- With the extreme power levels being produced by the engines in the open
and pro class cars here at World Time Attack,
making sure the engine remains reliable really comes down to monitoring all of
the engine's vital signs, ensuring that nothing goes outside of the realms
that the tuner is happy with.
We're here with Mitch from Maatouks Racing, tuner of the World's Best Technology's
R33 Skyline GTR that's running in the open class here and we're gonna find out
exactly how Mitch is using technology to do exactly that.
Alright so Mitch before we get into the electronics package,
let's just talk a little bit about the engine and find out what power this car's making.
So it's an RB engine but can you give us a little bit more of the specifics
of that engine?
- Yeah so it's a PMC built billet 2.8 stroker, it's got one of his cylinder head packages
on it, as I said, 2.8 litre 68/70 Precision, the usual what everyone seems to run
these days.
- I think the path has been well trodden for Nissan RB performance so there's
nothing particularly unusual there.
In terms of the power level, what is it making and how much boost are
you using?
- Yeah on our dyno at Maatouks it ran up 950 horsepower on about
32 pounds of boost.
- Now those sort of numbers these days aren't that unusual and the problem is
most people are missing the point that engines making this sort of power
most often are used for drag racing where they may only be under high load
for maybe six to eight seconds.
Here we're talking about a car that needs to put that power to the track,
for 1:20, 1:30, and that is a completely different world of hurt for the mechanical
package.
So let's get into the electronics and tell us what's managing the engine?
- Yeah so from last year we've swapped from a full Haltech package
to a full Motec system.
So in the car front to back, PDM in the front, M150, C187,
and then another PDM in the back.
- Alright so there's a lot of acronyms there.
For those who aren't into Motec lingo, let's start with the PDM.
That stands for power distribution module.
It's an electronic way of distributing power to all of the circuits on the car,
essentially replacing fuses and relays.
The M150, that's the ECU, that's really the heart of the whole package.
Now in terms of Motec's ECUs, there are a variety of firmware packages
that do different things, what are you running on that particular ECU?
- ECU's just running out of the box GPR package from Motec.
- OK so GPR, general purpose race, so all of the functions to control the engine
plus race functions such as traction control, launch control and a variety
of others, and then you're running the C187 so this is a dash logger.
So this starts getting us into the areas that I'm interested in.
Because conventionally those dash loggers are a central logging hub,
so tuners such as yourself, this is where you're gonna be downloading data
to look at the engine vitals as well as the chassis.
But importantly as well when the driver's out there on the track, you really want
the driver to be able to focus solely on driving the car and mainly they're
only gonna be looking at the shift light to tell them when to pull the next gear.
So you've gone one step further though, and instead of just incorporating driver
warnings, you're actually using telemetry.
Give us some insight into what that telemetry system's all about.
- For sure, so we've got the Motec T2 telemetry system on here.
Basically the C187 dash just spits out a set of channels that I've specified
over a radio link that comes back to the pits here.
I've got a laptop that runs the Motec T2 server, it reads that data in and then
that data comes into I2 Pro live straight from the car.
- So it's essentially like looking at the datalogging after the car's been
out on the track but you can actually do that live while the car's still circulating.
- Yep, correct, yep.
- OK so is there any reliability problems with that link, with that radio link,
between the car out on the track and getting that data solidly back in the pits
or is that fine?
- Yeah look the radio comms has a little bit of error checking built in.
The biggest thing is just getting good coverage of our aerial.
So we run an aerial up onto the roof and we do lose about five seconds
of comms as it goes over behind Corporate Hill.
As it comes back though, those error packets sort of bunch up and then
we get them all in a quick succession so you don't really lose that much
as long as you've got good coverage.
- So essentially it makes up for the data you've lost but you just don't get to
see it live for those five seconds.
- Yeah exactly.
- Alright so you've got all of that data coming in, there's gonna be a lot
to take in, what specifically are you looking for in terms of making sure
the engine is doing what it should and everything is inside the parameters
you're happy with?
- That's actually changed since we've gone from testing earlier in the week
to now day two.
So earlier in the week we were really worried about temperatures and making
sure that coolant temperature, intake air temperature, and oil temperature,
were all under control.
Last year we had a lot of cooling issues, this year that's been completely fixed.
So at the start that's mainly what I was looking at.
I knew the tune was good and we ran the engine on a slightly lower power
during testing.
Now that we've come to the pointy end of the event,
it's now more focused on engine health.
So we are leaning on the engine a little bit more, late in day two now.
So now I'm more looking at things like EGT temperatures, oil pressure,
and making sure that what the driver is giving us in terms of feedback
is actually working.
So things like peak speed down the straight and things like that.
- Now of course the next concern is, you see something that you don't like,
it's pretty hard to run out from the pits and actually stop the driver,
so how are you getting this information through to the driver?
- Yeah the whole team has full time radio comms back to the driver,
so we can simply just give him a command to say get off it.
It's good too, he can give us some feedback so that we can straight away know,
if we've made some changes, he can say it's worked, it hasn't,
and come back in the pits so that we don't maybe lose a whole session.
- Now let's go back though because of course with that Motec C187 you do
have the ability to essentially set up a range of alarms with a variety
of parameters that can then trip a warning message, bring up a warning
light to alert the driver something's not wrong and then he can read the
message on the dash.
So how do you see the telemetry being beneficial over that style?
- Look some of the things that the driver may not understand.
For example I was talking about EGT before, when we start to lean on the engine,
we're not gonna have a screen for him to look down and see six individual lights,
so that's more, we give him just a general warning on the screen if anything
does go outside of our parameters.
So that he has to do the most amount of driving and the least amount of
looking at what else is happening.
- I think a lot of people would lose sight of the fact that these cars are incredibly
fast, it's hard for most people to get their head around exactly what the driver
is dealing with out there on the track and particularly in open class,
we're not talking about professional drivers as well so really the more the driver can
concentrate on solely doing his or her job and driving the car,
and keeping it pinpoint accurate, the better job they're gonna be able
to do getting speed out of the car.
And then you've also got the ability from the pits to decide exactly how much
of an issue something is and whether the driver needs to know about it?
- Yep exactly right.
- Alright Mitch it's great to see how technology is improving the performance
and ultimately the reliability of these cars.
You've still got a few sessions to go so we wish you all the best for the rest
of World Time Attack, thanks for the chat.
- Thanks a lot.
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