[mod edit: FYI... this is a cross-post from reddit, for the purposes of canoeing. Spam links have been removed. Props go to reddit user: NomTook]
Hello everyone,,
I’ve been a fan of motorsports since before I can remember. At first I loved the speed, the sounds and smells of being at a racetrack, and the fighter pilot look of the drivers in their suits and helmets. As I grew older I became more fascinated with the engineering that went on behind racing cars – building the most powerful engines, using exotic materials, and testing new, innovative aerodynamic concepts. I eventually went to Engineering school with the hope of one day working in motorsport, which I did on a part time basis for a little while, but life kind of got in the way and I currently work for an OEM as an engineer. I am still a huge motorsport fan (F1, Indycar and Sportscars mainly) and also race karts as a hobby.
Most people tend to focus on the cars, drivers and teams that win – The Mercedes, Penskes and Porsches of the motorsports world. That’s all well and good, but I’ve always been more interested in racecars that failed. I ran a Formula SAE team in college for a couple of years so I have an idea of what it’s like to design and manufacture a racecar from scratch. For a professional team, even an OEM to do the same thing, to a much higher standard on a global stage, requires almost staggering amounts of time, brainpower and effort. So how does it sometimes go all wrong? How do brilliant engineers backed by millions of dollars completely fail in building competitive racecars?
I’m going to see if I can come up with an explanation for some of these failed, stunted, or forgotten racecars, staring with…
Nissan GT-R LM Nismo
This is perhaps the most well-known failed racecar of the modern era, mostly because it failed so dramatically and so publicly. It was in a Superbowl commercial for pete’s sake.
Sportscar racing in the 2000s-2010s was in a golden age. Audi kicked off manufacturer involvement in the LMGTP category, which replaced GT1 as the top category at Le Mans in 1999. The Audi R8C that raced at Le Mans in 1999 was the blueprint for the Le Mans Prototypes that would enter endurance racing around the world for the next twenty years. Audi eventually decided to run its open top R8 instead of the closed cockpit concept, and the R8 would become one of the most dominant racing cars of all time (hence why I probably won’t cover it). Eventually, manufactures like Bentley, Peugeot, Aston Martin, Porsche, and Toyota (never mind a bevy of Lolas, Rebellions, Ginettas and whoever else wanted to build a LMP1 car at the time) would compete for top honors at Le Mans. By the end of their run, LMP1 cars had been powered by turbo V4s, V6, V8, and V10 Turbo Diesels, Naturally Aspirated V8s, V10s and V12s and even a twin turbo diesel V12. Hybrid powertrains had been introduced in 2011 (the same year the World Endurance Championship was formed), and by 2014, three major players were left in LMP1: Audi, Toyota and Porsche. The LPM1-H cars produced by these manufacturers remain some of the fastest, most efficient and advanced racing cars ever made, rivaled only by Formula 1 cars of the same era.
Enter: Nissan Motor Company. It’s difficult to know exactly why Nissan decided to go endurance racing, but at the time they most certainly had an appetite for trying new things in motorsports. The famous (or infamous) Deltawing was powered by a 1.6L Nissan inline four, and carried Nissan sponsorship for the 2012 season. Deltawing, which used the tub design from the Aston Martin AMR-One (more on that later) was designed by Ben Bowlby, a former Lola designer and engineer, who would Nissan would tap to design its entry into the World Endurance Championship. Bowlby was given the helm of the project, and was told specifically not to design and “Audi copy”, the thought being that Audi had spent over a decade and untold millions at that point developing its mid-engined chassis concept, and winning would require new, innovative ideas, not just tracing the front running blueprints.
And innovate he did. I can still remember the articles and rumors going around at the time that Nissan was building a front engined LMP1 car. Okay fine, it’s been done before (the Panoz GTR-1 was actually pretty successful). However, the wackiness really set in when it came out that the car was front wheel drive. In early 2015, spy shots of the car testing at COTA were published on various media outlets and it was all but confirmed: Nissan was going to try to beat Audi, Porsche and Toyota with a front engine, front wheel drive car.
What was Bowlby thinking? Front wheel drive is only found on racecars when it’s mandated by the rules, and there hadn’t been a front engine prototype for almost twenty years…right?
Well, not so fast. Yes, the car was biased to front wheel drive, but it did have a hybrid system that could send power to the rear wheels. I quote the Febuary 2015 issue of Car and Driver:
“Behind the engine and beneath the cockpit is a kinetic energy recovery system using two flywheels developed by Torotrak. The flywheels gain energy from the use of the front brakes then discharges that energy back to the front wheels via a driveshaft running over the top of the combustion engine. The flywheels can also output power to a secondary driveshaft which is connected to a limited-slip differential at the rear of the car which feeds epicyclic gearboxes located in each rear wheel hub, allowing the GT-R to be all-wheel drive if necessary.”
Sound complicated? It should, because it is.
Additionally, while the engine is in front of the driver, it’s also behind the centerline of the front wheels, so it’s more of a front-mid layout. As Bowlby explained in an interview with Racecar Engineering:
“The front tyres on the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO are bigger than the rear tyres – 14 inch wide front vs. 9 inch rear. This is due to the way that mass is distributed in the car. We have moved the weight bias forwards to give us traction for the front-engined, front-wheel drive. We’ve also moved the aero forwards so we’ve moved the capacity of the tyres forward to match the weight distribution. So the aero centre of pressure, the mass centre of gravity and the tyre capacity are all in harmony and that means we have bigger tyres at the front than the rear”
And narrow the rear tires were. Check out how this thing looks with no bodywork:
Now, this is all well and good, but it still doesn’t really explain why the car is front engined and front wheel drive. The reason is, like it often is in racing these days, aerodynamics.
In my opinion the most outrageous and brilliant idea integrated into the design of the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO is not the front wheel drive or the front engine layout. It’s the wild way air flows around the car. Actually, “around” is not the correct word. Air essentially flows through the car. Check out this photo from Racecar Engineering:
These tunnels run down the length of the car, from the front, around the cockpit, and out the rear above the diffuser.
I’m not an aerodynamicist but the implication here is clear. Bowlby is trying to reduce drag by effectively reducing the frontal cross section of the car, and is trying to increase downforce by dumping a ton of aerodynamic energy into the diffuser. The rear wing on the car is miniscule – most of the downforce is coming from the floor and these tunnels, and the aerodynamic center of pressure is way forward. This would have been impossible in a mid-engine car, as the engine and its ancillaries would have gotten in the way of the tunnels
So, in theory the ideas here are at least workable, and at most revolutionary. So what went wrong?
This:
This:
And this:
The power unit and drivetrain in this car is INSANELY complex. Look at it! Just the number of pipes, wires, ducts, belts, pullies and tanks is outrageous. The packaging is ridiculously tight. Granted, I have never worked in a super high performance industry like aerospace or high level motorsport, but I have never seen such a mess of packaging of anything in my life. The engine of this thing must have been a nightmare to work on.
Nissan called the ICE part of power unit the VRX30A. There is little information available on the engine, however we do know that it is a completely bespoke racing engine that is not based on any of Nissan’s road car engines, and it was built and developed by Cosworth. The rumor at the time was that it was based on Cosworth’s stillborn Formula 1 engine, but the engine in the Nissan appears to have a shallower bank angle than the 90 degrees specified by Formula 1 regulations at the time, and displacement of the VRX30A is three liters, almost double that of the 1.6 Formula 1 ICE powerplant. The engine on its own was thought to develop about 550bhp in race trim.
