June Sprint Race Predictions F1000

[nulrich]

It's not necessarily the size of the sidepods that counts, but the shape of the sidepods, as well as the size and shape of the inlet and outlet ducts. It's one of the more difficult areas of a formula car to design, but if done right it yields very large gains.

I'm sure that the Citation does not have "tunnels" through the sidepods, i.e. clear paths that don't pass through a heat exchanger, as that would be a clear violation of the rules. I haven't seen Brandon's car in person, though.

Remember that Road America is Coello's home track, and that he's won many races there (including, it sounds like, this one!). I'm not sure how many times Brandon has been to Road America, but I'm assuming both the driver and car took a little longer to get used to the track.

At this level it's very difficult to determine which chassis or package is fastest, since there is a lot of variability in driver and crew skill and experience. However, I think we can say with some certainty that the Citation Brandon and his crew has developed is a faster car at Road America than his competitors. Anyone disagree?

Nathan

[R. Pare]

John Paul:

No, all air entering the sidepods passes through the radiators. Some exits out the side, some out the back. Nothing special going on there - just basic old-fashioned airflow management.

After the 1st qualifying, Brandon felt there was more left in the car and managed to put in a lap in 2nd qualifying that verified his feelings. No idea why Niki didn't make any gains.

Sorry to hear that Brandon didn't win, but Niki is a deserving champion.

It'll be fun to watch how everyone's cars develop over the next few years!

[carnut169]

Niki is one of the best drivers in the club. His winning has nothing to do with the size of the sidepods. He would have likely won in a Phoenix, a Stohr, a VD conversion....

Yes, if you can make a car work with minimal sidepod inlets your going to see an advantage- Piper was the 1st, now the Citation. The challenge is keeping the motors cool enough not to blow and Niki has proven again that you do not need to have the best areo to win- the driver can make up for that. If it was a massive difference Brandon would have won.

That said, you will have an advantage if your car has lower drag.

[nulrich]

It'll be fun to watch how everyone's cars develop over the next few years!

That's for sure! I think FB has great possibilities. Unfortunately, the Rn.10 isn't legal per the current FB rules, so absent a rules change we'll be watching this one from the sidelines. Which is kind of cool, actually .

I agree that a good driver can overcome deficiencies in his car. Aero gets a lot of attention because it's the most visible part of a formula car, but even in FB it's still much less important than mechanical grip. That may change somewhat as horsepower rises and the cars become more refined.

I'm generally not an advocate of limiting innovation, but at some point inlet restrictors will become necessary to level the playing field. The power of 1 liter bikes keeps rising, and no one wants to have to get the latest ($$$) engine just to stay competitive.

Nathan

[JohnPaul]

thanks for the responses, interesting stuff and it reinforces the message that it's all about the driver's ability.

Where can I find results/times?

[Dave Welsh]

http://www.scca.com/documents/Club_E...%20Results.pdf

[Wren]

We are headed home. Congrats to Niki on driving a great race. He pulled out early and Brandon put his head down and ran some faster laps and pulled to within a second of Niki and about 25 seconds ahead of third. They caught traffic and Niki negotiated it better and I had him 4 seconds ahead of Brandon when it started raining. At some point in the race Brandon had some screws fall out of the rear wing so it went flat and the car was undrivable on slicks in the wet. Bill got by him in the carousel.

As for why brandon went faster in the second qualifier: the car was almost undrivable during the first qualifier, even though he was out front. We took a big swing at the setup and after a late session adjustment it got ok. Even that fast lap was going under an FE in the carousel.

As for the sidepods, there are no clever mini tunnels, the sidepods just don't fit very well. He lower surface of the car is flat until the diffuser. No funny business, very legal. We have tried quit hard to make sure that all of the air passes through the radiators.

Sean- I cannot imagine why someone could not make little sidepods work. Brandon's car is always just sitting on the thermostat for the water at 180. George tells us that we are losing a lot of horsepower by running the oil so cool. We only run an oil cooler that fills up 75% of the sidepod. The rest is just blanked off. Even in Savannah with the outside temp 100*, the oil was only about 260 out of the engine.

As for mechanical vs. aero Brandon bought/built this car for the excellent mechanical grip. The aero is a distant second. Steve Lathrop knows suspensions and shock absorbers.

[JohnPaul]

As for the sidepods, there are no clever mini tunnels, the sidepods just don't fit very well. He lower surface of the car is flat until the diffuser. No funny business, very legal. We have tried quit hard to make sure that all of the air passes through the radiators.

Please don't think I'm suggesting that he was cheating, I'm not familiar with the rules and would'nt know either way. I was making an observation (Obviously a wrong one)
I thought that as far as tunnels being illegal it meant a specific purpose built one and maybe if you set up the sidepods with a gap between the rad and the inside wall it would be considered legal and could yeild some improvements similar to tunnels.

Sean- I cannot imagine why someone could not make little sidepods work. Brandon's car is always just sitting on the thermostat for the water at 180. George tells us that we are losing a lot of horsepower by running the oil so cool. We only run an oil cooler that fills up 75% of the sidepod. The rest is just blanked off. Even in Savannah with the outside temp 100*, the oil was only about 260 out of the engine.

I was thinking exactly the same, why wouldn't I just build new new tiny sidepods for my car and enjoy some of the same advantages? why wouldn't everyone? I guess that was kind of the purpose of my original post, is the small sidepods that much or a noticable difference and if so why wouldn't everyone follow suit?

[R. Pare]

Small sidepods on their own do not mean an advantage. As with everything, the shape both inside and out has to be correct, and has to match the radiator characteristics. Get any one item wrong, and the drag and/or cooling capacity could make them worse than large sidepods.

At least Brandon got bragging rights for the fastest lap of the race by over a second.

[RussMcB]

Congrats to all. Hope it was fun (but probably wasn't for JR in the Stohr - Anyone know what caught him out on lap 2?)

[glenn cooper]

Hey Russ, we just got back home.

I was right behind Osborne when he just basically slid off the track coming out of T7. I had passed him on the back straight, out of T3, he got me back into T5, then he went off in T7 exit, the car did a wheelie coming back on, and mud shot out everywhere from under his car. It looked like a wake coming off a boat's bow.

On the start I went from 6th to 4th coming out of T1. A lap later was up to 3rd w/ JR out, as his floor got bent back under the car in the off.

I was right behind Brandon for a 2 laps or so, and Niki just kept pulling away.
I eventually ran into shifting difficulties entering T5 and lost the draft of the Citation and was just running down the laps in 3rd. A bit back Billy McLaughlin was coming and I had nothing for him.

Now running 4th w/ maybe 4 laps left and Schweitz was coming alive, pulling even w/ me on the front straight into T1. I kept the point and then got a lapped FE between us.

A lap later it started to rain and althought I thought I was going pretty slowly, I managed to spin a 720 out of T1 and ended up on the corner exit, facing the traffic, AND high centered.
As I was on the exit of a super slippery corner I decided to see if I could keep from getting collected by a another spinning car (there were many to choose from!) and climbed out, grabbed the front left A arm and after a series of tugs, managed to get tthe car pointing downhill to T3, got in, fired it up and got gone. I took the checker in the hot pit lane and was credited with 5th.

PS Carnut / Sean O - You DAMN NEAR called the order, Good one!

[Dave Gomberg]

Dave Gomberg just told me that Nick Coello won with Brandon second...no word on 3rd and back.

He said that the race started dry, but that it started to rain during the next-to-last lap. Brandon was catching Nick at that point, but could get no closer in the wet.

No further details at this time.

I passed bad info to Stan: Niki, Bill McLaughlin, Brandon. Results for everything but FA/FM are on the SCCA web site now. (As I was leaving the track, I heard there were several pieces of paper that were filed from the FA/FM race.)

Dave

[Lincspeed]

So the only Stohr in the race was the unofficial "factory" Osborne car?

[glenn cooper]

Yes Clark, In the '08 race Obendorf and Stetcher podiumed, and I believe there were a few others as well.
Last year saw an early challenge by Obendorf who eventually fell out w/ engine problems, with Stetcher making it to the rostrum 2 years in a row.
JR had never run at the Sprints in FB prior to this weekend.

[Brandon Dixon]

The race didn't go as well as I might have hoped, but all in all it wasn't a disappointing weekend. We seem to have good pace.

Niki started the race on stickers and got them to work very quickly. He pulled out a lead in the first two laps that was impressive from my seat. I guess that I have some work to do there. I climbed back up to striking distance, but traffic separated us and then my car was undrivable in the rain.

Thanks for all the kind words in the previous posts. We have been working hard on every aspect of the car from aero drag, mechanical grip, downforce and reliability. There are no secrets or any one thing that you can point to. The cooling system is just one area that is working well (at least until we screw it up with some other change). My water temp never got much over 180 and the oil temp in the dry sump tank maxed out at 217.

I think that we have excellent mechanical grip. Part of our "old fashioned" design is some really good suspension geometry and I'm happy with the tradeoffs and choices that we have made. I can't look at a car and tell how much downforce it makes, so I don't know for sure how we match up in that regard.

We made a lot of changes to the car between the CAT National and this race. The two big ones were to go to a dry sump system and the Geartronics shifter system. The dry
sump is a big deal for us because our pan is a structural member of the chassis. I finished making the pans the week after the CAT and started on the tank and associated plumbing. About this time I started looking at the Geartronics shifter and talking to Nicholas Belling. There is a good bit of stuff to package into the car with the
shifter system: an air compressor, storage tank, actuators, solenoid valves, relays and plumbing. I decided that the time was right to try to make the whole package fit
together with the dry sump into the "empty" space in our "spar". It was a fun exercise and I'm glad that it has seemed to work.


*DON'T LET NIKI READ THIS*
As far as the shifter goes, holy crap! This thing is awesome. The downshifts are lightning fast and wicked smooth. The upshifts are good, but the downshifts make all the difference to me. This takes some of the most frantic moments on the track (braking for T5 downshifting 4 gears) and now I feel like I have time to react and concentrate on driving not just shifting. I was regularly making my 4 downshifts into T5 in under 1 second. Say click, click, click, click in one second, that's how it works. Tom Schwietz and I both changed over to the system for the Sprints, so Belling came out for the test day to "tune" the things. He made 3 or 4 "adjustments" to the system based on data from the shifter box and every time it just kept getting better. The whole process was professional and result is suburb. After one event, I can't imagine going back to manual shifting and it's now one of the coolest things about the car. Hopefully Niki is just too busy with the new FC car to have the time to get this system working on his FB car.
*KEEP READING AFTER THIS NIKI*

I put up a video on youtube of the fast qualifying lap from Q2. We made some fundamental setup changes from Q1 to Q2 just to get the balance right and made a wing change in the middle of Q2 that brought the car pretty close. Too bad I lifted on the entry of the carusel when I was catching the FE... here is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z2B0mxkU5g
The data was not all calibrated for the overlay, as this was the first look at video from the car. Perhaps I'll have something better from the runoffs.

FB cars are cool. Oh by the way, I don't think that there was an FB engine failure at the Sprints.

[Mike B]

I put up a video on youtube of the fast qualifying lap from Q2. We made some fundamental setup changes from Q1 to Q2 just to get the balance right and made a wing change in the middle of Q2 that brought the car pretty close. Too bad I lifted on the entry of the carusel when I was catching the FE... here is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z2B0mxkU5g
The data was not all calibrated for the overlay, as this was the first look at video from the car. Perhaps I'll have something better from the runoffs.

You sped that video up, didn't you?

Now I know what I'm doing wrong: I've been slowing down for T1...

Seriously, nice video, thanks for sharing.

[starkejt]

In response to Mr. Dixon's comments about the Geartronics, it really is an amazing system. If Schwietz could form complete sentences, write, or use a computer, he would post here about how well it works. Ever the motorsports Luddite, he was skeptical throughout the installation that it would even work, let alone be worth the effort. After 2 laps with it, he was raving about it. Every shift, up or down, is now blindingly fast and smooth, without variation. This is neither a cheap nor a simple system, but it offers fast, precise execution of every gearshift. Brandon is not exaggerating the rapidity of the downshifts. You can't move your fingers on the paddle as fast as it will downshift. Plus the paddles make a really satisfying click.

[Wren]

In response to Mr. Dixon's comments about the Geartronics, it really is an amazing system. If Schwietz could form complete sentences, write, or use a computer, he would post here about how well it works. Ever the motorsports Luddite, he was skeptical throughout the installation that it would even work, let alone be worth the effort. After 2 laps with it, he was raving about it. Every shift, up or down, is now blindingly fast and smooth, without variation. This is neither a cheap nor a simple system, but it offers fast, precise execution of every gearshift. Brandon is not exaggerating the rapidity of the downshifts. You can't move your fingers on the paddle as fast as it will downshift. Plus the paddles make a really satisfying click.

You left out the best part of the shifter story. Tom was so excited by how well the shifter works that I saw him tackle you in the trailer and kiss you, right on the beard.

[starkejt]

You left out the best part of the shifter story. Tom was so excited by how well the shifter works that I saw him tackle you in the trailer and kiss you, right on the beard.

Still having nightmares about that. I shaved the beard off and burned the hair because of it.

[Wren]

I finally got my pictures from the weekend uploaded.

Podium

Brandon and Nicholas Belling working on the shifter


My favorite part of the whole shifter thing was when I was doing a sprocket change on the car and Brandon was working back there with his laptop, I said, "Hey, somebody put the car in neutral so that I can turn the sprocket."

Brandon: "Ok, hang on" Then he hits a few keys on his laptop and the thing starts shifting until it hits neutral.

You can also see the new PFC brakes on the rear there.

Stohr's new wizzy stuff


Beauchamp came up to visit


Niki on the grid before the race


JR on the grid before the race. They had moved away from their new front wing pretty quickly


Announcer interviewing top three. At least they got to get out of the rain. I was pretty wet at this point.

I think that we have excellent mechanical grip. Part of our "old fashioned" design is some really good suspension geometry and I'm happy with the tradeoffs and choices that we have made.

Just imagine what you could do if you ever got your aero design out of the 70's. If it works on an F1 car, it ought to work on these cars. They are basically identical and have the exact same ruleset.

[R. Pare]

Just imagine what you could do if you ever got your aero design out of the 70's. If it works on an F1 car, it ought to work on these cars. They are basically identical and have the exact same ruleset.

[glenn cooper]

Incredible vid, Bro!

PS - Ya showed me something in T10/Kink... Thanks .

PSS - The retired older racer guy giving drive arounds for Rd Am newbs years ago says you (and me too for that matter!) are taking T14 wrong. I attempted to call him on this, but he gave me a look in the rearview mirror that effectively said "Do not mess with this Marine sonny boy, or I'll rip your arm off and beat you to death with it".
You're damn right I chilled...

PSSS - Guess I'll be placing a call to Nicholas / Lectrickshift right about now...

Again - The most breathtaking lap of a track filmed from an FB yet.

[Brandon Dixon]

Incredible vid, Bro!

...

Again - The most breathtaking lap of a track filmed from an FB yet.

Thanks man. My hope is to pump up the enthusiasm for the class by showing how cool these cars are to drive.

[Stan Clayton]

Looking over our data, Nathan, I am seeing 150-152 for top speeds. Stan

Thanks, Stan, very interesting. I did a rough calculation and came up with a top speed of 151 mph for an FB car like Brandon's at Road America. Interesting coincidence...if I'm right!

Nathan, I just watched the video that Brandon links to in post #55 above, and the top speed I see is 145. To me that top speed looks consistent with being 2-4 seconds off the pace of the quicker Atlantics at last year's Runoffs.

[dc]

Keep in mind, Brandon has already said the data shown on the overlay wasn't functioning properly or completely accurate.

[Wren]

Keep in mind, Brandon has already said the data shown on the overlay wasn't functioning properly or completely accurate.

I like how the car goes slower at the end of the straights. Which might be accurate given how low the battery voltage is (not a function of the new shifter, something is just broken in the car). It is probably a GPS reception issue though.

[starkejt]

Keep in mind, Brandon has already said the data shown on the overlay wasn't functioning properly or completely accurate.

145-146 mph is the highest speed I have on Schwietz's data from Road America. I believe Brandon's top speed is similar. Corner speeds? Not so similar!

[starkejt]

I like how the car goes slower at the end of the straights. Which might be accurate given how low the battery voltage is (not a function of the new shifter, something is just broken in the car). It is probably a GPS reception issue though.

Wren, data from Schwietz shows the same thing going into Canada. Car accelerating, RPM increasing, speed decreasing. Pretty sure the GPS is cutting out there.

[Wren]

Wren, data from Schwietz shows the same thing going into Canada. Car accelerating, RPM increasing, speed decreasing. Pretty sure the GPS is cutting out there.

Yeah, we had that problem at the Cat National also. There is a wheel speed sensor in the trailer to try to fix that. Or, we could just do an IMU.

The other issue though was the low battery voltage that was making Brandon wonder why the car seemed to perk up sometimes during the race. George told us we were lucky it ran at all.

[starkejt]

Yeah, we had that problem at the Cat National also. There is a wheel speed sensor in the trailer to try to fix that. Or, we could just do an IMU.

The other issue though was the low battery voltage that was making Brandon wonder why the car seemed to perk up sometimes during the race. George told us we were lucky it ran at all.

Yeah, it is surprising it ran with the voltage that low. Not as surprising as running 3 sessions with a cracked block that was welded in place on the car, though.

[Wren]

Yeah, it is surprising it ran with the voltage that low. Not as surprising as running 3 sessions with a cracked block that was welded in place on the car, though.

Well, you guys also had JB weld smeared over the top of the weld didn't you? That probably helped prevent it pushing out water and oil on the compression stroke like it had been.

[starkejt]

Well, you guys also had JB weld smeared over the top of the weld didn't you? That probably helped prevent it pushing out water and oil on the compression stroke like it had been.

JB weld was only there for the race, and all it did was direct the oil away from the headers, keeping the smoke down and preventing the again. Still a huge mess of oil in the car after the race.

[Northwind]

My car also had top speeds of 145 - 146.

From my days working for the government with GPS, tree canopy has a large affect on gps signal. Hill sides also create a shadow affect for GPS signal from the satalite geometry available in the sky. Going into canada corner has both variables working against the system, thus the questionable data.

[Stan Clayton]

Wren, data from Schwietz shows the same thing going into Canada. Car accelerating, RPM increasing, speed decreasing. Pretty sure the GPS is cutting out there.

Yeah, I've noticed the same thing while driving tree-lined roads with the GPS sitting on the dash. The car is accelerating while the GPS's MPH read-out is momentarily stagnant or decreasing. In any case, IIRC 145 is briefly shown three times in Brandon's video...twice at the end of the main straight, and once approaching T5 (with 144 shown approaching T5 on the other lap), so I am reasonably confident that was his speed.

In any case, as we all know, absolute top speed is only marginally relevant to best lap time.