Racing

A British company believes it has come up with a revolutionary seat upgrade for racetrack riders. The Chicane saddle unit ditches the traditional foam butt-pad for a series of rollers and gears to allow riders to slide smoothly from knee-down left to knee-down right in a tight series of corners without having to lift their entire bodyweight off the seat to do so. It's a fascinating idea, particularly for those of us that find track riding physically demanding on the legs - and the inventors believe it could help dampen the bowel-loosening sideways flick of a highside as well.  Read More

Citroen will take the wraps of the hot version of its new premium model, the DS3 when it reveals the 147 kW Citroen DS3 Racing at the Geneva International Motor Show on March 2. Developed by Citroën Racing - the dominant team behind five World Rally Championship manufacturer’s titles and six driver’s titles for over the past six years - leaves little doubt that the French car maker has the ability to take its already critically lauded DS3 and turn it into a real performance machine. Planned for the second half of 2010, the exclusive DS3 Racing will be limited to just 1000 production units.  Read More

The America’s Cup has been run and won, and will return to America where it has resided for the vast majority of its century and a half history. Larry Ellison’s Team BMW Oracle trimaran trounced the Swiss Alinghi team’s Catamaran as two of the most technologically advanced boats on water fought out a one-sided event.  Read More

Two of four submissions have now been unveiled by the companies wishing to produce the next generation of IndyCar open-wheel racers, and the most recent one is one of the most fascinating looking racecars we've ever seen. The DeltaWing is a radical departure from traditional open-wheeler design - in fact, the only thing you could really compare it to is the bizarre lovechild of a drag racer and a Batmobile. With its comically narrow rocketship front end, broad rear end and narrow tyres, the DeltaWing aims to outperform the current crop of IndyCars for significantly less money, while delivering extraordinary efficiency gains and leaving a clear airstream for following cars, in order to promote close racing and overtaking. But is the public ready for a car that looks... so little like a car?  Read More

Ferdinand Porsche developed the world’s first hybrid car in 1900 and showed the car, the Lohner Mixte, to the public at the Paris Auto Show of 1901. Hence, it is entirely appropriate that Porsche should introduce the hybrid drive to production-based GT racing. One hundred and nine years after that Paris debut, the Porsche 911 GT3 R with hybrid drive will debut at the Geneva Motor Show. Remarkably, the two 60 kW electric motors on the front axle drive are not supplied their energy by conventional chemical batteries, but by an electrical flywheel power generator originally developed the AT&T Williams F1 team.
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Imagine you're a competitive sailboat racer, about to go into the richest and most storied of all sailing races with a squillion-dollar boat and a razor-sharp crew. Now imagine somebody hands you a device that can quite literally map out the wind activity up to a kilometre out in front of you, showing wind speed, direction and turbulence - and giving you the almost superatural ability to adjust your sails and take maximal advantage of a wind pattern before you even reach it. It's almost an unfair advantage, isn't it? Well, this is the situation that BMW Oracle Racing's Russell Coutts finds himself in as the team gears up to take on defending champions Alinghi in the 2010 America's Cup. The device is called a Racer's Edge laser wind sensor, and it's built around a technology base that's being used to optimise wind power generators. We caught up with Phil Rogers, CEO of Catch the Wind, Inc, to find out more.  Read More

To many motoring enthusiasts, Japan’s Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima is to hill climbing what Michael Schumacher is to F1 or Valentino Rossi is MotoGP. It’s no wonder then that when Tajima launches an electric car the motoring world gets a little excited. Released recently at the first EV and HEV Drive System Technology Expo in Tokyo, the Tajima Motor Corporation’s (in conjunction with Natural Energy) EV Mini Sport is an open wheeler, single-seater car that looks very comfortable on the track.  Read More

America's team BMW Oracle Racing (BOR) has taken full advantage of a "wide open" set of design rules for this year's America's Cup to produce one of the most staggering and ambitious vessels ever seen on the water. Throwing out the cloth main sail, team BOR have fitted the BOR 90 with a gargantuan, motorized, solid carbon-fiber wing, nearly twice the size of a Boeing 747 wing at 190ft, or 57 metres tall. The engineering and logistics surrounding this incredible boat are mind-boggling - imagine trying to work out where to store the giant wing structure, how to transport it and how to fix it vertically onto a boat - let alone how to sail the thing - but the benefits of a non-deforming main sail include the potential for the multimillion-dollar trimaran to travel at up to 2.5 times wind speed. It's a crazy, massively expensive and hugely risky experiment that's never even been prototyped, and will only get a few weeks' worth of testing before it races in February.  Read More

With many auto racing formulae now requiring engines to last many races or a whole season, the new AVL DPM 800 (DPM stands for Dynamic Pressure Measurement) is a gadget many autosport race teams will be keen to get their hands on - it's an in-cylinder pressure transducer that comprises a proprietary Piezo spark plug system with built-in pressure sensor which will enable engine tuning and the accurate gauging of wear rates and potential longevity as the season progresses. The DPM 800 will cost EUR 6550 when it is launched at the Autosport Engineering Show at NEC in Birmingham next week - an absolute bargain compared to what it offers.  Read More