95 - 02 F1 Tech

95 - 02 F1 Tech

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Discussion

HughG

3,537 posts

240 months

Friday 24th January 2014
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poppopbangbang said:
I'm going to mail everyone back re discs once I've got home this evening and we'll sort something out smile
I sent an email on Tuesday/Wednesday as well, seems to have been some issue with the messages so hopefully you received it.

DaveL485

2,758 posts

196 months

Friday 24th January 2014
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poppopbangbang said:
Bossman says tenner a disc + postage for a fluffed disc. All proceeds to the tea/coffee/strippers staff fund wink
Yes please, how do I purchase?

DaveL485

2,758 posts

196 months

Friday 24th January 2014
quotequote all
poppopbangbang said:
The minimum weight is based on the amount of acceptable carbon loss for the disc to still meet minimum performance/safety spec as determined by the OE.
Learn something new every day smile Thanks for that!

dom9

8,040 posts

208 months

Tuesday 18th February 2014
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What a great thread! Found this mentioned somewhere else on PH, thought I'd have a read and really enjoyed it!

I worked on and off at the Ferrari F1 team (then based outside of Guildford and run by John Barnard) in the mid-late 90s, so a lot of this seems familiar, especially the flexures in the wishbones! I remember helping to lay up some of the first all carbon wishbones for testing and looking into carbon gearbox casings etc.

Happy days!

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Wednesday 19th February 2014
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Hey all. Firstly apologies for not updating for a while! We are absolutely flat chat at the moment getting the cars ready for test. Our calendar has also been confirmed for this year and it's going to be a mental one, three events in May alone so yet again we're running more often than the current F1 teams do.

The workshops are full of not only cars but pit gear at this time of year as well. We need to check, repair, update as required and repack all of the support gear and as you can imagine there is a metric f**k load of it to run the cars. So far we've got all our tyre warmers ticked off and made good for the work to come.... that doesn't sound like much but when you have 27 sets (108 individual warmers + spares) it's quite a task to make sure they all achieve temp and are in spec as well as all the fueling and warming gear. Few more starters to build as we're updating them all to our new 5.5KW units as well!

Next job is to sort through our small spares i.e this lot (well this is about 50% of it as you can't take a photo of a whole room at once wink ):



and replenish the stock in the pit trays and cases. These are essentially our primary use stock which travel to events with the cars for use when "live", in the workshop we draw from the stock in the parts stores. At the last stock take we are over 120,000 individual parts..... stock control via Excel, it's a wonder any of us are still sane laugh

TheExcession

11,669 posts

249 months

Thursday 20th February 2014
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poppopbangbang said:
At the last stock take we are over 120,000 individual parts..... stock control via Excel, it's a wonder any of us are still sane laugh
PM sent



Edited by TheExcession on Thursday 20th February 00:51

Steve7777

235 posts

148 months

Thursday 20th February 2014
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Really interesting thread, thanks. Can you give any insights into the approximate buying and annual running costs for an F1 car of this era?

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Thursday 20th February 2014
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Steve7777 said:
Really interesting thread, thanks. Can you give any insights into the approximate buying and annual running costs for an F1 car of this era?
That really is a how long is a piece of string question! It depends massively on marque, pedigree and parts availability. For example you can have a Lola T97 for £60K when a similar vintage Williams will be three to four times that. If you buy a car with a large spares package then your running costs are obviously reduced accordingly.

An unpopular car with limited pedigree that you have a boat load of bits for you can run for maybe as little as £15K a year if you are only doing a few hundred KMs. The big expense is engine, gearbox and suspension relife/rebuild and things like brake discs, clutches and tyres.

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Thursday 20th February 2014
quotequote all
TheExcession said:
PM sent



Edited by TheExcession on Thursday 20th February 00:51
Don't seem to have got it, do you want to try sending again?

FFRacing

35 posts

144 months

Saturday 15th March 2014
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Good to see you haven’t lost your way with words Matt wink

gwm

2,390 posts

143 months

Saturday 15th March 2014
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Have any of your customers asked you to give them a timescale of how long they can realistically run their cars for? Have you had to tell any of them about real/potential show stoppers?

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Tuesday 26th August 2014
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So last 6 months have been pretty busy! Apologies for not keeping you all more updated. Firstly the thread title is now incorrect as we've got a couple of 2011 cars and an 06 with us.

Anyway back to what we've been up to/what we can share, first we went old school and did this:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA9LtZBDV9Q
Bit of a shame they didn't let us run quick as we had all the boost available (and I do mean ALL the boost).

Then it was back to our usual gig of V10s (mostly), only this time a shed load at once as we fired up most of the Minardis for the Zandvoort Italia festival (and melted the track side noise limit mics wink ):


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_SMI84mrLM
A good day out was had by all and just to keep it as it was back in the day the PS04 stopped on circuit when it ran out of air (we're pretty tight on our AVS pressures and as this engine is well up on KMs it's air consumption is pretty high, hence the ECU took the decision to turn it off when the air consumption rate went above what we allow).

Finally we used the Brands Lotus festival as an opportunity to shake down the M198#1, this hadn't ran on a circuit for 16 years so it was three slow shake down laps only. Very nice of them to let us run it and a big thanks to the other guys on the demo for letting us get in the way!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIhuO3bjquQ

We've got five more demos and a couple more tests to do this year and on some of those the M198 will be running at speed following a further high speed shake down next month.

All in all a productive year so far and another year of keeping the technology alive and available outside of the teams.... and adding some new tech to play with!

Oh and if anyone fancies a toy we've a couple of Super Aguris for sale....

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Tuesday 26th August 2014
quotequote all
gwm said:
Have any of your customers asked you to give them a timescale of how long they can realistically run their cars for? Have you had to tell any of them about real/potential show stoppers?
We can realistically run them for as long as required. There are no show stoppers beyond destroying the car in a very big accident - significant tub damage is the end of the car for all intense and purpose apart from those for which we own the tub tooling. Everything else we can rebuild time and time again, many of the base components (pumps, valves etc.) are still available to purchase from the original suppliers, wishbones and suspension parts generally we try to either have an awful lot of good spares ex team or own the tooling to make them, gearbox internals are mostly standard bearing sizes and gears, barrels, motion shafts etc. are reproduceable and in some cases the OEM is happy to continue producing for us with a nod from the team. Engines wise we have a program running to produce the parts required to rebuild them to useable spec so are now manufacturing liners, pistons, rods, cranks, valves, air valve parts etc. as required. The only show stopper with engines is castings damage as we are very short on blocks, heads and sumps so we tend to be extremely careful with our limits and give the ECU the option to turn the car off if certain limits are reached or exceeded.

Consumables wise we can have discs and pads manufactured as required, it's just very expensive (20K+ a car set). Brake bells, rockers etc. are simple Ti machined parts and easy to replicate, dampers are rebuildable many times over. Rads, coolers etc. we manufacture as required.

Electronics are the big thing as we are running highly complex control systems which in some cases are over a decade and a half old. We have a very good electronics lab so at the moment they aren't posing a problem and replacing surface mount components is doable (if nerve racking). A lot of time is spent reverse engineering software or working with aged code to turn ex dyno controllers etc. into working race car controllers. Realistically there is still nothing out there in the aftermarket that is sufficently powerful to run these cars so there's no option but to run original electronics.

As all the cars were essentially low volume (but highly complex) there is very little that can't be manufactured again if required.

BrownBottle

1,365 posts

135 months

Tuesday 26th August 2014
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Glad to see you back posting again.

Sounds like a top quality operation, amazing that you can reproduce so many parts including engine internals yourselves.

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Thursday 28th August 2014
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BrownBottle said:
Glad to see you back posting again.

Sounds like a top quality operation, amazing that you can reproduce so many parts including engine internals yourselves.
We can't take all the credit for it, generally we may have to redraw the component but most of the original manufacturers are still going and they actually produce them for us. We use the same materials spec etc. so the engines we are running today are extremely similar if not the same as the last evolutions that ran back in the day.

Soov535

35,829 posts

270 months

Thursday 28th August 2014
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Just to say what a fantastic thread. Thanks.

How much are the Super Aguris?

n3il123

2,601 posts

212 months

Thursday 28th August 2014
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Great to see you back, this has to be one of my favourite threads on PH smile .

fatboy69

9,371 posts

186 months

Thursday 28th August 2014
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V10 Minardis at Zandvoort. What a great sight & what an awesome noise.

Everything that is wrong with F1 in 2014.

Great stuff. Now can we have some please????

Megaflow

9,345 posts

224 months

Thursday 28th August 2014
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What '11 car have you managed to get hold of? Very unusual to see such a relatively modern machine in private hands I would think.

poppopbangbang

Original Poster:

1,785 posts

140 months

Thursday 28th August 2014
quotequote all
Soov535 said:
Just to say what a fantastic thread. Thanks.

How much are the Super Aguris?
Beween 195 and 220K GBP depending on what engine you would like in it. Asiatech is the least expensive and to be honest better option as it has a lower rebuild/replacement cost as there are 22 new engines waiting for a home.