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[h=1]The Magazine for Racers[/h]RACER magazine has paved the way in motorsport coverage of Formula 1, IndyCar and Sports Cars with world-class writing and photography that tells the stories of racers in a way that is unlike any other publication. If you’re passionate about motorsports and insist on both style and substance, RACER is an essential read.


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In RACER Magazine: Improving the Breed?

Thursday, 14 December 2017


By Paul Fearnley


When motorsports adopts and adapts technologies, it's almost always for entirely selfish reasons: to find a winning advantage. If it helps make better street cars, then that's a bonus.


That "improving the breed" bellwether has rung increasingly hollow since the unseen hand of downforce began to exert a tightening grip on motorsports. When Texan Jim Hall feathered his Chaparral's suspension-mounted high wing in 1966 (above), he flipped the bird to the man (and his automobile) on the street.
Why should/how can a purpose-built racecar on – by the early 1970s – slick tires and festooned with aerodynamic devices that cause/want it to "scrape" the road have a bearing on our daily driver?


Formula 1's grudging attempt since 2014 to redress this has been a damp squib, the remarkable efficiency gains of its turbocharged V6 gasoline-hybrids drowned by "noise" about their lack of noise.
Just four years ago the FIA World Endurance Championship's LMP1 category was held up as a beacon of automotive worthiness when Porsche preferred it to F1, due to it being a willing and flexible high-speed laboratory for a hybrid tomorrow. Now it's yesterday's news.
A car industry blackened by the emission scandal of 2015 is even keener (to be seen) to be greener – and Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche have joined Renault in Formula E's "vow of silence." Expect budgets to spiral and piety to wear quickly thin.
It's time for motorsport – the show, not the business – to look after number one, starting with Liberty Media's F1.
Which shouldn't be difficult for a fundamentally selfish pursuit, should it?
Influential driver/engineer Mark Donohue was nicknamed "Captain Nice," yet spent a decade seeking what he termed "The Unfair Advantage." The stress this caused him – notwithstanding the success it brought – coined his other nickname: "Dark Monohue."
In 1969 he qualified fourth and finished seventh at Indy in a four-wheel-drive Lola; from 1971-'72 he was at the sharp end of a 25mph spike at The Brickyard caused by spreading wings; and from 1972-'73 he proved turbochargers could prevail on stop-start road courses. He wanted to please his team, its sponsors and partners – Porsche in the latter case – but he wanted to please himself more. Pissed when a works McLaren bumped his privateer version from the pole at Indy in 1971, he didn't blink when the misfortunes of others allowed him a victory the following year.

That's not a bad thing in context. Donohue was the epitome of George Bernard Shaw's "unreasonable man" upon whom "all progress depends." He was, in the words of rival driver/engineer Dan Gurney, helping "accelerate the evolution of ideas" – at 200mph, given 1,000hp-plus.


Motorsports has been a technical hothouse since Count de Dion steamed (literally) the 1894 Paris Rouen race at 12mph. Occasionally a catalyst of innovation, but more usually its incubator, it's not only regularly raided aerospace's temptingly exotic parts bin, but also used rat-like cunning to feed its need.
Ferodo's DS11 brake pad was originally intended for earthmovers and their ilk, yet won all bar two grands prix from 1961-'81; and the carbon-carbon system by Hitco of Gardena, Calif., that replaced it was inspired by Dunlop's design for Concorde.


The Brabham that won the F1 titles of 1966 featured a modified Alford & Alder front upright – a light steel modular forging easy to adjust – that was first fitted to a 1930s British daily driver.


And the Heim joint used wherever a low-friction, low-compliance adjustable pivot with zero play was beneficial to the 1967 Lotus 49 was either lifted from a late-1930s Ferguson tractor's lifting mechanism or a Luftwaffe plane brought down during the Battle of Britain.

The rubber-bushed joint between road and track, stretched and twisted by wings and fatter tires, failed totally when skirted ground effect – channelled by complex underbody shapes made possible by Owens-Illinois/Corning's 1936 Fiberglas (yes, that spelling) patent – forced a tenfold increase in spring rate by the 1970s' end. This in turn triggered widespread use of structural carbon-fiber composite – invented at Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment and patented in 1964 – during the 1980s.


Even the latest breed of hypercar merely scratches at the unreal-world potential performance numbers of these technologies. (Though that's expected to change with the delivery in 2019 of Adrian Newey's next-gen Aston Martin Valkyrie.)
But even humdrum street cars have benefited from racing's most efficient aero mod: the Gurney Flap, or wickerbill. An educated guess at controlling soaring Indy car speeds, Gurney fashioned a right-angled aluminum strip during a 1971 test at Phoenix and fitted it to the trailing edge of the rear wing on Bobby Unser's Eagle.

The powerful effect, with minimal disturbance, that it had on the pressure across the wing surfaces astounded even McDonnell Douglas when Gurney let it in on the secret. But although it has featured
since on helicopter horizontal stabilizers and high-lift airplanes – a twist from this story's norm – its patent foundered against the rediscovery of the 1931 Zap Flap...

 

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[h=2]In RACER Magazine: How to win an IndyCar championship[/h] Tuesday, 06 February 2018


By Mark Glendenning / Images by Phillip Abbott/LAT, Shawn Gritzmacher/IMS Photo


If winning the Verizon IndyCar Series was easy, everyone would be doing it. Except that in a way, everyone is. Dario Franchitti strung together three-straight titles between 2009 and '11, but the six championships completed since the arrival of the DW12 and its various iterations have delivered five different champions.


Close competition, bulletproof reliability and a field loaded with potential race winners mean that many of the time-honored roads to near-guaranteed title success are now closed. Nobody can dominate a season anymore, and nor can they afford to win a few races and absorb a handful of DNFs along the way.


So how should a prospective champion approach their season? Scott Dixon is unique in having won titles in both the DW12 and pre-DW12 eras, and notes that the main difference he observes between then (pre-2012) and now is a higher premium on consistency.


"I think it definitely has evolved," he says. "If you look at my first championship in 2003, I had five DNFs [from 16 races]. In this day and age you wouldn't even be in the running for a championship if you had that.

"So consistency is now the key to get what you can out of a championship. It's definitely harder to get multiple wins in a season now, even though Simon [Pagenaud] had five wins in 2016, and Josef Newgarden had four wins last year. That's the modern-day version of domination. So, consistency definitely becomes more of a play – and also the fact that you can't rely on other people having DNFs because of reliability.


"But when you look at it, it still comes down to the basics. Every race you go to, you're trying to win. The fundamentals are still the same. And then, with four, three, two races to go, you start tracking the points a little to see where your competition is going to be when it comes down to that last race."


Pagenaud's predilection for self-analysis helped him win the 2016 title and brought him within arm's reach of a second one last year, before ultimately losing out to Team Penske stablemate Newgarden by 13 points. From the Frenchman's standpoint, the parity that defines modern IndyCar racing means that everybody already has the fundamentals pretty much locked down. The quest for the last little bits that can add up to a championship advantage means going granular.


"Right now there are so many good cars, good teams, and the series has done such a good job at leveling everything that you pretty much have to work on the other things; all the other little details that are important for great performance," he says.
"At any given time, you have to be at 100 percent, and over the course of the whole season it's not easy to do that. With travel, and all the requirements from team sponsor appearances, IndyCar media appearances and all that sort of stuff, mentally and physically, it's tiring.


"And all of the other details – being good on cold and hot tires; on worn-out tires; working with your crew; working with your team; reviewing how good your last race was on Monday, but then also reviewing the race from the year past on Thursday before the next race. Those are all the kinds of details that you have to work on to not leave anything on the table. And that is exactly what this era is about – not leaving anything on the table. It's quite difficult to take care of all the little things that make you a contender at every race. It's relentless."


Pagenaud's 2017 season offers perhaps the most vivid example of the extent to which a current-era IndyCar championship campaign teeters on a razor's edge. The Frenchman completed every lap this year, with an average finish inside the top five. As his race strategist Kyle Moyer points out, "That would have won him a championship in any year – until the last couple of years.


"There's really only one way to win a championship [now], and that's by winning more races than the other guys. There's not much difference between winning and second – it's 10 points – but at the end of the day, those 10 points are huge."


Get the full version of this story in the 2018 Champions Issue of RACER magazine, on sale now. Take a video tour of the issue:
The 2017 Champions Issue of RACER is on sale now. To subscribe now at a special discount rate, click here, or to buy The Champions Issue online, click here.
RACER is also available digitally for Apple and Kindle Fire devices. RACER Digital has the complete content of the magazine's print edition formatted for mobile viewing. With RACER Digital, you'll have access to your RACER content all the time, wherever you are.


The RACER app can be found by searching for "RACER Magazine" in the Apple or Amazon App stores. The app is free and includes issue previews and the RACER.com newsfeed. Individual issues can be purchased for $1.99 and an 8-issue annual subscription is $9.99. Back issues are also available.

 

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[h=1]The Magazine for Racers[/h]RACER magazine has paved the way in motorsport coverage of Formula 1, IndyCar and Sports Cars with world-class writing and photography that tells the stories of racers in a way that is unlike any other publication. If you’re passionate about motorsports and insist on both style and substance, RACER is an essential read.


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[h=2]RACER Magazine: The Champions Issue[/h] Thursday, 11 January 2018


By Laurence Foster, Editor-in-Chief


129 Shares

















Having sat down to write a column applauding some of the racing champions of 2017 (this being RACER's Champions Issue, according to my editorial calendar), I quickly realized that my whole focus was on 2018 and the fact that we have some seriously exciting things happening in North American motorsports right now.
Props to Josef Newgarden, the Taylor brothers, Martin Truex Jr., Patrick Long, and the like for what they each achieved last season, but I'm pretty sure they're done staring at their trophies now and are all about what comes next, too.
The 2018 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship looks like it could be one for the ages, with its headlining Prototype class stacked to a level not seen since those heady, but long-gone GTP years.
Acura makes it four fully-committed DPi manufacturers, while incoming teams and drivers of the quality of Penske, Joest Racing, Helio Castroneves, Juan Pablo Montoya, Felipe Nasr and Oliver Jarvis bolster an already deep roster. Add in another season of the GT Le Mans factory slug-fest, plus GT Daytona's ever-changing hegemony, and calling this the best sports car series on the planet would be pretty difficult to argue against.
As an added bonus, the influx of star power for the season-opening Rolex 24 At Daytona, including Fernando Alonso, should deliver a boost in global profile that could last way beyond the short-term.
Alonso's entry in last year's Indy 500 gave that race a worldwide kick, but pending any similar revelations this time around, the Verizon IndyCar Series has to maintain momentum by its own devices (as it were). Cue the UAK18 aero kit, where the buzz from early testing suggests the standardized bodywork will deliver on its mission to take an already competitive series up another notch.
Take a video tour of the issue:
The 2017 Champions Issue of RACER is on sale now. To subscribe now at a special discount rate, click here, or to buy The Champions Issue online, click here.
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The RACER app can be found by searching for "RACER Magazine" in the Apple or Amazon App stores. The app is free and includes issue previews and the RACER.com newsfeed. Individual issues can be purchased for $1.99 and an 8-issue annual subscription is $9.99. Back issues are also available.

 

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