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World Time Attack Challenge 2013 Sydney, Australia

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Hey Guys, we have formulated a plan of attack for next year with a focus on our drivetrain reliability first and foremost. Looks like our engine package is quite strong. I got a couple more donations even after the event! Thank you for that! I did spend a lot more than I expected to get Tim out there, he proved quite invaluable though and I will definitely be getting him out there next year as well!...
 
Is the switch to AWD not something that is desirable? I would like to hear the reason behind not going forward with that conversion?
 
I think that has more to do with Andrew's obsession with weight. An AWD swap would add quite a lot of additional weight, and the lack of weight on his car is one of it's huge advantages. Plus, I think he wants to push the FWD platform as far as he can. But that's something that he would have to comment on himself.
 
Is the switch to AWD not something that is desirable? I would like to hear the reason behind not going forward with that conversion?

We just have to look at costs. Remember the other AWD competitors are sponsored by very rich team owners, its a lot to compete with financially and more than we can support with our humble sponsors, workshop labor and my engineering being volunteered. Also the AWD stuff for the DSM is not as developed as EVO so to get it right we have to develop and test some things from scratch. First and foremost we need to know our drivetrain is reliable before we can go and increase the loads it needs to endure. We cannot have any plans for the future until we are over that hurdle and fix our handling issue of four blown shocks and no testing. From there we will work out what developments will be done.
 
Are your shocks rebuildable? I'm not sure what you're running.
 
I can only hope, greengoblin, but tight budgets are what they are.

gixxerdrew, did you figure out what happened to them yet?
 
Hello everyone. Sorry for the slow updates. I have been really busy as I recently completed a huge project designing a wind tunnel which we installed at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi and we are still training their staff how to use it. I have also been busy with side projects and time attack stuff. Unfortunately haven't had any work on GT cars the last while because of the SuperGT DTM merger, but the wind tunnel has been a great project and learned a lot.

Back to the eclipse!

Some great news. PAR tore down the gearbox and we found pre-existing damage to the 4th gear. It is now replaced with a new one, reassembled, damaged bearing plate replaced and it is delivered to the workshop. PAR has been awesome to work with. Special shout out to Tim Zimmer for all the work to track down bits and pieces and talk me through everything on the drivetrain side.

Side note: The competition clutch is a really nice piece. We will start using that one as the primary part and the other as the spare. The GT Auto guys loved the design as well.

As you know we suffered blown shocks in transport. MCA suspension built us a set of custom remote reservoir (beautiful I might add) top of the line shocks. See the photo below.

We made a laundry list of everything on the car that was not clean or done right. We are trying to address everything one by one, reliability is our number one goal. There were a lot of things done in the past that are just not up to the level of competition we now face. Our job now is to find bugs and fix them while avoiding anything catastrophic. I ordered up a bunch of small misc parts and sent this and thats off for testing. Our changes to the car must be minimal and focus on refinement. We also have limited ability to test since our team is international. It is much easier for the local teams to put the crew together for a test.

I dont know that we can win, but really what I want to know is: what is the true potential of this car? It never got to the point where we could milk every last tenth out of it and now it is in a workshop that can put it together and we have the right sponsors in place. Our competitors are much lighter than we are and the minimum weight rule prevents us from doing anything about that. The car that was the fastest FWD last year was 900kg.. Mighty mouse is under 800 and we are 1100kg, so we have something like 3-4 seconds of ground to make up straight away. We really struggle to put power down at this track and that is hurting one of our biggest advantages.

With that said, I still feel honored that we even made it this far and can compete at this level. My little car that I used to work on in my carport when I was in university...

For the tech junkies: Another project I have been working on with our sponsor PWR. Porous modeling of the heat exchangers. I wanted to improve the cooling. I have been working with PWR to get my CFD to match up to their wind tunnel values. They have also been excellent to work with. This was a critical piece because we could not really develop in the future until we could more accurately represent the cooling system in CFD.

Spent a good amount of time on improving the modeling and testing techniques. A couple of my mates did correlation tests between the software I use (Ansys) and OpenFoam. Sensitivity testing all over the place. They also built a test rig for an array of pressure sensors and a data logger which we embed the heat exchanger cores while on track. This is to help the cooling system correlation further. Still using a hard top model though, since that is what the body was really designed for. I need to scan the car one of these days.
 

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It's amazing to see the attention to detail and amount of effort and technology that goes into being even somewhat competitive in this realm. Thank you for continuing to share! Wish you the best in your continued efforts and I hope we as a community can help keep you motivated!
 
Awesome stuff Andrew. Glad to hear that things are starting to come together for you again. I'd be curious to learn more about this Porous Modeling that you're trying to integrate into your test model. Is it a way to help see where you could increase the efficiency of heat extraction of your aero package? Or am I totally off base there?

Either way, great work and keep the updates coming! :hellyeah:
 
At this time we do not have any plan to ship the car. So I am not thinking that far ahead yet. I believe the problem was how they strapped it down though.

More on the porous modeling. In the past we did not have good test data for the coolers so I programmed a velocity in and out of them. Its a very rough method because as you change something on the aero the velocity would change and vice versa so you are not getting as accurate of test results until you do that right. If the results are less accurate you cannot trust smaller gains in your results. We are not developing anything at the moment except trying to increase the cooling capacity with extra venting in the hood. We had an issue with keeping the car cool and I had not experienced that before. It could have been a different problem but its not worth risking a test over unless I have good data from CFD that the flow is sufficient. Louver panels are cheap and easy to make though, so we will probably do that anyway. Its sort of my way with these time attack cars, if you have a list of problems overkill the solutions because your tests are too limited to lose one on something stupid. You need every second you can get to work on the handling.
 
At this time we do not have any plan to ship the car. So I am not thinking that far ahead yet. I believe the problem was how they strapped it down though.

More on the porous modeling. In the past we did not have good test data for the coolers so I programmed a velocity in and out of them. Its a very rough method because as you change something on the aero the velocity would change and vice versa so you are not getting as accurate of test results until you do that right. If the results are less accurate you cannot trust smaller gains in your results. We are not developing anything at the moment except trying to increase the cooling capacity with extra venting in the hood. We had an issue with keeping the car cool and I had not experienced that before. It could have been a different problem but its not worth risking a test over unless I have good data from CFD that the flow is sufficient. Louver panels are cheap and easy to make though, so we will probably do that anyway. Its sort of my way with these time attack cars, if you have a list of problems overkill the solutions because your tests are too limited to lose one on something stupid. You need every second you can get to work on the handling.

Ha ha. I for one can appreciate that statement. If it's worth doing, it's worth OVERdoing. Moderation is for cowards. :D
 
Ha ha. I for one can appreciate that statement. If it's worth doing, it's worth OVERdoing. Moderation is for cowards. :D

Yes and sometimes its a big problem like right now we need to overdo cooling, and every time we add cooling flow we lose precious counts of downforce and increase drag. So I am trying to find a way to increase our cooling without hurting the rest of the aero or at least hurt less....
 
Could the MCS suspension be made available to people like me? Whats the ballpark cost?
 
Could the MCS suspension be made available to people like me? Whats the ballpark cost?

Expect to pay around $8000+ for what Andrew is running on his car. MCS suspension components start about $3000 for single adjustable and go up from there.
 
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