They Designed a Car Faster Than Formula 1

This is the Porsche that was

faster

than F1 and broke a 35-year-old record in Nuro Winap. I've talked about it before, but this time I had an interview with the technical lead of the project to understand exactly how Porsche did it and it's crazy, it's almost a real life version of my F1 without rules video from a few weeks ago. They took their already extremely fast lmp1 car and made it over 12 seconds

faster

at Spar, which is 11% faster, a huge amount in motorsport, so let me explain how the engineers at Spar

designed

and engineered it. Porsche.

I developed a car that goes through a Rouge like this. I've driven by a Rouge hundreds of times and it's fast, so let's briefly review this car's records before getting into the engineering tricks

they

use to make it faster. record and Porsche's main objective was the Nurur Nord Schlier lap record which it had held for 35 years and which was held by another Porsche, Group C car 956 driven by Stefan Bellof. All eyes are on the latest recruit, Bellof, who had stunned motorsport. world with an incredible pole position time in the previous round at Silverstone, this was a legendary lap in motorsport set in 1983 and those Group C cars were legendary too.

Group C was a playground for development in motorsport, allowing engineers a lot of freedom with aerodynamic materials and the engine. setups including turbocharging passing towards the exit Finish line number two, the rofman Porsche with an incredible time of 6 minutes 11.13 seconds and Group C produced some of our favorite cars in this part 956, the Cyber ​​​​Mercedes C9, the Jaguar the team was just before N Slier's record in 2018,

they

were actually preparing well for that record while they were in spa Neil Yan completed a lap in 1 minute 41.7 beating Lewis Hamilton's lap from the previous year in the Mercedes wut 07 by 8/10 of a second, however F1 went faster again later in 2018 with Vettle in a Ferrari in a 1min 41.5 and then Hamilton again in 2020 with a 1min 41.2, so yeah , F1 beat Porsche again, but not by merchandise and remember these were the fastest F1 cars we have ever seen and Porsche's time is still faster than the current crop. of F1 cars, so it holds up quite well, then in September 2018 the team took the car to the incredible circuit that is Lagona Sea and again unofficially broke the lap record.

This lap record had been held since 2000 by a monstrous C Carard driven. by HELOC castris btw these CL cars were amazing 900 horsepower V8s running on methanol yes the same smoldering methanol and just look at proper race cars, proper tracks and no power steering. I love it, so Helio set a time. from a rating of 1 minute 7.7 and the Porsche then surpassed it 18 years later with a time of 1 minute 5.7, but look, there was one circuit they went to and didn't beat the record and I promise this will be the last time which I will mention but they went to Brown's hatch and they didn't break the record set by yours truly, okay yes of course I'll stop it, that's not the case anymore so to be fair to Porsche they had to limit something on the car, which I'm going to reveal later and that would have seriously hampered their chances of the record without that, they probably would have beaten my time, so let's move on.

This is Steven Mitas, he was the chief racing engineer for the Porsche LMP team, the team that won three Leóns. years in a row and who was then the technical project leader for the 919 Evo, this wild experiment. I spoke with him on the driver 61 podcast and this was one of my favorite interviews because what Porsche allowed him and his team to do was an engineer's dream. make a car go as fast as possible with no rules, the only thing that limited them was creativity, structural integrity and of course some kind of budget, so where does a crazy project like this start and how the hell can you convince to a big automaker that it's a good idea, well, it all starts with a question: what would our 919 Evo hybrid or our hybrid be like if we had the opportunity to go from 9 N to 11?

So Steven went to Andreas Sidel, who was the team manager. of the LMP projects and incredibly, he and the Porsche board said yes guys, however the team would only have a very small budget and less than a year to do the work, an incredibly small amount of time for this works and works. Well, the project started in September 2017, when the team only had that season's car and the idea of ​​producing a car without rules by the end of November, the team was testing a car with EVO parts and until early spring of 2018. The team continued testing using Porsche's proven terrain in visco.

Now it's worth noting that the terrain tested isn't really

designed

for a nearly 1200 horsepower race car, it's pretty twisty, so I doubt the team would have gotten any significant error data from those tests at the time. In April, the team did a 3-day test in Spa during which they broke the unofficial lap record, then moved to Nurburgr for a test before the final lap record attempt in June. There are a few things that are impressive here first, the team. He managed to turn things around very quickly and I guess it's not entirely surprising that these teams are used to rapid development like we see in F1, but also a lack of test miles, they basically tested on a winding road car proving ground that they did a few days in Spa. and a final test at the Nurburg ring which isn't many miles at all, which might be enough if you're making some adjustments to a car, but these guys were making fundamental changes to the Porsche, taking it much further than ever before, so where is it?

Earth, you start with a project like this, how do you start thinking about it? Steven's idea was to focus on the easier wins and stay away from potential problems and try to at least understand what the low-hanging fruit were. which ones were worth the risk and which ones we couldn't possibly finish in the time and with the financial constraints we had and that makes sense when you have so little time and a limited budget that you need to reduce the risk of things not working out, but It's not just about adding as much power and grip as possible.

Doing a lap of less than six minutes on the Nurbo Ring is no joke, you have to go fast, very fast, since we know that if things go wrong on the Nurburg Ring, the consequences can be dire. Remember that things like the monocoque and safety equipment are designed for a certain specification of car and now the Porsche team was heading into the unknown and they wanted to do it in the safest way possible if you want to increase performance by 50%. there will be consequences , so we were very aware of that and monitored it as we introduced the additional performance into the vehicle step by step, so let's get back to the low hanging fruit, what was the first area that the team took a good look at?

The tires, the parts that connect the car to the track, make them wider, make them stickier and you will have a car that rips through corners and accelerates faster. I've seen comments on this channel saying that the width of a tire doesn't affect grip. but that's just not okay with race car tires to the point that you just want wider tires made of the softest compound that gives you the most grip, but if you make wider tires you need to make wider wheels and there it is where the team met. For your first problem, it would take the wheel manufacturer 12 months to produce wider tires, at which point the deadline set by Porsche's board of directors would have ended, so we were forced to use the same rims we had for the 919. , in the end the team used. tires that looked exactly like the lmp1 tires they used for a long time, the construction of the tires how their materials were made, their structure and design were the same as the race tire, but the compound was different, the compound was a Michelin's very soft special compound, which would be somewhat similar in philosophy to an old F1 quality tire and, while the compound was an improvement, the construction of the tire was actually going to be a weak point.

Steven told me they were now aiming to add 50% performance to the car. Of course, that's not half the lap time, but it's a huge increase in the load going through the car. Imagine all that extra force that is generated, that load goes through the body, the unibody, the suspension and finally through the tires, then think about the tires themselves, the sidewall gets crushed every time it hits the contact patch. and if the tire construction is not as strong this sidewall will squish even more and that's just on the straights, you can imagine what happens when cornering. at even higher speeds, so having tires that are not designed for these much higher loads was a concern, we needed to increase the pressures in order to ensure that the basic structural integrity of the tires was maintained and in the NCH life we ​​ended up with three bar of tire pressure, three bars, that's 44 psi, much more than race cars like to run and even much more than you would have in your street car and the simple principle here is adding so much pressure to the tire that it can hold up under these massive loads and while this allows the car to run faster and be quicker in the faster corners, high tire pressure like this doesn't really help with mechanical grip, which is what I mentioned earlier about my return. record in br's hatch the BR hatch independent circuit is short and, as the race circuits are quite twisty, it only has two corners where the aerodynamics really work, but it has much more mechanical grip.

Curves that are second and third speed. Corners that really aren't fast enough. to generate significant downforce and therefore with a circuit more sensitive to mechanical grip, the Porsche's overinflated tires were going to have problems, that's their excuse anyway. I'm kidding, it's a very fast car, yes, with a very fast driver, actually, with the sticky parts. I thought about what's next, so obviously the next thing we need to do is the weight. The power of the arrows, three things that all drivers and engineers want less weight, more grip and more power, so let's take a look at the genius engineering that Porsche carried out in each area of ​​the car. powertrain the arrow including some moving parts the suspension adding lightness and braking and stability controls but before we get into the incredible engineering of the 919 Evo I need to tell you about today's brilliant sponsor, they are the best way to learn about engineering data analysis and much more and learning these topics doesn't cost thousands or require years of study, it's free and easy, whatever your skill level, its content is personalized to meet your needs and allows you to solve at your own pace with its bite-sized lessons.

I enjoyed the case study on electric cars in the data analysis course in this lesson. I was able to work with real sales and cost data for electric and gas cars, but if that's not your thing, they have tons of fun, interactive lessons. Covering topics from basic to advanced to try everything shiny offers free for a full 30 days, visit shiny.org driver61 or click the link in the description, the first 200 of you will get 20% off the annual brilliance premium subscription now back to the video let's get started With the powertrain, the original 919 race car is a turbocharged V4 hybrid system with a combined output of about 900 horsepower, but with no rules the team was able to improve that pretty quickly now that it's not They didn't have the time or money to change the engine. completely so it was about improving what they already had they needed to keep the existing V4 and hybrid system and it seems like that was relatively simple in lmp1 there was a limit to how fast fuel could flow to the engine and how much . part of the battery power could be used, the 919 Evo team simply removed the Fuel Flow Restriction, remapped the software so that the combustion engine worked correctly and then removed the limit on the electric machine, the electrical part of the powertrain and this benefited them a lot.

With the Evo now producing 1160 horsepower, but of course being engineers they wanted to take things further, at one point there was a discussion to put a bigger turbo on it because we were obviously hungry for more, but thatwould have become complicated, so again because Due to time constraints and the complexity this would have added, the team didn't think the turbo was worth the arrow and this is where the team made big gains: the Evo created more maximum downforce than the race car at its highest downforce. but it created less drag than the racing car at Lal, an incredible feat.

The team developed much of the car using cfd and then took the car to the wind tunnel for a physical test, but again the team had a problem and also limited by the tub itself because the car was being designed for a set of regulations in lmp1 and yes there was a point where they said we can't have any more crashes, the tub or monoco is in the center of the frame of the car, it's where the driver sits and basically what the rest of the car is bolted to All of the car's loads go through the tub and Porsche's structural team had to ask the arrows team to stop creating more downforce, otherwise the tub ran the risk of braking, not what you want when you're at full speed on the nurur ring or anywhere, so let's divide the car into the different sections of Arrow, front diffuser, rear diffuser, skirts, active arrow and rear spoiler and understand how they created the downforce of the front of.

The diffuser was completely new, the overhang compared to the original race car was much longer which meant more downforce and as there were no rules to follow the diffuser was also more aggressive, it was twice as tall as the version original, which is basically free downforce and as we talk about in our F1 no rules video, this is an area for big gains as it is generally an area of ​​big restriction in racing regulations as with the front diffuser the team simply focused on making a longer and taller rear diffuser and although simple, this is worth it. explaining that a longer, taller diffuser produces more downforce because it more efficiently accelerates airflow under the car.

This acceleration creates a lower pressure area under the car. Improves downforce compared to a shorter diffuser. The longer path allows the air more time to expand and accelerate. while the increase in height provides a greater volume for the air to accelerate, creating less pressure and therefore more falls, but there is another problem with the floor of the original 919, thanks to fishing regulations, a lot of air that runs under the car accelerates. and creates downforce, but where the floor creates low pressure below higher pressure from the outside it can leak, meaning a reduction in downforce, so as we talk about in our F1 No Rules video, the solution is skirts, basically walls that seal the side of the floor so that the air under the floor can suck it in more effectively, as you probably know that this was banned in F1 in 1981 for precisely the reason Porsche wanted to use it: because of how much it affects the speed in the corners, it increases them a lot, but it was not like that.

Just like that, the most effective type of skirt to wear is the one that flattens or slips and is best explained if I show you what they came up with in F1. Look at this photo of the lotus 79. The skirt is the part that runs along the bottom of the side pod and in this case it moves up and down inside the Pod, this is because the ride height of the car changes Depending on whether you're cornering, you're braking or accelerating, and having the skirts floating means it's always sealed and therefore as effective as possible. but now, first take a look at the original 919 and you'll notice that aerodynamics has come a long way in 40 years and you'll see that the side supports are heavily sculpted so there's nowhere for a sliding skirt to slide into the package.

The skirt on the cpods was practically impossible so we had to get creative with what we wanted to do with the skirts so we needed a solution that could bolt to the edge of the floor and wouldn't slide up and down so If the skirt does not move, it must be flexed. The issue was addressed to Porsche's materials department, who came up with a number of solutions and the team tested them with varying degrees of success, and while the skirts will make a big difference to lap time, it is a challenge. doing it right makes the material too soft and wears out too quickly and then reducing the downforce makes the material too hard and runs the risk of the downforce going through the skirts and not the tyres, which is not the case. that you want and this is something that The team saw in testing that we had the skirts bolted to the side of the floor and just dragging them along the ground.

Obviously we saw huge increases in drops and performance, but in those cases you end up having probably six contact zones on the ground, not just four. So at Spar the team used a thick rubber version of the skirt which was apparently very effective, although driver Neil Yani came in after a few laps because he thought the car was broken, in fact the rubber was vibrating at a very high frequency. and caused a high pitched squeak, so there was nothing wrong with the car but it just shows the state of mind when testing a proper prototype car, they are pushing the limits, things can go wrong and drivers are very aware of that at that time.

At the Nurburg ring, the team switched to a hinged carbon skirt and you can see it in these images. When you compare the skirted version of the 919 to the non-skirted version, you can see the big difference. Imagine all the outside air dripping. on the floor across that huge space and while this solution wasn't perfect, they would have liked a sliding skirt, it was the best compromise considering the time and money the team had and even this solution would have added a lot of drops without adding too much resistance, so before we get into the moving wings, let's take a look at the rear wing.

You might be wondering what a genius solution Porsche's top engineers came up with. Well, they just made it bigger and moved it back a little on the rear wing. Usually the biggest difference because it was set up for the back of the car, it was something like half a meter longer. As a result, no, it's easy to understand how a wider, deeper wing adds downforce, but why exactly would you want to be further back? Well, as we talked to Willam, the air flowing over the rear wing of a race car interacts a lot with the air flowing under the floor, the air connects back to the rear of the car, so if you put the rear wing on Just in the right position you can use it to accelerate the air coming out of the floor and faster air means lower pressure which means more downforce, but again there were some problems because the Porsche ARA team had exceeded their targets.

Rear wing loading is achieved. this gooseneck which in turn goes to the gearbox housing, but the rear connection was creating so much downforce that there were concerns about the strength of the gearbox again, you don't want that clicking noise when driving at 300 km per time in the nurur smile, the reason why We have these huge end plates on the rear wing to help the rear end stay together when you mount it to the back of the car. This is what these wild old cars have and their development is a continuous cycle of adding more power. and more grip and then strengthen the car so it doesn't break before starting the cycle again, so on with the moving arrowheads and it's actually quite simple, the rear with the top element opened up like the DRS in F1 to eliminate rear drag and that's great, but there is a problem with this in F1, you have a DRS system in the rear wing that moves the error balance forward, which means you can only use a straight line, so so the resistance and grip removed from the rear means more grip. at the front and that's great when you don't have to turn, but not so good when you're trying to get through a Rouge where the chances of losing the rear would be high, so the Porsche engineers had to rebalance the car and so they did.

By adding a moving part to the front diffuser at high speeds, the trailing edge of the front diffuser would lower to reduce drag and force, so this, along with rear DRS, was known as low downforce mode, although in reality it still produced more downforce than the original 919 race car in high camber spec which is just incredible, it meant that corners like o Rouge and Blon Shamon were still at full speed even with the car in Force mode low and to have an idea of ​​how fast it was. just look at this and the added benefit of the low Force mode was that it gave the tires a relative break going down the long straights.

Remember that before the tires are going through a lot of stress and this system means there is a little less load crushing. tires on the straights and with the aerodynamics sorted there isn't much left, add a dash of lightness, some cool suspension tricks and complicated driver aids and the team would be ready to go down the road if you want to drive an F1 car. on an F1 circuit, enter our competition for an all-expenses paid trip to drive an F4 car and an F1 car at Paul Ricard with my tips. Registration closed this Sunday at midnight.

Link in description below. The team then managed to save around 50kg in In fact, they managed to remove a bit more weight, but some of the new body parts were larger and stronger, which meant that some of the weight was removed. I think the team removed the side mirrors because there was no competition to defend against and the headlights and taillights were also removed as it was a daytime only car. There was also a qualifying system that the race car ran, which was telemetry and an ECU for the FIA ​​to monitor what Porsche was doing, which was also removed and eventually the driver.

Call team removed as engineers generally care more about a tenth of a second than driver comfort and I'm only half joking to be fair to the Porsche engineers, they did think about the drivers when it came to steering , but probably only because that's how it was. I'm going to make the car faster again. I'm kidding, the 919 race car had power steering, but with the Evo creating 50% more D-Force, the steering system was going to be an issue, we realized that the steering torque and power assist Steering required was so high that the current system couldn't do it and it's these details that you might not think about in such a cool project, the previous car was built for a defined amount of power and downforce and the increase in power and grip is only part of the project, then you need the rest of the car to be able to survive with those loads anyway, Porsche engineers solve the problem by adding an additional power steering pump to add power to the system while still being reliable and there were tricks With the braking system too, the lmp1 race cars had brake-by-wire systems on the front axle.

Brake-by-wire or BBW integrates the traditional hydraulic system with electronic control that also charges the battery system, but for the Evo the team added brake-by-wire at all four corners. the car and this helped them a lot with the record attempts, particularly on the Nurburg ring, this braking system meant that each tire would have something like Abs if the tire was about to lock, if it didn't spin compared to the speed of the car, the system Reduce the amount of braking from that tire and this helps on normal circuits like Spar or BR Hatch, but it particularly helps on bumpier circuits like the Nord Slier, where a traditional unassisted setup would mean it would be easy to lock a tire that this system would take.

Taking care of that means shorter braking zones but also more confidence for the driver, allowing them to push harder. Independent control of each wheel also meant that the car had a form of stability and traction control, giving the driver more confidence in the nurur G, which having driven there is exactly what you need. The Evo suspension was also very interesting. The original race car was already allowed to race. Front-to-rear interconnected suspension. This is where the front and rear suspensions are hydraulically linked, allowing the car to stay at a more consistent speed. camber to help aerodynamics and with such a large front diffuser running low to the ground, it's important that you don't want the ground clearance to change too much as it will change the overall grip and balance of the car and this special.

The suspension also allowed the EVO to stay off the ground with all that load.additional aerodynamics. If it didn't have this type of suspension the car would have sunk on the track at high speed and of course this would cause problems with the aerodynamics but also just wearing out the bottom of the car, but the really interesting thing is that the Evo team added a device that allowed them to control the ride height of the front of the car; It wasn't a fully active suspension like we saw in F1 in the 90s, but they could control it, we could basically turn off this pumping effect or this lever effect from the rear axle to the front whenever we wanted, this meant they could control the front of the car for better weight and deflection distribution, for example when exiting a corner, the weight of a car moves rearward and away from the front, but with this system it was possible to control when and how much It raised the front of the car, allowing them to manipulate the car's pitch at all times. the corner very smart stuff, this project was extraordinary and I am very happy that Porsche said yes to putting the resources into it.

In talking to Steven, I realized that it's one of the best things he's ever worked on and that he's been involved in a lot of. I think that sums it up perfectly. I also asked Ferrari's former aerodynamics chief how he would design an F1 car if there were no rules. You can watch it here, thanks for watching and consider subscribing.