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Technically Speaking By MulTiMaTic Vice pReSidenT laRRy holT


STRaighT aS an aeRo


home to write yet another monthly contribu- tion to itmn. this is good and bad; good that i get to spend a few days with my girl and the dogs, bad that i am totally accessible via email, phone and directly (morleigh the old english sheep dog demanding something every few minutes). at least on a plane nobody can get at me. on top of all the open windows on my desk-


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top that contain letters, quotes, technical re- ports and emails i am keeping an eye on the pirelli world challenge race in st. petersburg as we are providing engineering support to my good friend remo Ferri for the two Ferrari 458s his team is campaigning in the series. this is the first year that r. Ferri racing has


run a totally independent and standalone pro- gram and like everything else he does, it has been executed in totally the correct way, in- cluding dssV dampers and multimatic engi- neering support. saturday’s race was rained out, but an-


thony Lazzaro starts sunday from the outside pole in the #61 car after a mammoth front row qualifying battle with tomas enge in the reiter Lamborghini Gallardo. tomas is back after another enforced sabbatical (you gotta


10 •www.insidetracknews.com


or the first time in recent memory i am ac- tually sitting down in the comfort of my own


love him), but fast as always and he has been intensely testing and developing the beasts from sant’agata over the winter. i spent a week in sebring for the race, obvi-


ously; nobody would go there for anything else. people do apparently live there, but they are all old. my kids have always referred to the place as the “Grim reaper’s waiting room”… nice. the famous 12 Hours of sebring out- shone itself this year and set a record for nine cars finishing on the lead lap, four of them Lmp2 and five of them daytona prototypes. that should shut down the imsa Balance of


performance (Bop) debate once and for all, although Garry watkins still found stuff to whine about. multimatic’s continental challenge result


on Friday afternoon was not what it should have been with both new cars showing good speed, but a fluke clutch actuation failure on the #158 saw it drop a lap in the pits. mean- while, scott maxwell was on the way to a top three finish when restart mayhem saw two contenders taken out on the spot. the accident forced scotty to stop dead to


avoid totally wrecking his new ride. Half the pack streamed by at that point and then a 25 minute yellow ended the race with the #15 only able to climb to seventh before the cus-


tomary caution procession to the checker kicked-off. i might have mentioned before that a major


aspect of the imsa Bop simulation work that multimatic undertook was associated with the aerodynamic comparison and balance of the dp and Lmp2 cars. they were very different beasts when we started and still very different beasts when we were done, but different in dif- ferent ways so able to race against each other. we undertook only one aspect of the aero engineering, the analytical computer based simulation stuff. so here goes my technical bit of the article:


aerodynamic performance measurement 101. note that i didn’t say aerodynamics, just performance measurement. i am not an aero- dynamicist, but i have spent a load of money on aerodynamic performance measurement, so that pretty much makes me an expert on the subject. these days, aerodynamic performance can


be assessed in three different ways. the first, and a specialty of multimatic engineering, is purely simulation based and generally referred to as computational Fluid dynamics (cFd for short – you gotta have an acronym!). the sec- ond is scale model wind tunnel testing (no acronym…yet), which basically consists of tak-


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