Racecar Engineering – September 2019

88 http://www.racecar-engineering.comSEPTEMBER 2019

TECHNOLOGY – CHASSIS SIMULATION

I

was in the position at this year’s Le Mans 24

hours where I had the opportunity to help

an old friend of mine who was up against it

engineering an LMP2 car. What transpired

was a great example of just how effective

simulation tools can be in helping a race team

on a very practical level. And it was also proof of

the absolute worth of such simulation.

The car in question was the Inter Europol

Competition Ligier LMP2, run by Keese

Motorsport. Being new to the class the team

was suffering from typical growing pains and

they needed a hand, and since there were quite

To hit these sweet spot targets, the front and the rear

third springs really need to become your best friends

The following run-through of the process

employed at Le Mans will not be perfect, but it

will get you in the ballpark. The thing is, when

you simply don’t have much time you have to

make do with what you have got.

Aero model

Fortunately, dialling in the aero was very

straightforward and the result of the correlation

work is shown in Figure 1. Here the actual data

is coloured, the initial baseline is black and the

final aero model is red. The channels shown here

are speed, steered angle, front pitch (average of

a number of bush fires that needed to be put out

I stepped in with ChassisSim, to help point the

team in the right direction with its racecar.

The first thing I did was to take the standard

base model that had been completed by a

colleague of mine and dial it in. Due to time

constraints (this was done in two four-hour

blocks) I was really forced to focus in on the big-

ticket items, and if you ever find yourself in this

position this is what you concentrate on: aero;

focus on speed and damper correlation at end

of straight; then sort the bump and grip scale

factors to dial in the cornering speed.

Our simulation expert was on hand to help out the team that was running this Ligier LMP2 at Le Mans this year. The car’s pace was pretty good but gearbox issues spoiled its race

Simulation in action

Racecar’s chassis sim guru jumped at the chance to prove his

systems in the heat of battle at this year’s Le Mans 24 hours

By DANNY NOWLAN