As one of his final acts as Ford's president and CEO, Alan Mulally signed the check to upgrade the company's humble Charlotte, North Carolina, NASCAR support center—affectionately known as the shack—to a lavish new facility conveniently located next door to NASCAR's own R&D center in Concord, North Carolina. This one sparkling 33,000-square-foot building will serve several Ford Racing purposes—and we got a tour of the place and the cool gear inside.
Among the Ford Motorsports Tech Center's key functions is being a worthwhile stop on promising engineers' training tours through the Ford Motor Company; providing Ford NASCAR and other racing terms technical support; and helping to narrow the gap between Ford's racing technology and its production performance cars.
The center's biggest contribution to Ford's world, however, will be to prop up all of its motorsports development efforts. According to Ford Racing director Jamie Allison, "Eventually this tech center will support teams from NASCAR, the Tudor United SportsCar Championship, IMSA, Rally and Global Rallycross, and NHRA.
So far, there are six major tools at this location, and here's what they do:
K-Rig: In the $250,000 K-rig (Kinematics machine), a car's body or frame is held securely while individual tire support platforms rise or fall to accurately measure suspension geometry and wheel loads with various springs, tires, and anti-roll bars installed.
Stiffness Rig: Supports three corners of the car on a surface plate while a load is applied at the fourth corner to assess torsional stiffness. In NASCAR Sprint Cup, the typical space frame stiffness is 10,000 lb-ft/degree. Adding the body metal increases this stiffness by 50 percent.
Center of Gravity Machine: For all intents, this is an overgrown teeter-totter with the pivot axis above, instead of below, the platform. The car being tested is placed on the machine and the angle of the platform is measured. Adding weights at one end of the platform changes its angle. A simple calculation knowing the wheelbase, quantity of weight added, and change in the platform angle reveals the test car's center of gravity height.
Coordinate Measuring Machine: A high precision coordinate measuring machine allows the accurate measure of component parts to assess their quality and to provide the dimensions needed to construct simulation models. In addition to enhancing development speed, this machine helps assure that cars comply with the rules.
Chill Zone: A comfortable lounge with superb audio-visual facilities provides the ideal setting for engineers and technicians who don't accompany teams to monitor race events and to collect pertinent data. It's also a nice place to just relax.
Simulation Facility: The centerpiece at Ford's new tech center is a simulation facility, where the front half of a Cup car is mounted on a sled that moves through six degrees of freedom (up/down, left/right, fore/aft, yaw, roll, pitch). Motor-driven cables provide the simu-motion according to control computer commands. Three-dimensional data provided by laser scanning supplies defines both the physical and visual environment, and projectors deliver the video to a 180-degree display screen.
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Ansible Motion, the same vendor that helped build McLaren's simulator, collaborated with Ford on this project. Ford claims its sled has lower latency (delay reacting to commands) and higher frequency response than Honda's new simulator, which uses a so-called "hexapod" configuration of six motor-driven ball-screw legs to provide motion. Still under development, Ford's simulator has a library of ten real-life racetracks—at least so far. Drivers we spoke to expect that this tool will be especially handy for learning new tracks well in advance of the heat of a practice, qualifying, and racing weekend. We certainly wouldn't mind having one of these rigs to help pass the winter months up here in Michigan . . .
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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