- Hey team, Tim from High Peformance Academy here, welcome to today's member's webinar
where we're going to be talking all about brake temperature data, how to make use of it
and what it all means.
Like we always do, let's start with a little bit of a wrap up of what's been going on around
the workshop for us.
A couple of updates on the cars we're working on.
So jump across to my laptop screen here.
So a lot of you guys who are following us regularly will know that we're right in the throws of
building, or at least upgrading one of our little endurance racing cars which is a Toyota GT86
powered by an SR20VET engine.
One of the big things that's been going on recently has been fitting all of the large
aerodynamic devices and also just integrating those into the bodywork so we've been doing
things like building new front bumpers, modifications to some of the ducting and
stuff like that.
So I just thought I'd give you a bit of a time lapse of some of the stuff that's been happening
over the last couple of weeks with respect to that so I'm just going to zoom in a little bit to
give you guys a little bit of a better perspective of that.
So I'll just point out a couple of basic features here, we've got our ducting which is, this is the
inlet of the main duct here.
And this is the outlet which runs through the bonnet up here.
So the idea here is everything for the intercooler and the radiator flows through
that duct and the idea behind all of that is that a converging diverging duct, sorry
diverges and converges so opens up on the inlet and it closes down on the outlet and
that's all about pressure recovery, I've actually got a whole video out there all talking just
about that but that's a pretty common way of arranging ducting to get quite high
efficiency cooling air through your cooling system.
There's a couple of other pieces in here that you can't, we've got them removed in this
particular photo, they are inlets either side of that main duct for two oil coolers.
One side on this particular side of the car, this is for the engine oil cooler and we've
got one on the other side for the transmission cooler so the idea is that air comes in here and
it actually exhausts out just below the back part of the front bumper there.
One of the things in this photo here is this is sort of at the point where we're trying
to figure out what we're going to do with the front bumper.
We knew we had to redo the front bumper because we've got a big diffuser, a splitter
and diffuser fitted to the front of the car and we had to integrate that with the factory
style bumper so at this point here what you can actually see is we've gone ahead and
filled, this is from a couple of weeks ago, we've filled in where the factory spotlights
and everything integrate down here as well as where the factory indicators are, we've filled
all those in with ABS plastic and at this point in time everything was actually trimmed
off the bottom.
This is the splitter that I was talking about that runs along here and you can see actually
just down here you can see the start of the tunnels which are the expansions that happen
underneath the splitter to help give you your front downforce that you get with an
aerodynamic device like this.
So long story short, essentially what we need to do is integrate the front bumper into that
splitter to get them to fit nicely together so this is at the point where we'd sort of
trimmed away all the pieces we didn't want and we were starting to rebuild exactly
what we wanted in there.
So if we go to the next shot here, before I show you what we've done at the front,
this is how the rear is currently looking.
So you can see we've got, I'll just zoom in a little bit there as well, you can see
we've got our big rear diffuser, so this thing's relatively large for an endurance
racing car anyway and we've got this pretty big rear wing on it as well.
So all of this packaged with the front splitter, the wing and that rear diffuser were all
designed for us by Top Stage Composites in Australia.
All that is designed to go in as a package together so it's not just random stuff
slapped onto this thing, it is all actually designed to work together.
The stuff that the guys in the workshop have been doing, they went ahead and
designed these rear wing stays which integrate into the mount for the diffuser
and everything like that.
There was quite a bit of work that went on to make sure that this was serviceable,
it's one thing to make something strong and stiff and reliable, it's another thing to
make sure that it's easy to work on so one of the things we had to take quite a
lot of care on and maybe a little bit of compromise was making sure we could
still get the rear boot lid off.
So it doesn't pivot anymore, it actually comes off on some quick release fasteners and you
can sort of pull the boot off sideways, off the car rather than normally pivoting up so that
is a compromise but at least it is still quick to get the boot open if we need to to get in
there to service anything which is where things like the main fuel filters, the fuel surge tank
and everything in there are all stored inside the boot.
So this is moving a little bit further down the process after the guys have sort of mocked up
a buck for the front of the car.
So the buck is the part that you make when basically you make the real part that you want
that you're then going to take a mould off and you can then lay the composite inside the
mould to make the real part.
So the buck is kind of like making the shape that you want but it's not actually going to be
the real part, it's sort of like, you can think of it as the model for the final part you're
making so there's a little bit going on in this picture, I'll just describe exactly what's going on.
Didn't get down there quickly enough to get the picture of it when it was completely,
before they started making the mould but what's going on, basically everything you can
see in grey here, all this light grey area in here, this is the buck and this is a combination
of the factory front bumper, MDF wood, there's some steel in there, there's certainly a lot of
body filler and stuff as well.
Essentially, it doesn't matter what you make that out of because it's not a real part, it's
just finding the way of building up the shapes that you need as quickly and effectively and
that's why it's got some many different pieces of material on there because it
depends exactly what you're trying to make and the fastest way to do it.
So you can see here we've got the inlets for the oil coolers that I was talking about
before, we've got the front of the duct inlet which integrates with the new front bumper
in there as well.
Now there's a little bit more going on in here as well, you see these little black pieces
which are maybe a little bit hard to see, these are like a plastic core flute material
you can see them sitting around here as well.
These are not part of the final design, the purpose of these is we use it as part
of the mould making process to allow us to separate the front bumper or that whole mould
into multiple pieces.
In lots of pieces like that, certainly when you've got a complicated shape like we do here,
the idea is that you usually have the mould, to get the part out at the end, you usually need
to have the mould build in multiple pieces so you can actually disassemble the mould to
extract the part out of it and that's exactly what's going on here.
So everywhere we've got one of these black pieces of core flute section, that's a split line
that's going to be a split between two sides of the mould.
The idea is basically you go ahead and make each piece of the mould individually,
wait for it to dry and then you get onto the next part and you can build them up next
to each other so you can get a nice smooth surface.
One of the things we are doing while we're here is we're getting rid of the headlights,
we don't actually need those to do the kind of racing that we're doing here in
New Zealand for endurance racing so we might as well get rid of them, just a little bit
more weight to get out of the car and everything like that.
It actually frees up a little bit of space in the front of the car to fit in things like, well
anything really, whether it's wiring, cooling, engine stuff, anything, just having a little
bit more space in the front of the car is always welcome because it's certainly a
pretty tight fit to get everything through there.
You'll also see on there, there's a bit of a slight sheen, you can see in this area up here,
both on the headlights and on that top bumper skin, that's call, it's a release agent
so that's before they start laying out the mould on this part, they basically put
a release agent on there, in this case it's a PVA release agent.
The idea here is that it just stops your mould sticking to the part so we know we can release
them at the end.
So that was part the way through the process.
This is a little bit further on where they've actually started to make that top section of
the mould which is the first part that we made.
The reason it's green, that's just a gelcoat material, gelcoat is just used, essentially it is
the first layer of the mould, it is in a semi liquidy kind of form.
The idea here is that it gets into all of those nooks and crannies and allows it to wet out
properly so just to give you a nice smooth mould surface.
So the idea here is that once you've laid the gelcoat on, still stays tacky, you can then
lower your fibreglass over top an that fibreglass is really what's going to give the mould its
actual structure.
So this is at the point where they've just started laying the gelcoat down on that top part of the
mould there.
And you can see where this whole bottom section down here, this grey section, this is a whole
separate part of the mould.
So the green part is one part, this part down here is all another part and then just around
the corner into the wheel arches, back behind here, there's two small parts which you'll
see I think in another one of these shots coming through soon.
So this is actually the mould once it's been removed from the car so you can see there,
you can still see that green sheen there from the gelcoat, we've also got that fibreglass,
it doesn't really matter, the fibreglass that you stick over top, it can be pretty rough
and ready because that gelcoat takes up that nice smooth surface at the start.
You do put one final layer of fibreglass to really give that gelcoat some strength but
after that you can really just slap down a whole lot of really cheap chop strand
mat but the reason I've got this picture here is you can really clearly see the split lines between
the different moulds so you can see the front left headlight there, that's that split, it's sort
of sitting on its front face at this point.
This is that whole lower section where it integrates into the lower splitter and this
is that rear little back section here which wraps around the back of the bumper.
So it is actually a relatively complicated mould at this point, certainly for us in our workshop,
while we can do this sort of work, we're certainly not specialists in doing anything
with composite materials or anything like that so this is a relatively involved process
but hopefully you can see it's certainly something that's within the bounds of most
people if you're interested enough.
This is a shot of the back of the buck.
So this is the original ABS plastic bumper, the headlights obviously stayed in the car so
that's where you can see the, that's the gelcoat surface, it's the inside of the
mould that we'll be laying up into.
Here you can see the absolute mess in behind this thing, it really doesn't matter
what it is as long as you get the right shape.
We've got the MDF I was talking about.
Can't quite see it but this is a steel panel that's sitting in here and all of this stuff
is just really attached together as simply and as quickly as you can get it whilst still
getting a good surface finish so really not pretty but that's what's going on behind
the buck there.
This is the final part that just got pulled out, I think late last week this got pulled out of
the mould so you can see there basically all of this is fibreglass that gets laid up
inside that mould.
The first part we're going to make anyway is just out of fibreglass until we know we've
got the right shape to a mould, make sure we're happy with everything but the idea
here is that all of that is all now in one piece so everything, the whole front
bumper, all of the inlets for all of the cooling, the headlights and everything can
go on and off in one place.
And that's quite nice because it does allow us to get in there and service things really
quickly.
One of the things we're going to need to be able to do on this car to get the car on and off
its trailer because it does have a really low ride height with the new aero stuff on it,
is all of that, that whole front splitter and everything is all quick release so it comes
off the car with very few tools.
It just pops off quite quickly and it's also important that that bumper can pop off
quite quickly to allow us to get the splitter off so actually this whole front bumper
assembly, while it's not shown in these photos, the guys are actually just doing it right now
in the workshop, they're going ahead and fitting quick release fasteners to everything.
So it's just a case, you don't actually need any tools to get this thing off, you can just pop
them off just by clipping little clips here and the whole thing comes off really quickly which
is a nice feature, again coming back to that serviceability thing I was talking about before.
This is the last shot I'm going to show you guys from the 86 project that we've got
going on, so this is looking at the underside of that front splitter.
So this is sitting upside down on the bench, you can see this is one of those tunnel areas
that I was telling you before where we get that expansion ratio.
This here is looking, this is the front corner, that front edge of the splitter.
But the point I really want to make here is we're fitting these skid blocks down here.
These happen to be titanium, it's not really super important what you make these things
out of, titanium is a good thing to make skid blocks out of simply because it doesn't
actually corrode when you grind it down, you could use steel but you will get a lot
of rust and stuff, particularly when you get any moisture and it's particularly when you're
scraping these things on the ground all the time, you're exposing that new surface,
it just makes a bit of mess of things with things getting rusty so titanium, it's not
absolutely necessary but it is an off the shelf product that we could buy which is
why we went with these.
This is actually from a company called Professional Awesome who sell a couple
of different types of these titanium skid blocks.
The idea here is that we want something sacrificial so when and if this splitter
comes into contact with the ground or at least gets close to the ground, we want to
make sure we're wearing away something that we can quickly and easily replace
rather than take anything out of the main splitter itself which is obviously made out of
carbon fibre, really great stiff material but has really poor abrasion resistance.
What I mean by that, if we start grinding this thing on the road, it'll wear away
really quickly, it really doesn't last long so that's what's going on there.
The guys are part way through building a little mount, little epoxy mount for that
thing, the idea there is we can just quickly unbolt them from the top and replace them if we need to
but hopefully we won't be replacing them too often.
Again these front splitters, really a lot of their performance comes from running them really
low to the ground, it is really important to have, we have a ride height window that 's been given
to us by the manufacturer of this front splitter and it's really important that you don't get too
far out of that window because it will mean that you will change the amount of downforce
you've got in the front of the car quite considerably so it is important to keep it
within those quite narrow bounds of ride height and in order to do that, that means
we need to put these skid blocks on so if we're doing that running it too low or
we hit a curb or something like that, it just means we don't completely destroy the
front splitter.
So guys that's it for the shop updates, this part of the webinar.
I just want to go through one of the videos we put out recently on YouTube so I'll just
jump across to my browser here.
So this video called 5 mistakes you're probably making, race driving errors, this is actually an
excerpt from our recent race driver course that we recently released.
So this is a video all about some of the most common things that the professional driving
coach that was involved in making this course with us, some of the 5 most common things he
sees people doing wrong.
So this guy that we got to do the course with us, Andrew Waite, he's a professional race
driver as well as being a professional driver coach and he had a lot of really great input
to give to us on this course and this is a huge bank full of knowledge that anyone
who's going to take this course will get out of this thing and this is a bit of an excerpt from
that course.
Let's scan through some of the topics that we've got going on here.
So whether it's uncommitted braking, so that's all about not being aggressive enough
on the initial brake application, overslowing the car which is a really common thing, people just
scrubbing too much speed in corner entry, not trailing the brake hard enough into the
corner entry.
What else have we got here?
Apex acceleration.
What else is there here, multiple inputs is a big one, so rather than getting on the
brake once and bleeding off, having multiple times where you get on the brake, off the brake,
on the brake, off the brake as you realise you've overslowed it and getting off and then getting
back on as you get back to the apex, stuff like this, same with hobby horsing on the
throttle, making sure that once you get on the throttle at corner exit, you're staying
on the throttle and not getting on too early so you have to back out of it again
which is quite an unsettling force to the car.
Anyway, guys I'll let you guys check that video out at your leisure as well, I definitely
recommend you do, there's a lot of good free info in there for you guys.
Let's jump across to the forum, there was a forum post that came up recently that I
wanted to highlight to you guys.
So this actually was put on our Practical Corner Weighting course forum.
So this is all about the question was what to do with your anti roll bars.
I'll go up to the top here so you can actually see, the topic of the post was disconnect
anti roll bars so this is all about when you're going ahead and doing your setup on your
car, do you disconnect the anti roll bar links and why do you do that?
So the idea here is that when you do your setup, obviously when the car's sitting there
on a nice flat setup patch which is usually the datum that you use, certainly when you're
doing something like road racing anyway, the idea here is that you're usually making
quite fine adjustments either to your main ride height or to your coilovers in terms of getting
the corner weighting right.
So the corner weighting, if you're not familiar with it, it's essentially about evening
out the load distribution of each tyre on the car.
A little bit of this is to do with how the weight is distributed, with respect to the car so things
like where the driver sits, whether the fuel tank is, where the engine is mounted.
Usually you don't have a situation, or it's very rare certainly in something that's based
on a road car to have equal corner weights on your front left and front right and rear
left to rear right.
Certainly side to side on the car anyway.
And that's usually what we're doing when we want to corner weight things.
The outcome of that is you usually end up with some skew, some offset from
one side of the car to the other, let's say the left front and the left right,
in order to equalise those corner weights on the setup patch.
The problem is if you leave the anti roll bar connected when you're doing that, obviously
the anti roll bar's a link that runs from one side of the suspension to the other.
You end up pre loading that bar and adding what we call wedge or essentially some lateral load
transfer statically before the car's even moving on track so I'll just sketch out
exactly what I mean by that.
So let's say we've got a side view of an anti roll bar here.
So if we've got, let's say this is our tyre here, let's say we're looking behind it, this is our
anti roll bar connection that runs here and this is our pivot point.
Let's say we've got a couple of different adjustment points there because we've got
a nice adjustable anti roll bar.
And let's say our lower control arm is mounted down here and it runs back into the car.
Usually what you have is some sort of link that attaches to the, between something like
the lower control arm and the anti roll bar.
It can really go between anything, could go between the strut, the upper control arm,
any of the other control arms in theory, the idea is that we're just connecting the
anti roll bar to the suspension.
So obviously this thing's rotating up and down, rotating around its pivot point as
we're moving around the track but the idea here in that adjustment we're talking about
is zeroing the anti roll bars once we've finished our wheel alignment.
So the idea is that when you're doing your wheel alignment, your setup, you have
one anti roll bar link disconnected, one on the front, one on the back, you go ahead and do
your whole setup procedure.
Then you come back at the end and you zero your anti roll bar links.
So all you're doing is adjusting your anti roll bar link which is what we see down here,
we're adjusting the length of this.
So this is something in the aftermarket parts industry, in the motorsport world anyway,
it's certainly super common is that these links would usually have some of turn buckle
system on them, maybe it's got rod ends on each end, there's all sorts of different ways
these can be configured but the idea is usually there's a lock nut to break off here
and you can wind this thing in and out to make it longer or shorter.
This is the last thing we do after we've finished our setup, we go ahead and zero the
anti roll bar links so there's no force on that anti roll bar.
So that's really the back story behind that forum post there and if you guys are
interested in learning more, you can jump into that forum post and read for yourself
what I wrote there.
Basically a summary of what I just talked about.
So guys we do have a number of courses in development at the moment.
The biggest one that's coming out soon is our suspension fundamentals course which I'm
sure a lot of your guys will be really interested in.
It's really just a 101 on suspension, particularly on motorsport suspension so all the different
suspension types, all of, some of the intricacies, the pros and cons of each suspension type.
We go through spring rate selection, damper tuning, how anti roll bars work, a little bit more on what
I discussed there.
What else have we got, suspension geometry, and also some really useful calculations that
you can actually do to start understanding and tuning your car balance for yourself on track.
So I promise you it's a course that's packed with heaps of really interesting information so keep
an eye out for that if you're interested in suspension and suspension tuning in
particular.
So guys that's it for the pre show.
I'll jump back into the main part of the webinar, today's lesson on brake temperature
tuning, I'll be back with you in a second, cheers.
If you liked that video make sure you give it a thumbs up
and if you're not already a subscriber, make sure you're subscribed.
We release a new video every week.
And if you like free stuff, we've got a great deal for you.
Click the link in the description to claim your free spot to our next live lesson.