 1 and the World Endurance
Championship was controversial.
The original plan was to use the
restriction of fuel to balance cars,
rather than an air restrictor which had
been common for many years.
When it was in the WEC Audi’s R18 suffered with fuel flow meter accuracy problems caused by the high diesel return temperatures
40 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
While the FIA required an accuracy
of +/-0.25 per cent of reading, and
this was largely achieved, some teams
identified a problem with aliasing,
where information was being lost due
to under-sampling of the flow rate. At
the Australian Grand Prix in 2014,
Red Bull Racing attempted to prove
that its measurements were more
accurate than that of the FFM, but
it lost its case as the FFM was judged
to be the tool by which the FIA
measured the rate of flow.
The aliasing issue remained a
problem for some teams, despite
numerous upgrades from the original
supplier, but now will finally be
eradicated with the introduction of
the Sentronics 2018 FFM.
In the WEC, meanwhile, an
accuracy problem was identified
and unfortunately amplified in the
Top left: Sentronics has won the
tender to supply the Formula 1 grid
with its fuel flow meter for 2018
Above: The front half of the fuel flow
meter contains the tube where the
ultrasound pulses are transmitted and
the rear half houses the electronics
Left: The modular design of
Sentronics’ FFM has allowed it to
adapt the technology to both low
flow and high flow applications
diesel engine, where flow and return
sensors were required. With its high
diesel return temperatures the Audi
R18s suffered with accuracy. The FIA
subsequently homologated a high-
temperature sensor to particularly
help the diesel engines, which was
developed and supplied by Sentronics.
Unfortunately, these sensors never
saw action, as Audi quit the WEC
before they were used.
Cash flow
Today, the sensors are infinitely more
accurate than in 2014, but having
improved the accuracy, the challenge
now is to reduce the costs to make
the technology more accessible (and
useful) to other race series throughout
the world. With this in mind Sentronics
says it has been able to reduce the
price of the sensor itself, due to an
increase in demand, and is now
actively offering the benefits of the
technology to lower formula series.
be experienced on the vehicle. This is a very
thorough process and tests conformity across a Going with the flow
range of temperatures and flow-rates.

Low flow
The concept behind Sentronics’ fuel flow
technology has proven so successful that
both low flow and high flow variants have
been developed. ‘Low flow is a very difficult
parameter to measure accurately due to your
zero flow error becoming the overriding
source of inaccuracies,’ explains Meech. ‘For
example, if you have one per cent error in your
measurement and you are measuring flow
rates of five litres/min then there is plenty of
difference in ultrasonic pulse timings to allow
for small errors. However, if the flow rate is four
ml/min, which is less than a teaspoon of fuel
per minute, one per cent error is +/-0.04ml/min,
which equates to timing differences of sub pico
second levels. This is an incredibly difficult task.’
For reference, since 2014 the new F1 power
units are using approximately 2.2 litres/min Josef Newgarden won the 2017 IndyCar title driving with a fuel flow meter, which helped the team with its strategy
maximum fuel flow (100kg/hr), compared to the
2013 V8s which were 3.3l/min (150kg/hr).
Low flow measuring devices have become
essential for both OEMs and automotive
testing companies because WLTP (Worldwide
Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure) and
RDE (Real Driving Emissions) tests are now
mandatory in the EU for new vehicles. This
focus on emissions testing requires companies
to publish figures such as fuel consumption,
so being able to very accurately monitor the
amount of fuel going into the engine has now
become even more of a necessity.

Strategic measures
In motorsport terms, low flow technology
could be particularly useful in series such as
IMSA, and other sportscars series that require
refuelling. With the ability to measure low flow
conditions with +/- 0.25 per cent accuracy, Corvette used FFMs last season. They help the team to monitor the fuel consumption during the full course cautions
when off throttle or mid-corner, the engineers

can get a much better understanding of the
overall fuel consumption figures which can in
turn help them to strategise their pit stops more
effectively. ‘I think we’re going to see a mind-
set change with this technology,’ Meech says.
‘The feedback from those who have tested
with this sensor is extremely positive because
they can change their thinking of the fuel load
they need to carry, when they carry it, and
when is the best time to refuel.’
One of the secrets behind the development
of the low flow variant is the modular
design of the original Sentronics fuel flow
meter. The sensor itself is built in two halves;
the front half houses the tube and the
piezoelectric transducers, with the other
electronic components situated in the back
half. Therefore, the tube for the low flow
version could be redesigned and then bolted
on, without Sentroncis having to modify or
interfere with the electronics housing.
R
estricting fuel flow is just
one application for the
fuel flow meter – as used
by the FIA which regulates either
maximum flow (in Formula 1) or
average flow (WEC) – but there are
other uses, as Corvette and Penske
have discovered in US racing.
Fuel consumption is relatively
well-known under normal
conditions, but behind the safety
car it’s more of a challenge,
and teams are left to calculate
consumption at reduced speed.
Over the past 20 years, more than
a quarter of the laps at the Indy
500 have been run under caution,
leaving teams relatively blind to
their actual consumption figures.
But with the fuel flow meter
transmitting live information
back to the pits, teams are
completely aware of when they
need to stop for fuel, rather than
relying on ECU injector data
alone, and that has led to some
interesting decisions from teams
that are using these meters.
Economy drive
Corvette has been using the fuel
flow meter in the second half of
the 2017 season, and has been
able to stretch its fuel to the limit
to make up for what the team
says is a disparity in on track
performance with the other GT
cars. The team says that it has not
got a performance advantage
on track through the Balance of
Performance, or in the pits where
its refilling time is longer than its
competitors, but by being able to
stretch the fuel to its limit it can
deliver the results.
IMSA has mandated fuel
flow meters in all cars in 2018,
including GT and prototype
cars as it targets race capability
rather than one-lap speed. ‘Stint
lengths [in 2017] continued to be
a challenge for IMSA as the team
fuel consumption reporting was
questionable at best,’ says
Geoff Carter, senior director
technical regulations and
compliance, IMSA. ‘For 2018,
IMSA requires a spec fuel flow
meter in the IMSA-mandated data-
logger. The erroneous reporting
led to incorrect refuelling
restrictors/refuelling times and
incorrect capacities.’

LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 41

ENDURANCE RACING – TYRE TECHNOLOGY

The black art

Dunlop is the most successful tyre brand at Le Mans in terms
of outright wins, so when it invited Racecar to the pre-season
Aragon tyre test for an insight into the secrets of developing
high-end endurance racing rubber we jumped at the chance
By GEMMA HATTON

Tyre manufacturers involved in sprint racing often

have to design their tyres to degrade, the polar
opposite to what’s required for endurance racing
42 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
 D
unlop’s tyres endured 525,000km during race week at
last year’s 24 hours of Le Mans, equivalent to 13 times
round the world. A staggering 9632 laps were completed
on its rubber throughout the race – that’s 245 million
tyre revolutions. Its tyres led a total of 769 laps in various classes,
including every lap in LMP2. In addition, 17 LMP2 teams were able
to quadruple stint, with five teams completing five stints – that’s the
same distance as two and a half Formula 1 races on one set of tyres.
Of course, endurance racing is an entirely different beast to F1
and therefore requires entirely different strategies, driving styles and
tyres. The majority of today’s sprint race categories, including F1, no
longer require pit stops for refuelling and drivers only pit when they
need a fresh set of tyres. Therefore, the FIA has collaborated with
Pirelli over the years to try and develop tyre compounds that offer
high grip to keep the drivers happy, whilst sufficient degradation
and wear to force them to pit, increasing the number of pit stops
and consequent strategies to keep the fans happy.
The ‘cliff ’ that Pirelli developed a few years ago is a prime
example of this. In 2016 it tried to engineer a sudden drop in grip
into its compounds, at a certain level of wear. This secondary phase
of tyre degradation occurred at a much higher rate, so drivers
lost so much time per lap that the only feasible option was to pit
immediately and change tyres. This is a good example of how tyre
manufacturers involved in sprint racing often have to design their
tyres to degrade, the polar opposite to endurance racing.

Consistent performance
During a long distance race, the main cause for pit stops is refuelling.
To minimise the overall time spent in the pit lane, ideally teams
want to reduce the number of tyre changes, and when new tyres
are needed, they are changed at the same time as refuelling. This
strategy is one that the teams will try to do at every opportunity,
demanding the tyres to not only last, but maintain performance
for as long as possible. ‘The goal every year for us is to improve
the durability and consistency of all our compounds,’ highlights
Vincent van Goor, computational mechanics engineer at Dunlop.
‘This is endurance racing where our tyres have to last and maintain
consistent performance, not sprint racing where you have one lap at
peak temperature before the tyre drops off and start to degrade.’
Sebastien Montet, director of tyre technology at Dunlop, adds:
‘In endurance racing, the biggest opportunity to improve tyre
durability is to have a wide operating temperature window and

Main picture: Dunlop’s tyres not only cope with the

demands of endurance racing, but also achieve high
performance. Five LMP2 teams at last year’s Le
Mans completed five stints on the same set of tyres –
the same distance as two and a half F1 races
Right: Dunlop provides track-side engineers,
integrated into each team, who work to help optimise
the set-up in order to maximise the tyre performance

LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 43

ENDURANCE RACING – TYRE TECHNOLOGY

Race tyre manufacturers will fit the rubber to the race teams’ rims. After they have been used the tyres are then removed by a machine, once the air has been bled out of them

this is something that we aim to improve each
year. When you race from one track to another,
sometimes on the other side of the world,
the different climates really demand a wide
temperature range that the tyres can work in.
Le Mans is quite specific because of the track
length and the weather can vary on the straight
compared to the rest of the track, but at tracks
like the Nurburgring for the VLN 24 hours, the
conditions are 10 times worse. Two years ago it
was sunny in pit lane and hailing on track, you
can get four seasons in one day there, so we
have to develop tyres that can cope with that.’
This wider operating window is aimed to
have a typical range of 30degC, with a 10 to
15degC overlap between the compounds. Of
course, these numbers vary according to how
each compound behaves with the specific
weather and track conditions, which may
narrow the working range as well as reduce
the overlap. ‘By formulating the compounds
to widen the working range, we can use
compounds in situations that we couldn’t
previously,’ Montet says. ‘For example, this
morning [at the Aragon tyre test] we could
run the B compound [medium] in these cold
conditions. In theory, the medium would have
been out of the window and not the choice we
would recommend and we expected some level
of [cold] graining. Actually, it worked pretty well
because graining was minimal, so that’s one
more box ticked with these new specifications.’
Increasing the suitability of each compound
to a broader range of conditions also opens
up the options for tyre strategies as teams
can then run different compounds in similar
temperatures and conditions.
peak tyre carcass temperature is to effectively
manage and control the rate of wear. High wear
means less rubber which reduces temperature
because there is less material to generate and
preserve the heat,’ explains Montet. ‘The more
we can manage the wear, the more grip we
can maintain. We can control this through the
formulation of the compounds as well as the
mixing process. Also, some of the materials we
use are more thermally stable, so their stiffness
characteristics don’t vary with temperature
as much as other materials. We can simulate
and test these materials across a range of
temperatures to quantify these properties.’
Warming up
Warm up is another characteristic that needs
to be carefully managed. This is defined as the
time taken for the bulk of the tyre to reach

‘The goal every year The heat is on

peak temperature within the working window.
Improving the warm up means the tyres can

for us is to improve the Of course, this wider operating range is

pointless if the tyres can’t get up to temperature
be switched on faster, particularly in cooler
conditions: essential to survive 24-hour races.

durability and consistency temperature once it’s reached. These are the
in the first place or can’t maintain this peak ‘Where this has the biggest impact is after
safety car periods and double yellow zones
other areas that Dunlop has been focusing because the tyres cool down completely,’ says
of all our compounds’ its development on. ‘The key to maintaining Montet. ‘It all depends on the track length, but

44 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

 Once the new tyres have been fitted to the wheel rim they are then pumped up to pressure in these special safety cages

I would say this is most difficult to manage at

Le Mans because of the long straight, which
cools the tyres more. You can lose between
30 to 40degC bulk temperature if you enter a
double yellow down the Mulsanne straight, and
the pressure can drop easily by 0.3-0.4bar. If
this happens we aim for our tyres to be fully up
to temperature by the Porsche curves, but this
depends on the weather conditions. Naturally, if
it’s cold then the warm up will take much longer.
It’s not just from a performance point of view
that we want to minimise warm up time, but
also from a durability point of view. The lower
pressures of cold tyres can lead to structural
problems, particularly when hitting kerbs.’
Surface tension
As well as coping with the differing lateral and
longitudinal demands of each circuit, the tyres
also have to cope with the different surfaces.
The majority of the Mulsanne straight at Le
Mans is public road. Therefore, this section of
the track will have a different macro and micro
roughness which will ultimately affect the rate
at which the tyre generates temperature and
therefore grip. Furthermore, the continual use
of the public roads results in an extremely dirty
Dunlop supplies five different tyre specifications to its LMP2 teams: three types of slick, an intermediate and a wet. All five
specs are new for 2018 and each of them features modified constructions and compounds as well as a wider working range
section of the track, which sounds rather petty,
but with the LMP2s reaching 340kph down this
straight, any debris, dirt or grease can have a
huge effect on tyre performance.
Compound interest
‘For the high abrasive tracks you need the
stronger compound because it lasts longer
and is more stable,’ says van Goor. ‘But for
the low abrasive tracks you want the softer
compound because this gives you more
chemical grip through adhesion.
‘However, if the temperature is low, the
harder compound works better, but at low
mu [coefficient of friction] tracks, the softer
compound has better adhesion,’ van Goor adds.
‘You have to make a trade off and quite often
the medium is used as it suits both conditions.’
This is why Dunlop conducts tyre tests at a
variety of circuits, so that it can subject its tyres
to a wide range of different surfaces. ‘We spend
a lot of time doing circuit characterisation,
which is where we analyse all the car data and
try to group the circuits into categories and
understand how to optimise the tyres for each
track,’ says Mike McGregor, track-side support
and engineering manager at Dunlop. ‘As part
of the new ‘Super Season’ we will be racing
at Sebring, which is half concrete and half
tarmac. We last scanned Sebring in 2015 and
found there were 37 different surfaces around
the circuit. Trying to design a tyre optimal for
that track, whilst coping with the public road
surface at Le Mans as well as the high load and
high energy characteristics experienced at
Silverstone, is a challenge.
‘This is why we come to Aragon for tyre
testing because it has very high loads and the
tyres don’t get much relief,’ McGregor reveals.
‘Here, we hit top speeds that are similar to
Le Mans down the back straight, so in terms
of gearing we can run in full Le Mans set-up
and simulate these loads. However here,
immediately after the cars reach top speed
there is also a fast left hander, so the tyres
have no time to recover. This gives us the

LE MANS 2018 www.racecar-engineering.com 45

ENDURANCE RACING – TYRE TECHNOLOGY

‘We found there were 37 different surfaces around the Sebring circuit’
worst case scenario, rather than the best case
scenario, in which to develop our new tyres.’

Open competition
Open tyre competition means that suppliers
can optimise their product to suit their teams, to
beat the competition. For example, in VLN and
WEC GT, although Dunlop has to homologate
three compound specifications, it is allowed to
modify the construction and supply a unique
specification to each chassis. Therefore, last year
when Dunlop also supplied Porsche alongside
the Aston Martins, it could develop a much
stronger rear construction to cope with the
higher loads from the rear-engined racecar.
The Honda NSX was running at the test at Aragon. The track’s ideal for testing Dunlop’s endurance rubber as there are very LMP2, however, is much more restrictive. By
high loads and the tyres don’t get much relief, while the cars hit top speeds similar to Le Mans down the back straight regulation, Dunlop can only supply three slick
specifications, so all teams have to use the
same specifications, regardless of the chassis
they are running. The only tool to optimise tyre
performance is the car’s set-up.
‘Every year it is a big challenge to design
one tyre package that suits every team, whilst
coping with the different chassis,’ says van
Goor. ‘If the specification doesn’t work for one
chassis, then we can’t release it. In LMP2 last
year, the cars gained 100bhp and 40 per cent
more downforce compared to 2016 which is
why we introduced a totally new tyre package
that better suited the aero balance of all the
chassis, but it meant that the teams had to
adjust their set-up. Last year we made the rear
tyres stronger, whereas this year we have made
the front tyres stronger whilst keeping the
rear tyres at a similar level. We are constantly
testing various constructions to learn about the
The optimum strategy to win an endurance race is to spend as little time in the pit lane as possible. Teams want tyres to last different vertical and cornering stiffnesses which
as long as possible and by regulation have only a certain number of tyres for use during a race weekend, forcing longevity is very important for the aero platform. Stiffer
front tyres help to stabilise the ride height and
aero platform, so the balance is more consistent
which helps the drivers during braking and turn-
in and that’s what we have improved this year.’

Varying set-ups
The main tactic for optimising the behaviour
of the tyres to suit each racecar is through
adjusting the set-up. For example, out of the
nine LMP2 ORECAs running on Dunlops last
year, none had the same set-up. That said, set-up
is largely dependent on driving style as well,
which is yet another factor that Dunlop has
to consider when developing tyres. Unlike F1
where the set-up of each car evolves around the
particular preferences of each individual driver,
endurance racing teams have three drivers to
consider. Not only does this mean the engineers
have to deal with three different driving styles,
but the combination of Pro and Am driver line-
ups also exaggerate these differences. ‘From
To measure tyre wear first the pick-up on the surface of the tyre needs to be heated up and then scraped off. Only then can a design point of view we need to ensure the
a wear gauge be used to measure the depth of the wear holes and therefore the amount of rubber that has been worn away tyres are not too sharp for the Am drivers to

46 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018

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ENDURANCE RACING – TYRE TECHNOLOGY
Dunlop brought around 3500 tyres to the Aragon test. At Le Mans this year, just for LMP2, it will need to supply 180 tyres per car for race week, which adds up to 2880 tyres in total
handle,’ Montet says. ‘By definition, Am drivers
are not spending the same amount of hours on
track as the Pros, so we have to give them tyres
that are still fast, but easy to manage. We could
make a faster tyre for the Pro, but there’s no
point because the Am driver would not be able
to cope and endurance racing is a team effort.
That’s why during testing we actually give a lot
of consideration to the Am driver comments
as well as the Pro, so we can check that the
direction we’re going in is not too extreme. The
Am driver should be the happiest with the tyres,
because the Pro driver has the skills to manage.’
LMP2 changes
The change in LMP2 regultions opened the door
to new set ups for the teams which led to some
problems, initially, but these are now solved and
teams have experience with the cars. ‘Although
the car regulations are the same for 2018, the
problem is that now teams know how to utilise
these more powerful cars and extract every
tenth from them,’ Montet says. ‘Of course, the
tyres will be punished the most. Therefore for
2018 we have completely revamped everything.
The construction has changed for the slicks,
Logistical challenges
I
n addition to all the on-track challenges of being a tyre
supplier, there are plenty off-track challenges for Dunlop
to face, too. Tyres not only have to be engineered and
developed, but manufactured and shipped as well, and
this has become even more of a headache as the WEC
embarks on its new 13-month, eight race season.
‘It’s essentially one and a half seasons, where we race
at Le Mans twice and also go to Sebring, which adds about
1500 miles to the season for LMP2,’ explains Paul Bryant, key
account manager at Dunlop. ‘For example, this season at
Le Mans we will be supplying 16 LMP2 cars, which equates
to around 2800 to 3000 tyres in total, just for LMP2. To get
those to Le Mans we will need six transporters and around
30 fitting staff at the track to fit them.’
That said, the logistics team actually has more of a
challenge supplying tyres for testing rather than the races,
despite the fact that fewer teams take part in a test. ‘You
might think we would have fewer tyres here than at Le
Mans, but when you are testing not only do you have so
many variants, but also tyre sets might be disregarded after
only four or five laps. So here, we have about 3500, and
that’s just how tyre testing works.’
48 www.racecar-engineering.com LE MANS 2018
intermediates and wets, to maintain the same
level of consistency and durability as last year,
but with improved performance.
‘Obviously, if you change the construction,
you change the footprint and so the compound
needs to change as well, which is where we
widened the operating range,’ Montet adds.
‘You need to optimise the cavity shape, the
construction and the compound and then how
all three work together. Another aim for these
revamped tyres was to improve the stiffness
balance between the front and rear to maximise
the potential of the aero platform. We have
brought more stiffness to the front, but whether
that is done by adding stiffness to the front tyres
or reducing the stiffness of the rear tyres is the
question. We supply five specifications to LMP2,
and all five are new for this year.’
Rule mule
Having to redesign the tyres in the second
year of a new phase of regulations is relatively
unsurprising. New regulations bring new
unknowns and with safety always at the top
of the agenda for every tyre manufacturer,
often they go conservative. This was seen in
Formula 1, where the mule cars that Pirelli
used to develop its 2017 tyres were largely
unrepresentative in terms of aero loads. This
forced an increase in safety margins, producing
a range of tyres that were much harder than
required, resulting in minimal degradation and
less overtaking. With the data and knowledge
gained from last year, its 2018 tyres have
now all moved a step softer, resulting in the
introduction of the new pink-walled Hypersoft
to provide more grip at street circuits.
The open tyre competition of LMP2 and
the close relationship Dunlop has with its
teams meant that its mule car was a lot more
representative. ‘We used an old LMP2 car and
added a mock aero kit to give us the rough level
of aero that the new cars would have,’ Montet
says. ‘As the cars would be coming relatively late
we decided to supply a preliminary specification
for 2017, that we thought was 90 per cent there,
based on this data. This was then frozen for 2017
Of the nine LMP2 ORECAs running Dunlops
last year, none of them had the same set-up
but we have used all the data gathered from the
season to make the changes to meet our target,
which we knew was reliable.’
On the GT side of things, the rule changes
have been much less dramatic, although VLN
has made a controversial change to its open
tyre competition championship. Previously,
the teams had full use of confidential tyres, so
Dunlop could bring any specification that it
wanted. Now there are new restrictions.
‘Three years ago we could run any
development tyre, but this changed last year
and we now have a “Sample Tyre Procedure”,’
explains Bernd Seehafer, motorsport technical
project leader at Dunlop. ‘Effectively all the
slick tyre specifications that you run have to
go into a so called “impound” where the other
tyre manufacturers can access them. Logically
that means we have to develop tyres with the
same level of performance, without showing all
our cards.’ The number of specifications are also
limited to nine per car, although three of these
can be introduced later on in the season.
Ongoing development
Last year, Dunlop won the WEC in LMP2 with
Vaillante Rebellion at Bahrain and celebrated
with a tyre test the very next day. That
approach never changes. ‘Here at Aragon, we
are already thinking of 2019,’ Montet says. ‘We
are testing designs that have some potential
but the season [begins in May, 2018], so we
don’t have time to industrialise or test these
designs, but we will continue to pursue them
at other tyre tests, ready for 2019 or 2020. The
biggest problem is actually saying when to stop
development, and for that we work back from
the dates of the Prologue.
‘The teams out on track are our customers,
but we see them as partners,’ Montet adds. ‘They
have come here to go racing and win and it’s
our role to bring a product that allows them to.
Open tyre competition is fierce so you have to
push through the season as well as the winter.
We need to keep this leading edge in ELMS and
LMP2 and from what we’ve seen so far, we are
on the right track to be successful again.’
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