For many companies supplying a race engine, the choice of con rod can be a very straightforward affair. Often there are multiple suppliers of uprated engine internals, and there are a number of very competent and successful con rod manufacturers. The engineer has only to be satisfied of the advantages of choosing a rod from a certain manufacturer, who will have chosen to use some very specialised bolts (or studs and nuts) to hold together the two pieces of the rod (assuming a split rod...

There are a number of ways to evaluate the heat dissipation performance of a radiator. Some might prefer a computational approach using one of the many CFD codes available to model heat fluxes and fluid flows. However, since the geometry of a radiator is complex, requiring large amounts of computing power and detailed knowledge of how to use the software, this might be the least preferred approach, except by the CFD specialist with a suitable budget and the desire to get down into the...

It has been a number of years now since many of the trial-and-error methods in engine development have been abandoned. Most of the higher class amateur racing teams and, without exception, all of the professional teams make maximum use of the available computer-aided possibilities that modern times offer. This includes not just CAD systems but also CAE applications such as finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). What is not yet so widespread though is the...