MotoIQ fans?

Any of you guys read stuff from MotoIQ? Maybe you're waiting for your next issue of GRM to arrive? Definitely check these guys out. They know their stuff, and they write awesome articles with tons of pictures breaking down everything they are doing.

I'm currently reading about their project V8 RX7. Link for those interested:

http://www.motoiq.com/v8rx7.aspx

They also have a "Project Miatabusa" I am going to check out next:

http://www.motoiq.com/Projects/Mazda/Miatabusa/lapg-235/2.aspx

Lots of other cool stuff too, like close looks at time attack cars and the trick engineering that goes into them. Engine builds, chassis setup guides, etc. One of their main writers, Mike Kojima, is very knowledgeable, and has been in the business for a very long time. Guy knows his stuff.

Anyways, I figured I would spread the love. Theres a lot of great content over there if you've been looking for more motorsport related stuff!

Love that site! Read all the LeMons builds too, and anything else Dave Coleman wrote.

There are some very good articles there. Lately I've been sending folks to read this one. http://www.motoiq.com/MagazineArticles/ID/3974/How-to-PROPERLY-select-and-size-TIRES-for-PERFORMANCE.aspx

Not a huge fan due to some big engineering style oversights... Good for skimming and pretty pictures though!

it's like when I read exotic car reviews. it's not that it isn't interesting, but not regularly applicable. Maybe I'm just not hardcore enough, idk.

In reply to tuna55:

Can you be more specific? I do get annoyed by the occasional "look this obviously makes a lot of downforce because it looks like it does!" and "WPC everything!" but find a lot of the tech to be solid, especially "best engineered cars of lemons" and similar.

Ugh, I should really not have brought this up, but here it is.

http://www.motoiq.com/MagazineArticles/ID/2135/PageID/3624/Building-the-Long-Rod-Nissan-SR20VE-Engine.aspx

If you read that, you'll start seeing FEA plots from JE on the pages, somewhere around page 3. If you look at the screenshot of the wristpin, you see a little scale showing the deformation. That's fine, sort of. When you do an FEA, you have to give it inputs. You can't just say "OK, computer, pretend this part is spinning around in an engine and tell me what it would look like", you need to program in specific loading scenarios for specific temperature and material properties. Without knowing what those are, the graph is useless. It could be an FEA of the wristpin sitting on the bench, or falling off of your desk, or accidentally being installed in a top fuel dragster. You know nothing based on this graph.

Further ruining this is the picture of the piston. Not only is there no definition of the loading case, but now not even a scale of the results. In any FEA software, you can scale your results to show different color gradients, which can be quite useful. In other words, I can set the scale from 1 inch to 0.999 inches, and the entire plot would be blue.

They did it again here with wheels.

http://www.motoiq.com/MagazineArticles/ID/1608/PageID/2134/Industry-Insider-A-Look-at-the-Technology-Behind-RAYS-Wheels.aspx

No data given regarding the loading or the scale. Honestly, the wheel truly looks like it's being loaded in an unrealistic manner. In a real car, you would expect a massive amount of asymmetry around the circumference. Some part of this wheel is facing the ground!

There are other crimes, but those were the ones which stuck out.

In reply to tuna55:

Oh, I remember reading those articles when they came out. Having done a decent amount of FEA work myself, I'm pretty sure I glanced at the pictures, went "OK no scale or loading info, so these are just here for the pretty colors" and moved on. I'm totally with you on the uselessness of it, but I'm pretty sure Kojima is also the one who constantly goes "and we WPC treated it so now it's made of magical berkeleying unicorn E36 M3s!"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: In reply to tuna55: Oh, I remember reading those articles when they came out. Having done a decent amount of FEA work myself, I'm pretty sure I glanced at the pictures, went "OK no scale or loading info, so these are just here for the pretty colors" and moved on. I'm totally with you on the uselessness of it, but I'm pretty sure Kojima is also the one who constantly goes "and we WPC treated it so now it's made of magical berkeleying unicorn E36 M3s!"

Yeah, so you understand. Essentially it pretends to be engineer-y and data driven, but really it's just different pretty pictures.

I have no doubt JE pistons uses FEA, but those pictures don't encourage me as to their results. It makes me a little suspicious, actually. I would not let FEA screenshots like that out of my building. I hope they actually do know what they are doing.

In reply to tuna55:

Those images have a distinct look of "hey, intern, crop these so nobody can steal any of our secrets OK?" to them.

Clearly I'm the target audience as the third piston photo in the linked article looks like a gentleman's sausage.

MCarp22 wrote: Clearly I'm the target audience as the third piston photo in the linked article looks like a gentleman's sausage.

And yet again, we need a scale.

Your nitpicking. FEA is clearly outside of their realm, and the fact that they are not claiming to do any analysis of their own means you cant really fault them for not fully understanding it. Here is the reply from someone who had your exact same nitpick:

bkb001 said: You guys need to stop putting FEA "results" up on this webpage like that. There is no scaling listed, so you cannot tell if the design is strong enough to wishstand the condition as-loaded, or for how long. You have also failed to put any of the loading conditions in with the graph. Is this at TDC at 5K at 60% throttle? Is this 8 ms after falling off of a shelf? Without some background information, your FEA "results" are completely irrelevant. An engineer should know better.

The reply:

Mike Kojima said: bkb, JE didn't give us the scaling and loading conditions and as an engineer I don't care, why? Because JE's engineers are a hell of alot better at designing pistons than I am so the exact information is irrelevant to me as I am not going to second guess an experienced piston designing ME who does this all day for a living. I am pretty sure that they might be better at this particular task than you as well! This isn't an article about FEA so why should I bog down the article with minutia that perhaps .01% of readers would care about. It's good enough to see that there are no hotspots in the design and that JE does make use of analytic tools like FEA when a lot of the aftermarket does not. You can also see how material was removed without screwing up the design as well by looking at the pics. However we will be doing articles about JE's design process in the future so maybe I might include some of that data. On the other hand probably not unless I write an article on FEA.

So at least they recognize that. Everybody makes mistakes.

In reply to Desmond:

Hey, that was me!

No, that's not nitpicking.

Anyway, we each have our own opinion. I lost a ton of respect for those guys that day. It may as well have been a plot of HP and torque with no numbers on the side.

Hahaha, yeah I had that thought that it might have been you. Its all good. I do understand where your coming from.

Dsport mag is another good site for learning stuff:

http://dsportmag.com/category/the-tech/education/

I really want to like dsport, but as with with most automotive journalism, the "technical" info is pretty damn thin.

The content is fine for someone who's just getting started with cars & tuning. Beyond that, it's just more pretty pictures & breezy text.

love their stroker 4AG build

My POV on MotoIQ is that their builds are solid - they wrench and race their own project cars. They obviously have passion, and they make good decisions with the routes they take in the different builds. THey spend money when it makes sense to, and they bin engineer when theres no need to open the wallet wider than necessary.

I get the ME vernacular discussion - it makes sense to not just simply accept that pretty pics = solid science. But, Kojimas point is solid: They write car articles, not break down engineering mathematics. You could argue that the pics with no reference is the same as fleecing someone into buying snake oil - claims with no backup, so I will give you the gripe that they shouldnt include the pics just for the pics sake. But you cant necessarily argue the merit of the actual motorsport discussions on that point alone.

I personally dont read many of the zomfg unobtanium grocery list part reviews - I dont have the budget for half that stuff, nor an application theyre available for in most cases. But I do enjoy the builds where theyre building a 'busa powered meeotter, and a 1992 G20 Racecar etc etc.

There's good stuff over there, and (no disrespect meant) discrediting it because you disagree with their policy regarding publishing proprietary engineering schematics is a little thin of an argument in my book.

I like their stuff. You can find gripes with just about everything, but they do a good job of avoiding the showy/stance stuff and going more toward proving the parts they use. Khiem Dinh is a pretty good series on his S2000 that's one of the reasons I bought one again.

And, as others have said, anything by Dave Coleman is worth reading. Really wish he still wrote regularly.

I am with Tuna55 here. If your going to buy a off the shelf part fine say the manufactor says its good enough. If not don't show the data incorrectly.

I really love the Dave Coleman articles on MotoIQ. They did something weird with their RSS feed in the last year or so that means I have to go back periodically and look, so I haven't been there in a while.

My problem with motoiq is that for some reason their web site is usually incredibly slow to load. I'm not sure why, but I mostly don't bother trying to read it for that reason.

Agreed, their site layout and such is clunky and weird. But content is up there with the best of em.

I think there are articles by Per Schroeder up there periodically, too, and of course we all know that guy! . I enjoy the site. I'm no engineer, so I skip over those charts and graphs anyway. Good pics and I like that they build what they race. As a Nissan fan it's a great site for weird (and normal) Nissan stuff.

I'm another Coleman fan, haven't followed up on much from motoiq lately, I have seen an article or 2 there from Per, good stuff.