Designing the dream

The story is now familiar. A year ago the Honda Racing F1 Team, having suffered two difficult years near the back of an increasingly competitive field and staring into the barrel of a world recession, walked away from the sport. Despite barely making it to the opening race, the new Brawn GP team which rose from the remains of Honda achieved a remarkable early season dominance that saw it became the first new F1 team in history to take both the Drivers and Constructors Championships. What then, defines the ever thinning line between last and first? Simon Lott investigates.

There is no denying that part of the remarkable success of the Brackley-based team (which next season will compete as Mercedes GP after the luxury car giant bought a 75.1% stake in the outfit) comes down to the resources coming from Honda during its involvement with the team.

The Japanese car manufacturer has invested heavily in plant, equipment, and facilities since completing its buyout of British American Racing after the 2006 season. There is also little doubt that realising the 2008 car's limitations and concentrating on the widespread design changes for the 2009 season early on paid off hugely. Any naysayers however, will also have to look at winter long anxieties over the team's existence, the forced restructure and downsizing, sudden budgetary restrictions, an aborted KERS system, the missed testing opportunities and a car designed to take an absent Honda engine.

Brawn GP came into existence just three weeks before the opening round, the Australian Grand Prix, and its challenger the BGP 001 only saw two test sessions before it had to be driven in anger. Even more astonishing, by January, the team didn't even have an engine, which ordinarily by this point would have been assembled and ready to go. Things were so tight that if the aerodynamic team hadn't assumed that it would be taking Mercedes engines before the deal was done, forcing a total redesign of the back six inches of the chassis, the team would have been in doubt for the first race. Despite this, drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello stamped a clear authority on their competitors over the first third of the season and although its main rivals for race wins – most notably Red Bull Racing and McLaren Mercedes – were able to close the gap as the season unfolded, it would prove to be too little, too late. 

On the limit

Never has the pace of change been so rapid in F1, be it the rules, the technology and even its leaders. No sooner have I drafted this article and the next thing I know, Brawn GP has already metamorphosised into Mercedes GP. Nonetheless, underneath the veil of corporate branding the team remains the same, so how did it turn itself around so dramatically in a world of F1, where so much effort goes into finding the tiniest gains, down to hundredths and thousandths of a second? Graham Miller, who has been part of the team since it was known as British American Racing and is currently director of special projects and wind tunnel operations, reveals that actually, very little has changed: “That's an interesting question because Ross Brawn didn't change the infrastructure or the resources or the people. What he did do was give direction and leadership, creating an environment where people gelled.”

Underneath Ross Brawn's guiding principles and with renewed confidence, the success of the BGP 001 can be put down to at least two major factors – the extra aerodynamic development time afforded by the ill fated 2008 season, and the Mercedes engine, bought in at the last minute. The former can be attributed entirely to Brawn GP's in house team, for which the aerodynamics department comprises 25% of the workforce and was revamped in 2006 at a cost of £30 million.

Working 24/7, a full size wind tunnel is the centrepiece of the department, although with limitations on such testing coming into force shortly after, most of the work is half scale. This perpetually hungry beast is capable of going through in excess of 300 runs every week and is fed via a metal machine shop devoted solely to the development of new model components, as well as by the race team's carbon fibre production facilities and for some specific purposes, rapid prototyping techniques such as stereolithography. The aerodynamic department is self sufficient by design, so as not to be constrained by issues stemming from the race team, and with the equipment at its disposal, considers itself to be one of the best equipped in the paddock.

Making models

“We built this tunnel out of a desire to improve our simulation ability and ultimately to improve correlation with track results. We wanted, in particular, to test at full scale," explains Mr Miller. "Whilst scale testing has many advantages, it does have certain limitations in terms of simulation accuracy and the representative nature of the materials used. However, the current sporting regulations now limit testing to 60% scale, and with our tremendous CFD capability running in tandem, we have to use our resources to best effect. The technology is changing all the time,” he continues. “For example: to go back five years, the tyres on the model were just solid carbon fibre and now they're pneumatic with proper structural suspension and wheels. We are also starting to produce models with active suspension, so we can simulate aspects such as tyre squash as well.”

Once the design of a car has been nailed down, 80% of performance gain throughout a season is typically aerodynamically led. Designed solely for wind tunnel testing, car models produced at the factory, despite being visually similar, bear very little resemblance to their racing counterparts as far as materials and assembly are concerned, optimised specifically to ease the changing of many elements as designs evolve. A typical half scale model can take two months to produce, and the team has had working examples of the 2010 car in operation since May.

In order to meet the stringent leadtimes racing teams naturally place themselves under, it is typically the case that wing, chassis and suspension components produced from carbon fibre in the race car can be more practically machined from metal. The vast majority of the work at the team's aerodynamic machine shop is carried out by a variety of Haas machines installed for the opening of the wind tunnel, including four specially tuned VF-4SS vertical centres (two with pallet changers), a 5-axis VF-2 TR, a Toolroom mill and a Toolroom lathe. Although much can be achieved using 3-axis methods, a trunnion table, readily interchangeable between the VF-4 machines offers additional simultaneous 5-axis capability when required – particularly useful for complex front wing elements, amounting to a big capability increase for little capital outlay. 

Total control

With this equipment, the team is able to produce all of its model parts in house, including components such as the 750mm wide (half scale) front wing required by the FIA regulations since 2009. The shop itself runs between 18-20 hours a day for 5½ days a week, some of which is lights out, working out at around 120 hours a week. In terms of the specific requirements of the components being produced here, the machine's consistency and flexibility offer particular advantages. For one, to halve the size of the car means a subsequent reduction in allowable tolerances and requires especially small tooling.

Despite this, the finish produced by the Haas machines is uniform enough to avoid any finishing procedures short of a brief hand polish. This equates not only to the obvious saving in time, but also avoids unnecessary re-inspection. The modified Super VF-4 machines' attributes include high speed machining software and an inline direct drive 12,000rpm spindle, side mount toolchangers and a fine pitch ballscrew system as used in the Haas VM-3, a machine originally designed specifically for mould manufacture.

“We recognised the team's need for accuracy and fine surface finish over rapid movement from the outset,” comments Pat Fenn, Haas' technical and commercial director. “This was achieved by fitting the fine pitch ballscrews from the VM range with faster running drive motors that give the highest degree of controllability for a given axis speed.” As far as ROI is concerned, the machines had paid for themselves within two years and achieved an improved spindle uptime over the previous generation of equipment at the facility by 40%.

Mr Miller adds: “They're simply a good quality machine for the money. They're accurate and ideal for what we use them for. They've got every machine you can think of in the brochure and that helps us. It's almost a single source for us now and gives us a stronger relationship as a supplier.”

The bulk of the machine shop's efforts go into front and wing assemblies and suspension parts. The compromise on material typically comes down to necessary stiffness requirements versus ease and speed of machining. On most occasions aluminium can do the job, although steel and titanium parts can be readily produced when required.

However, with weight not being the primary issue (this can be calibrated out of wind tunnel results), the use of harder metals comes down to stiffness and strength requirements. As far as composite materials are concerned, stereolithography is commonly used for bodywork involving complex geometries, but the resulting material is relatively brittle and as the team passes through the winter off season and designs begin to stabilise, bodywork will start to be produced using the more familiar carbon fibre.

To put the intensity of the operation into context, Mr Miller explains: “We're typically producing 5,000 components for the models every month. That can be anything from a wing element to a hot air chimney on the bodywork to a wishbone. The bulk of that is done between our metallic and rapid prototyping capacities, with some other composite materials backing it up, but that volume is a constant. It doesn't fluctuate like it does in race car manufacture simply because the wind tunnel is constantly being used.

“As the triangle of our work goes – design, machining and testing – we're pretty well balanced,” he adds. “The design (as in the production of useable CAD) is up against the buffers, on time manufacture is in the 90%+ range and the tunnel never runs out of new parts.” Once components have been tested and approved, new designs move into the race team's machine shop, which is also a 24/7 operation, at a rate of about 60 parts per day, 365 days a year. 

Efficiency inherent

The future of F1 as a whole and requirements placed on teams by the FIA and by agreement with FOTA (the Formula One Teams Association – comprising all the current teams and Campos Meta so far) mean that there is more to operational efficiency and environmental issues than just cost saving. Thanks in part to Honda's legacy, there are two notable elements in the drive for greener operation at Brawn GP. First, it is currently the only F1 team to hold ISO14001 accreditation. Secondly, the team follows a ‘minimal landfill' policy in which every used metallic element goes back into the manufacturing cycle, and carbon fibre parts are sent for processing.

There is however a less tangible element that is no less important as far as operational efficiency is concerned. After its survival was ensured, the restructure and switch to becoming a private team (at least for 2009) necessitated by the Honda exit has also left the team in a good position as far as stability is concerned.

“FOTA has a legally binding agreement amongst its members regarding resource restriction with a view to reduce cost, restrict spend on capital equipment, how many people we can employ, and how much money to spend externally on car parts” expands Mr Miller. This thus presents an opportunity for the teams that can make the most of their resources and shifts the focus to getting the most out of their equipment.

He continues: “We've already got excellent facilities and investment so it's really a matter of using it to best effect. With the downsizing that we had to go through, we're now down to 450 people and to comply with the 2010 regulations, that's about the right size, but there's still a trade off. If you have 350 people in chassis development, you can have an external expenditure of €40 million, but the more people you have the less you can spend, with an equivalency ratio of one head to €100,000. We believe we have an advantage over the other teams because we've already been through the pain of downsizing and reorganising.”

Although one might imagine the hard part is now over. The Brackley-based team, be it Tyrrell, BAR, Honda, Brawn or Mercedes now knows what that ultimate victory tastes like in the modern Formula One era, but as Mr Miller concludes, the team has never worked as hard as it is now: “Our aero gain target for next year is even more ambitious than the one we had for 2008-09, and we're on target for that, approaching it very aggressively with several novel concepts being worked on now. Everyone here has raised their game and our stated aim is to be a top three team every year from now on.”

Haas
www.haas.co.uk Brawn GP / Mercedes GP
www.brawngp.com