The past few weeks and months have been busy but exciting times for the people who work for the Panoz Group at Élan Motorsports Technologies in Braselton, Georgia. Led by chief designer Simon Marshall and chief aerodynamicist Nick Alcock, Panoz's engineers, fabricators and component builders have been embroiled in finalizing the details of the first Panoz DP01 Champ Car and getting the car ready for a dozen or more days of testing at Sebring over the next three weeks.
After nine months of unrelenting work the brand new Champ Car runs for the first time over five days at Sebring this week with test driver Roberto Moreno at the wheel. Moreno, 47, has a wealth of experience in Champ Cars, Indy cars and Formula 1. He won Champ Car races in Vancouver in 2001 and Cleveland in '02 while driving for Patrick Racing, finished second to teammate and old friend Nelson Piquet in the 1990 Japanese GP with the Benetton team, and was a Ferrari F1 test driver in the late '80s. There couldn't be a better man for the job of testing the new Panoz DP01.
Chief designer Marshall worked for Lola Cars in England before joining Panoz where he developed the company's recent IRL cars. Marshall commented on the challenges of coming to grips with Champ Car's design brief for the new DP01.
"When Champ Car approached us asking for our proposal for their product they gave us a three-page summary of bullet points," Marshall said. "These ranged from the performance aspects, which would be seen as lap times, weight, power and downforce, as well as safety considerations. There was half a page of bullet points which covered some of the toughest tests in racing we would have to put this car through. It's given us a good chance to wipe the slate clean, break away from certain regulations which don't make sense today, and rewrite the Champ Car rulebook."
The new Panoz makes around 5,500 pounds of downforce at 200 mph with the underwing accounting for nearly fifty percent of the downforce. The focus on increasing the proportion of downforce produced by the underbody is the key component in trying to improve the raceability of the DP01 compared to recent Champ Cars.
"We also had to look at the aesthetics of the car," Marshall added. "It's hard to put your finger on what a Champ Car is and what it looks like because in a competitive environment it has changed and evolved. It seems to be dominated by the dissolving shape and the low engine cover which are all products of the turbo installation and not requiring any cold air intake located high up but something that is more purposefully low. We don't have to ram air into the Cosworth engine."
Another important element in the appearance, let alone the performance of the DP01, relates to its F1-like high nose.
"This was an area where Champ Car needed to break away from the traditional-looking car," Marshall commented. "It would give us some very good aesthetics with the suspended front wing and enhanced role of the underbody. Being remote from the nose itself, especially the center section, the high nose allows the front wing to work more efficiently. You've got to be careful that the sloping surface of the underside of the car doesn't produce its own lift, which it actually does. So you can negate the effect very easily."
Marshall's design team have been able to define some parts of the rulebook, particularly the underbody which was strictly specified by CART for many years going back the mid eighties. Chief aerodynamicist Alcock, who also worked at Lola as well as enjoying five years in F1 with Williams, was delighted with this element of the design brief.
"Just to be given a free hand on the underbody and the fact that we've got no regulations to work to in that respect is a breath of fresh of air," Alcock remarked.
Added Marshall: "We've got no restrictions on the entrances and exits and with vortex generating devices. We were able to spend a lot of time in making the best underwing possible and generate most of the downforce on the underwing."
The Panoz design team does its aerodynamic testing and development in the Penske wind tunnel at the Penske Technology Group in Mooresville, NC. Built by Adrian Reynard, who had hopes of breaking into NASCAR, the tunnel was purchased by Penske after Reynard's company went bankrupt. Alcock and his aero people work with a half-scale model which can run up to 100 mph and so far the DP01 Champ car has spent five weeks in the wind tunnel.
"Your goal when you go to the tunnel is to work as efficiently, quickly and as accurately as possible," Alcock says. "Doctor Panoz is paying Roger Penske a lot of money to be there every day and we've got to make sure that me and my guys work as flat-out and efficiently as possible.
"You have to go to the tunnel very well-prepared with your test plan. All the changes you make to the model have to take place as quickly as possible so you can maximize your time. We would typically go and work four days in a row, twelve-hour days, working straight through with no lunch breaks. When the tunnel is running is sort of down-time for the model makers, and when they're making their changes provides some down-time for the rest of us, although there's always plenty of data to look at and work to be done. We take two model-makers and usually myself and one other aerodynamicist."
Alcock emphasized the importance of aerodynamics in influencing the layout of the car.
"It is the key," Alcock said. "The car is laid-out aerodynamically. The intake area at the front of the sidepods is the most powerful part on the Champ car. There are three turning vanes in there which generate some very strong vortices down the tunnel. The vortices are very high-speed and very low pressure.
"Simon and I have a very good working relationship and he knows how important aero is. I'm not saying the mechanical side has to be designed around the aero, but it's a team effort. And of course, I understand the mechanical requirements. It's always a compromise and packaging your suspension is always your big nightmare."
Added Marshall: "It's no surprise why these cars go 'round the corner so fast. It's not the steel parts of the car that do it. It's the downforce-producing carbon bodywork parts.
"We have to package some of the ancillary items around that. It has an impact on what we can and can't do with the rear suspension and gearbox. Usually with cars of this magnitude of downforce, the suspension installation and a lot of mechanical items on the car have to take a back seat and play second fiddle to the aerodynamic performance. So there's a lot of give and take between the mechanical and aerodynamic sides of the design."
Alcock says a lot of work has gone into making the car as aerodynamically stable as possible on a typically rough street circuit.
"The car will be running on bumpy street courses and not being sensitive to pitch and ride height changes will be very important in terms of controlling your downforce as you go over the bumps," Alcock commented. "The ultimate downforce we have to hit is the target but retaining that downforce at high ride heights is another important goal. We've done some work simulating braking and acceleration and turning the car, just so we can calculate how much downforce is on the car in different conditions and how the aerodynamic balance is affected.
"The very latest wind tunnels are getting into more dynamic, or quasi-dynamic testing, where the model moves in real time. We take ride heights from around the circuits. At Long Beach for example, we've looked at current car data and tried to simulate these changes in conditions around the tracks."
Marshall and Alcock have enjoyed working on the concept of creating a more raceable car with a less turbulent wake and proportionally less influence from the front and rear wings versus the underbody.
"We've been allowed to pursue the subject of raceability and less turbulence because we can write the aerodynamic rules ourselves and we're not constrained by performance-limiting factors, which we usually are," Marshall said. "Also, we're not giving anything away to a competitor. Usually you wouldn't dream of helping the guy behind with your aerodynamic wake.
"We worked with the whole package from the front to the back, optimizing around the new high nose and front wing. Then we would go back to the front and start again because the effect of the aerodynamic parts at the rear of the car have an effect upstream as well as downstream."
Like most of us, Marshall is interested in seeing the results of Champ Car's experiment in making a change to the aerodynamic equation.
"It's a realistic goal to achieve in some manner. It's just the magnitude that is unknown," Marshall observed. "We are doing some CFD (computational fluid dynamics) studies where we can take the entire car as a model and calculate the flow characteristics at the back of the car and the wake, and then input that into the front end of another car and see what it does to the numbers.
"We've been trying to head towards that but we can't forget that the performance of the car is a very important thing. The numbers we've had to hit aerodynamically to achieve a certain lap time have still been there. You can't throw away the performance to make it driveable. But we do the best we can with a solid underwing and less reliance on the front and rear wings."
Marshall confirms the drivers' opinions that we won't know how well the idea works until we get a pack of cars running together on the track.
"Absolutely," he declared. "You never can tell what the car will be like for a driver running on its own, let alone in a bunch of cars interacting together. Every feature on the car has an influence on the balance and handling. We've had only nine months from a clean sheet of paper to a complete, manufactured car, so we don't have the luxury to simulate absolutely everything along the way.
"I think we'll be able to assess where we theoretically should be with our CFD model but it will come down to the first race. Racing on street circuits is not as easy to analyze as racing on ovals where the cornering is very much steady-state and you can accurately calculate and measure the effects of changes and driver lines.
"There's a lot more driver feel and seemingly random effect to ten or twenty cars on a street circuit. They'll all behave and handle very differently. It'll depend on the guy driving the car and a few millimeters here and there on the ride height when you're taking a turn or braking or accelerating. We'll find out at the first race whether we've actually achieved it."
Marshall and his design team are proud that the DP01 has exceeded the FIA's and Champ Car's crash test requirements.
"We subjected the car to a number of different crash tests," he said. "Some of them are through static loading, some are through fairly abstract experimentation and some are dynamic crash tests. We've subjected the roll hoop on this car to a twelve-ton load, which is about five or six full-size passenger cars sitting on top of a purely carbon fiber structure. Other areas are poked and squeezed and prodded and the test car comes out of it looking a little second-hand and dented and dinged, but all within the standards set by Champ Car.
"The frontal crash test is always the most impressive of these tests to watch. We run the car into a very unyielding concrete/steel wall at 12 meters per second and the car weighing in at 800 pounds. So it's got a fair amount of momentum to absorb and it converts the energy of the crash into heat and noise by the splintering of the crash structure at the front of the car.
"It takes a certain amount of energy to break each carbon fiber and split it away from its neighbor fiber. Hence, we use special carbon fibers and resins structured in such a way that it's crash resistant."
Marshall admits that meeting Champ Car's cost control requirements has been a serious challenge.
"To design a car at the level of a Champ Car and also keep it economical is very difficult," he remarked. "If you look at the car, there are no cheap parts. It all comes down to the amount of time we spend designing this car. Hopefully, we've done it right and the investment upfront in the safety and performance of the car will continue for three or maybe four years, and we can spread that investment over a high-volume of parts and cars.
"When we're competing, the drive to beat another manufacturer or team escalates costs, so by turning this championship into a single-make series, it should make things a lot more economical for the competitors. They can worry about their engineering of the car and working with the driver and the whole team aspect without getting more into redesigning of the race car."
Alcock says the cost control aspect has not put any serious restraints on the DP01's aerodynamic design and development.
"It's something you've got to be mindful of, but in terms of the actual aerodynamic shape and surfaces, I don't design a car to be cheap in that respect," Alcock observed. "It's a bit of a different mindset for myself, coming from an F1 background where you're actively encouraged to spend money because that's what gets you to the front of the grid. But here, the company is very conscious about how they manufacture the cars and how they're made in order to keep the costs down."
Concluded Marshall:
"The single-make race series brings its own challenges. We just try to give the customer exactly what they want and in this case the customer is the race teams and also the series organizer. We work with them to try to create the best tool for them to use over the next few years and not leave out any options or adjustments they might need over those years.
"Hopefully, we're not designing the car like we did in the IRL to do just one job aimed at a single circuit. We're designing it to be adaptable to a lot of different situations, different drivers and team engineer requirements."
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i think the car design is a complete rip-off from A1 cars. having re-read the article, there are many people in the project who worked for lola, and one even for williams, so from there comes the similarities. i dont think its a good thing because each series should have different and identificable cars.
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