In the past 15 years or so there has been a huge change in the range of coatings for metallic components in motorsport, with many more suppliers and a much wider choice. Before then, and in terms of hard-wearing coatings, these often implied adding a different material such as a hard metal or ceramic to the component’s surface to a significant thickness before grinding back to finished size. Various spraying techniques were commonly used to apply such materials, and they are still in...
There have been a number of RET-Monitor articles on con rod materials over the past few years. The last article to cover steel as a con rod material, in late 2009, discussed the general benefits compared to other materials. In general terms, people have tended to consider steel as the safe option and titanium as the material for the optimum rod if the budget allows. If we decided to look beyond traditional steels for rod manufacture and towards some of the more exotic steels available,...
It is a sad indictment of the spark-ignition engine that, even in its most efficient form, for every horsepower or kilowatt generated, the thermal equivalent of at least two more are lost as heat. And although up to half of this can be conveniently discharged directly into the atmosphere in the form of exhaust gas, the remaining heat – the amount roughly equivalent to the power output of the engine itself– has to be disposed of in other, less convenient ways. As my old...
Anyone involved in the development of a race engine understands the basics of performance improvement. We want to trap as much air as possible in the combustion chamber, mix with it the amount of fuel that will reliably give best power, burn it as efficiently as possible and turn as much of the resulting energy as we can into mechanical power. Much of the energy released as a result of combustion is lost to the cooling system or out of the exhaust, but there are also substantial mechanical...
Weight is the enemy of the performance car – how many times do we hear that in motorsport circles? But if we are paranoid about the weight of the chassis, engine, gearbox and all the other ancillary bits and pieces – even the paint on a car – then we need to consider the wiring loom as well. One way of course to rid ourselves of this parasite (for that’s what it is) is to dispense with as much wiring as possible – shorter wiring ‘runs’, thinner...