- Hey team, welcome to today's member's webinar.
Today we're going to be talking all about brake pressure system data.
We're going to get into the nitty gritty of it soon but first as always we'll get
into a bit of a pre show first and show you guys what's been going on around the
shop and around the place for us.
Over on my laptop screen here I've got a shot of one of our GT86s which is an
SR powered GT86 which had a recent track outing, it was last weekend we took it to a
really low key local race event and that was the first time that car's been on track this
year and in a while, it's had a lot of updates over the summer period in preparation
for our endurance racing season which is going to start up here later in the year.
You can see there we've got some wet tyres sitting next to the car, we actually
had some relatively heavy wet running, certainly in the first part of the event.
But these new Michelin wets we've been running have been fantastic.
They always are and the driver that was driving that car was definitely very impressed
with how well they performed on track.
It's certainly, the quality of a wet tyre makes a massive difference.
This is a shot of the same of that front car, front of that car sorry, once we got it back
to the workshop.
So at the moment we're sort of focusing on trying to get some of the mecahnical
elements a bit more tidied up.
We've had a couple of mechanical problems and we've really just been refining
the original concept of that car.
Things like improving cooling efficiencies and stuff like that.
This is a shot of the car with its new front splitter that will be going onto it at
some stage this year.
It's just sort of a mock up figuring out how we're going to integrate it again
with the bumper and particularly now we've updated a few more cooling things
on the front of the car so at the bottom here this mesh at the bottom, this is feeding both
our front brakes.
This is our front brake cooling, we've got our transmission oil cooler feed here, our engine
oil cooler and then our main intercooler and radiator channel is all fed through
this duct here.
You can see that we had a different front lip sitting on the front of the car before but
now we're going back and modifying that, we're not going to use that front lip we were
using which has now changed a little bit how we can feed the oil coolers at the front.
So they'll need a little bit of a tweak but it's not going to be too major.
We're also working on next is the air outlets at the side of the bumper here.
We've got a few more details to figure out there before we are ready to finalise it.
This is another shot of the engine bay after we got back from the track, after it's had
a wee wash.
I've talked about before this area over here, where we've got a whole lot of new heat shielding
in the engine bay, this actually worked really really well, all the upgrades and all the effort
that Jimmy our fabricator put into getting that sorted really paid off.
it was actually so good that even after running hard on track the car could come straight in
you could actually hover your hand over one of these heat shields without being burnt
which is a big big change from what we had before.
Heat management in any turbocharged setup like this is always massively challenging
but we've made some good gains in that direction as well so it's been really promising.
We have also had the gearbox out of that since that event.
We did actually have a couple of, we didn't have any terminal problems with the gearbox,
we did have a couple of maintenance issues, there was a noise in there so we've got that out,
given it a bit of a strip down and a check which is all pretty standard stuff.
This has got I think the brand was TTI, it's a sequential 6 speed dog box.
You can see there it's a relatively compact thing on the bench, it's in the middle of being
stripped down and getting a bit of a service.
So that's just sort of normal ongoing maintenance for us as well.
Yeah so that's it for what's been happening around the shop, a lot of the effort in our shop has been
going into that car recently.
As far as what's been going on on our socials, I thought I would just mention that we did
have a really interesting video go out on Formula Student competition tyre selection.
So this is from an interview I did towards the back end of last year and it's all about a
local Formula Student team, talking to one of their technical guys about how they
select their tyres.
Now for anyone that doesn't know what Formula Student is, it's essentially a university
competition where people build small single seaters and they go and race them against
other universities, it's a really really big and popular competition.
But the interesting thing about this competition is that the level of sophistication in the cars is
enormous.
Certainly much more than you would see even in some lower end professional series.
The cars can be particularly tricky, particularly with the tyre selection, there are a lot of
options they've got to choose from.
There's a lot of tyre companies that are making specific tyres for the Formula Student
competition, obviously they're packaged, they're very small, they're in the 10 to 13 inch
range, lots of different funny aspect ratios, the cars are obviously really small and light,
they're really specific, they're much bigger than a go kart tyre but a lot smaller than a
normal single seater or racecar tyre.
So I was speaking to Jarred here we were talking about how they go through the process, how they
integrate things like simulation and track testing for making decisions on how they're choosing
tyres which I actually thought was a really interesting discussion because it is a big
and interesting topic.
So I definitely suggest you guys head over to our Instagram page and check out that
video if you haven't seen it already.
On our forums again things have been pretty busy on the forums as far as lots of good
questions coming through, lots of really good discussions coming through from people.
I thought I'd just highlight this question that came up a couple of days ago.
It was from one of our members Matt Cooley and his question was about using a panhard
rod with his leaf spring suspension so he's got, from what I understand, an older style
car that's got rear wheel drive and has got leaf springs in the rear and they've got a
panhard rod which is doing the lateral location of the rear axle and he was just
asking about is the panhard rod the right way to go, what are the other options out
there, what are the downsides of stuff like this and turn into quite a informative
conversation, there were a few members that jumped in and gave their 2 cents worth
which was definitely really valuable as well.
But I thought maybe I'd just talk a little bit about what the panhard rod actually
is in case anyone isn't familiar with it.
So if we've got our, looking from the rear of the car, so this is our tyres and let's
say this is our rear axle here.
With our diff sitting in the middle.
So a panhard rod, the idea here is that, let's say we've got the leaf springs that
Matt's got in his car, so they would look like this from the back with some
shackles dropping down.
The idea with the leaf springs, and they're purely there to look after the vertical
component of springing the car but strictly speaking there's nothing laterally constraining
the rear diff.
What I mean by that is if you put any side force on the back, while there would be
some restriction by the leaf springs, the purpose of the leaf springs isn't
to support the diff laterally, we need to do that with something else and that's
really what the panhard rod is there to do.
So the idea behind this, let's say for argument's sake, this is our chassis up here.
Just really simplifying it down, a panhard rod may look something like this.
So the idea here is that any side forces, so obviously we've got lateral tyre forces
coming into the car, they are reacted all through to this rod here, that's how they are
reacted through the chassis and that's what locates the rear axle on a lot of older
rear wheel drive cars.
Now there are some downsides and some compromises with the panhard rod.
It's a lot simpler setup, it's a lot cheaper setup to produce and I think this is why
you see a lot of manufacturers back in the day when live axles were more common
using this just because it's simply a much simpler setup that one of the other
setups that I'll go on to talk about in a second.
One of the problems with it is you can see here because this rod is on an angle,
as we move up and down on the rear axle, necessarily this whole rear axle is going to
translate from side to side so because this is on a, this panhard rod's on an arc means
as we move up, the axle's going to move to the left and as we move down the axle's going
to move to the right.
Now you can negate that a little bit to some extent by choosing the angle of
your panhard rod at ride height and particularly in the case if you're running
a circuit car and you don't have a lot of vertical movement of your,
you don't have a lot of vertical movement of your whole axle then you don't actually
get, necessarily get that much position change on your rod.
So whether it's a length or the angle or the ride height or just the amount of
suspension travel you need, that's going to determine whether a panhard rod's going
to be suitable for you or not.
So if that's something that's interesting to you guys I suggest you go and check that out,
that was on the motorsport wheel alignment section of the forum.
If you guys have got some similar questions to that.
The other option which came up in the discussion was the idea of a watts linkage which is another
really common, in fact in a motorsport context it's probably much more common to
see watts linkages than panhard rods these days.
Certainly it's something you see if you go and look at any high end car with a live
axle built back in the day, something like an old BDA Escort or something like that,
they all have watts linkages.
What that is instead, it's sort of a different take on a panhard rod.
The idea here is that you might have some, let's say this is the chassis here again.
You might have some mount dripping down here and some mount here.
The idea here is that you've got a 2 piece panhard rod you can kind of think of it.
That's got a centre pivot in here and the idea here is that as this moves up and down,
this whole link that's pivoting, it's pivoting at this point on the diff here.
This rotates around and these, the beauty of it pivoting in the middle like this is that
even though the angle of those arms is changing, each one of those watts linkage
arms, the position of the diff actually stays central in the car, it doesn't, you don't have
any lateral translation as you do.
As long as everything's set up properly you don't have any lateral translation.
The really key important point about this for a watts link to work properly is the angle
and length of these watts link arms must be equal to each other in order to keep the diff
spaced centrally.
Yeah so that's a little bit of a, that's a good question that came up, it's not something
maybe we get asked too much about because it's a relatively uncommon suspension setup
these days, obviously most cars are running things like macpherson struts or a arms or
multi link suspension so it's not quite as common so I thought it was a useful discussion
to have.
So also you guys should know about upcoming courses.
So we only really, only just released our professional motorsport data analysis course
so that was a follow up to our data analysis fundamentals course.
So if you guys have already taken the data analysis fundamentals course or even
if you haven't, if you are interested in this topic, there's 2 really great courses now
that span a pretty wide range of motorsport data analysis stuff, everything from the complete
beginners right through to everything you need to be going and sort of starting your job at
a professional level, that new professional data analysis course is definitely well worth checking
out, we've also got a race driving fundamentals course which is currently in production which is
slated for release some time this quarter and I'm also working on a new suspension
fundamentals course which will be aimed for being released about halfway through
the year so keep an eye out on the future courses coming out as well guys.
Alright so that's it for the pre show, I'll be back in a second and we will get straight
into the log data analysis for braking systems.
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