a possible means of
overcoming the sterile thinking behind many current formulae
Former Lola designer, Ben Bowlby, is now head of engineering for Target / Chip Ganassi Racing and was the man behind the radical DeltaWing IndyCar concept (left)
people combined their activity to generate more powerful software, which was then used to generate other products that would make profi ts. The software itself did not generate income. If you can face disclosing and sharing your source material, you then have the opportunity to have many brains and motivated groups develop and use it. An example is Linux, a carefully managed open source operating system that has become extremely powerful – the internet itself runs on Linux – and has not been developed specifi cally for one corporation to knock out another. In CFD, the open source
software OpenFOAM, which was used for DeltaWing, is gaining popularity and is already being used by major players such as Audi. It is free, powerful and constantly being developed, primarily by those actually using it. The producer, OpenCFD, makes money training people to use it rather than from the code itself, knowing those people will ultimately help to improve it, too.
SIX BILLION DOLLAR MEN A totally different example used by Bowlby concerns the owners of an apparently defunct gold mine who published the geographical data of the mine.
Around 1400 people made potentially workable suggestions, 800 of which were successful, and another six billion dollars was pulled out of the mine, illustrating the devastating effi ciency of collective effort. ‘If we have the objective in
racing to develop highly relevant, future technology – such as we could if motorsport were not confi ned by the rules – going open source would enable us to do it in a way that would be highly effective,’ he says. There are already examples of
such knowledge sharing within motorsport, such as the ‘NASCAR garage system’, but Bowlby
believes this is just the start and that it would be exciting to share information far more widely and engage students, universities, suppliers, teams and the entire automotive industry, including OEMs, Tier 1s and Tier 2s. Not only does sharing
push forward development, but it reduces redundant duplication, too. The Formula 1 f-duct, for example, was a brilliant exploitation within the regulations, which was then duplicated by every team, all of whom had to spend vast sums developing their own version of it. In the end, the f-duct was banned, and the industry has
Le Mans •
www.racecar-engineering.com
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