From race car to your car

Gerry Malloy

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

It's a mantra used for decades to justify manufacturers' interest in motorsport: racing improves the breed.

But a lot of people are likely to be at a loss if asked to cite an example of just how the breed has been improved – apart from the oft-told story of the rearview mirror used on Ray Harroun's Indy 500 winning car in 1909.

In fact, these days, race cars are more likely to benefit from the adoption of technologies developed for passenger cars than the reverse.

However, there are some clear transfers of technology from the track to the street. Here are a few:

Materials

Aluminum is a common material in today's cars, not just in engine, drivetrain and chassis components, but in body panels as well. In some cases, such as the Audi A8 and TT and the Jaguar XJ, the entire structure is aluminum.

Race car builders – many of them with backgrounds in the aircraft industry where the use of aluminum was pioneered – have favoured the metal for decades. For a given level of strength, it is lighter than the iron or steel it typically replaces. It may have to be thicker to provide that level of strength, but the net result is a lighter car.

In race cars, the weight saved directly improves performance. But in production cars, it's the potential reduction in emissions and particularly the reduction in fuel consumption that has driven the widespread adoption of aluminum.

Suspension

If there is a race car on the planet that doesn't employ double-wishbone independent suspension or some derivative of it at all four wheels, it's an oddity. Well, apart from those who follow a rulebook perpetuating '60s production-car technology. (Yes, NASCAR.)

Another form of independent suspension – which means each wheel is suspended separately from its cross-car counterpart – is called the Macpherson strut. While not made specifically for race cars, it gained credence on the track, particularly in Colin Chapman's early Lotus racers.

Independent front suspensions, typically double-wishbone or Macpherson, have been used in most production cars since before World War II. But in North America especially, the configuration has been slow to find its way to the rear. Even on race cars, until mid-century, most independent-rear setups used a simple swing-axle geometry, like that of the Volkswagen Bug.

Now, apart from some very low-end cars and a few minivans, there is scarcely a car or CUV on the market without an independent rear suspension design derived from one of those two configurations. And our cars handle and ride better because of it.

Safety

When we think of race cars and safety, we probably think first of features that help keep drivers safe in a crash. But most of the technology transfer in that case has gone the other way – from production cars to race cars.

Braking is one area where race-car needs have directly benefitted passenger-car safety.

The most obvious example is disc brakes, which were developed by Jaguar and Girling/Dunlop for the LeMans-winning Jaguar C-Type and the 1953 race.

The big advantage of disc brakes was their resistance to fade, stop after stop, at a time when drum brakes weren't good for more than one or two hard stops in a row.

Jaguar introduced discs on the XK150 production sports car in 1957, and their use gradually spread. Today, disc front brakes are ubiquitous, and most models have discs on the rear as well.

Power

The contributions racers have made to increasing engine output are countless. Among the most significant is the double-overhead-camshaft (DOHC) cylinder-head design, which enables the use of four valves per cylinder.

Common to many of today's passenger car engines, the configuration made its debut in 1912 in a Peugeot racing engine. The superiority of the design was immediately obvious, as cars with that dramatic new engine layout won the 1912 French Grand Prix and the 1913 Indianapolis 500, both by huge margins.

By the end of the 1920s, several race and road cars had adopted the layout. And it was the norm for race-car engines such as the Millers and Offenhausers that ruled the Indy 500 until the Ford V8s came along in the '60s – using the same cam and valve configuration.

The design was much slower being adopted for passenger cars. In the post-war era, the Jaguar XK120 sports car led the way, and other sports or sporty cars followed, but it wasn't until the 1980s when DOHC engines began to make inroads into mainstream vehicles, led by the Europeans and Japanese.

In race cars, the advantage of DOHC design is the ability to breathe better and thus run to a higher engine speed and increase maximum power. That applies to road cars too, but the improved breathing ability and valve-control flexibility the design enables, helps increase efficiency (and thus reduce fuel consumption) throughout the driving range.

Fuel efficiency

You can improve the vehicle's efficiency by reducing the power required to achieve any given speed, and one way to reduce that power requirement is to reduce friction losses within the engine or drivetrain. Doing just that is the primary reason bearings exist.

The Swedish-based bearing maker SKF has worked with Scuderia Ferrari since the founding of the marque in 1947. And it is heavily involved with Ferrari's F1 cars, each of which contains more than 150 SKF bearings and seals.

If the equivalent of just one-half horsepower can be gained through reduced bearing friction in the race car, it can be the difference between winning and losing, according to Tom Johnstone, SKF's president.

But if the technology that helped gain that half-horsepower can be applied across millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of bearings in everyday cars, the global energy savings resulting from reduced friction would be enormous.

That technology transfer is happening right now, says Johnstone.

So while it may not be in the ways you might expect, racing does improve the breed.

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