E30 Zone

If anyone's interested, right-click here and select "save target as", to download the Physics of Racing series of articles by Brian Beckman. File size is 6.6MB.

If you are serious about understanding tyre traction, weight distribution, suspension setup etc. then these articles are worth reading.

Please note that this file is free for distribution, and copying or hosting of this file is not an infringement of copyright.

From Brian Beckmans introduction:
"I wish to point out that these articles are FREE. I retain the copyright ONLY to prevent the kind of theft that would make the articles difficult to copy, meaning that I grant to everyone, everywhere a perpetual, transferable, universal, royalty-free license to copy, host, post, translate, convert, transform, and reproduce the articles in any form whatever, asking only that the content and attribution not be changed and that the rights of anyone, anywhere to further copy the articles not be restricted, say, by charging money for copies."

Excellent, thankyou !! Should be a great help with my Uni course !!

That is some read, I think i'll take a week of, cheers, downloaded for some (Hopefully understandable) reference.

I did a masters in automotive engineering. My notes were total gash. This is a lot better!

You're welcome gents. Read 'em slowly - the material gets quite intensive around chapters 15 onwards.

n1tr0_9 wrote:I did a masters in automotive engineering. My notes were total gash. This is a lot better!

Damn I wish I had your qualification! What do you do with it - not unemployed I hope? Top of my list would be to work for McLaren , but I'd settle for a job with Mayflower.

Im self employed, but mostly build and repair kit cars and race cars. I dont really use my qualification! Had naff all work last year which is why i agreed to build thoes car at my house where your advice was most helpful!

Now im building this for myself! Its a 2 seat space frame chassis kit car for sprint racing, and has a golf 1.8 Turbo. This now takes up the time when work is slow.

N1tr0_9, that's fantastic!! Is it your own design? 'Reminds me somewhat of a Ginetta G12, of which I am a huge fan. The Ginetta has a mid-mounted straight engine with transaxle, but in other respects is very similar. What suspension does your car use?

If you haven't already, have a look at Herb Adams book on Chassis Engineering from HP books. You may find this a useful reference for the type of work that you are doing.

Now im building this for myself! Its a 2 seat space frame chassis kit car for sprint racing, and has a golf 1.8 Turbo. This now takes up the time when work is slow

Dude that is cool as.... Did you make the moulds for the fibreglass?

bumhole wrote:

Now im building this for myself! Its a 2 seat space frame chassis kit car for sprint racing, and has a golf 1.8 Turbo. This now takes up the time when work is slow

Dude that is cool as.... Did you make the moulds for the fibreglass?

I'm sure Ive seen that shape before as I think thats a prebuilt kit that he's assembling. Cant remember which kit it is for the life of me though.

If it would have a roof you could count me in.

Yeah this is called a Blaze RR. It is an evolution of something called an Aeon. I have worked for the company that manufactures them. I bought it half built off my sometime boss. He needed the space and the cash, and i fancied another project!

I think i have flicked through the herb adams book, but i dont own it. I have got the legendary 'Race and Rally Car Source Book' book by Allan Staniforth. Its got lots of interesting reading in, but its very badly organised, the index and contents pages are of no use!

I came across this years ago and exchanged a few emails with Brian - he's never had the work peer reviewed and I was up for doing it...

...unfortunately I got through the first couple of articles and ran out of time and motivation!

Motorhole wrote:I came across this years ago and exchanged a few emails with Brian - he's never had the work peer reviewed and I was up for doing it...

...unfortunately I got through the first couple of articles and ran out of time and motivation!

Not sure that his work requires much of a review TBH. It's based firmly around Newtonian mechanics, and to question some of his conclusions would feel, to me, rather like reviewing Newton himself

I have a few criticisms of his work though, and these relate to consistency. In one article he is pussy-footing his way around differential calculus by introducing delta this and delta that, and a few articles later he forsakes this in favour of full-on ODE's.

My feeling on matters such as these has always been that its best to either leave the math out for the sake of your target audience, and hope that they trust your conclusions, or use the hard-core math to its full extent and reduce your target audience to those with a knowledge of maths. This business of explaining differential calculus before tackling a problem just irritates me. But that's only my opinion. There are no doubt a great deal of people who have benefited from his user friendly approach. But then I question, at what point is he explaining maths, and at what point is he explaining physics?

Anyway, Regardless of what I may think of his approach to the topic, the physics is valid and I think he does a wonderful job of explaining why a car does what it does under certain conditions. The later chapters where he introduces the "Magic" tyre model are especially good IMO.

Anyone else read his work yet? Any comments, questions, criticisms?

hehe it sounds like you've done a bit of a peer review yourself!! I didn't mean so much reviewing the physics, more checking his maths, any derivations and making comments such as you have done on consistency in method and presentation - a review by an IOP member that would allow it to be submitted for publishing. But as I say...time and motivation...

Either way you're right it is an excellent piece of work! A nice set of notes to refer to time and time again.