Please discuss here all your remarks and pose your questions about all racing series, except Formula One. Both technical and other questions about GP2, Touring cars, IRL, LMS, ...
The Mercedes team once started on a license from Tyrrell with Reynard in Brackly UK and without moving was American, Japanese, British and now German.
What now is "Austrian" RedBull Racing was the Scottish Steward GP, then the American Ford racing, then the British Jaguar Racing.
Swiss Sauber F1 was the German BMW F1 team for a while. They even raced Mallei "Italian" Petronas engines for a few years
Force India is been Russian, Dutch, British and Irish but always been based next to Silverstone.
The Enstone based Lotus has been British, Italian and French.
I think racing team have not much to do with their name giver, it's just who is paying the bills at a certain point and how deep are their pockets.
For Nissan it would be a relative small step to buy or RedBull or Toro Rosso and brand the Renault engines into Nissan's and have a competitive team, but they just choose not to.
I'm sure I'll get blasted for saying this but having been around the industry for a while there is an element of culture that I and others have seen can limits Japanese success in motorsport.
In very simple terms its a need to fully understand something before they will use it, it may sound stupid but an analogy another engineer told me about his dealings with a Japanese team summed it up excellently:
"if you gave a group of UK F1 engineers a magic box that they could pull race winning performance upgrades from they would pull every upgrade out of it as quickly as possible and win as many races as they could while the magic box worked, whereas if you gave the same magic box to a group of Japanese F1 engineers they would study the box, simulate the box, work out how the box worked, then they would make their own version of the magic box, evaluate it, improve it and then finally use the magic box.... at which point its years later and they havent won any races and the magic box is old technology"
This sort of culture is superb for making reliable, consistent road cars but no good when all that matters is winning a race each weekend.
Compare this to a small UK based team I heard about a few years ago who I was told used a jigsaw to cut slots in a rear wing end plate in the pit garage at a race as they had seen a winning team turn up with slots in theirs. It gained them some performance and worked so they stuck with it even though they (at the time) had no idea why they worked.
Or FIF1 doing so well at Spa in 2009 because they ran out of low downforce front wings at the circuit so they fitted a high downforce front wing they had trackside so they could compete in practice. To their surprise it made the car a second a lap quicker so they stuck with it and nearly won the race.
Toyota/Honda would never have done this because it would go against what they and the simulations believe would work , I've heard of one of these teams literally refusing to fit an airbox that gained them 5bhp (on the V8) because the numbers didn't tally up with their simulations/CFD.
Just my observations, but having worked in motorsport and OEM manufacturing I can say that to me different cultures are suited to different things.
"A pretentious quote taken out of context to make me look deep" - Some old racing driver
part of the problem may be the basis of japanese engine design to start with...japanese engines (especially in their performance cars) run way closer to their optimum level than most other manufacturers...prime example being a honda s2000...240+bhp out of a 2 litre engine as standard if your lucky and careful you might squeeze another 10 bhp out of it..a lot of the toyota engines are the same (or atleast they used to be) that said the toyota 4age was used for the atlantic series for a long time and i've saw one of these engines making over 300 bhp on the dyno still normally aspirated and running under 1600cc reving to 14000 rpm still using mostly standard parts!
japanese engines tend to rev higher they seem happy to slap a turbo on to almost anything i think there's just a different approach taken to engine design for a start and a totally different set of priorities compared to european manufacturers which make their cars less suitable for many types of motorsport
take ford for example...you want a performance ford they sell you a beefed up focus, porsche have been building on a 911 for years and every car they build is in many ways based on it, vauxhall give you a souped up astra whereas with japanese performance cars they're generally built on a totally different chassis, ie. skylines,supras, gto, fto
They (Japanese teams) are just not winning so much at the moment.
Sure, there are cultural differences but these have strengths and weaknesses and when they are winning a lot the same differences can be cited in reverse as reasons for their triumph.
hurrill it's a problem because the engines are already at their limit there's no gains to be made, if you try to pull more power out of the engine you start to have issues with cooling and so on
williammcc wrote:hurrill it's a problem because the engines are already at their limit there's no gains to be made, if you try to pull more power out of the engine you start to have issues with cooling and so on
How does the engine in a Honda S2000 have anything to do with international racing?
williammcc wrote:hurrill it's a problem because the engines are already at their limit there's no gains to be made, if you try to pull more power out of the engine you start to have issues with cooling and so on
How does the engine in a Honda S2000 have anything to do with international racing?
many classes of racing use production engines...i used the s2000 as an example many japanese production engines are the same they're already running much closer to their limits than european engines....it's pretty much down to japanese engineering philosophy more than anything else
their philosophy has been the same from as far back as world war 2 and probably before it...if they don't think they actually need something be it another 20 bhp, another thousand rpm or going back to their roots in world war 2 armor on a fighter plane they won't include it or even leave it possible to be included...if the zero fighter plane had any sort of armor at all it would probably have been close to the best plane of the war but it was too fast and maneuverable to be shot down so armor wasn't needed...except they quickly found all it took was 1 or 2 bullets and they went up in smoke and there was no provision in the design to do anything to prevent it...
basically they think totally different every bit as good as designers as a European but if you ask a european to build an engine he'll build the best engine possible within the constraints where the japanese will build the cheapest engine possible within the constraints
If the zero had armour plating all over the plane, it would have severely impacted it's flight performance. The zero wouldn't even be close to being one of the best fighters of the war, it would be severely outmatched by just about all 1945 era fighers.
correct cold fusion but if they had decided to armor it they would have needed substantial upgrades or the cold have done like the yanks and just put a steel plate behind the pilot but you understand what im getting at
