Endurance Racing Fuel Strategies Explained – It goes without saying that no one can complete the 24 Hours of Le Mans – a race in which some competitors cover around 5,000km – without refueling or changing tires from time to time. That’s why pit stops are very important and can be decisive on the long road to victory.
“Races are won and lost in the pits” is often heard in the paddock. Obviously, the less time you spend in the pits, the better. However, it’s often more rush, less speed, and teams also have to follow certain rules or risk punishment.
Endurance Racing Fuel Strategies Explained
For example, for safety reasons, the pit lane speed is limited to 60 km/h, and drivers are not allowed to unbuckle their seat belts until the car has come to a complete stop (the engine must be turned off). In addition, the necessary tools must remain in the garage between refuelings, and the number of people allowed to work on the car in the pit lane is strictly limited. Likewise, the number of air guns (two) used in the circles changes.
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However, since last year, mechanics have been allowed to change wheels during refuelling, which has forced teams to rethink their strategy. In fact, pit stops are so important that this rule change led Toyota to introduce a special team tasked with compiling a list of all potential scenarios and testing them during private testing.
However, the new rule (see regulations) will not increase the number of tire changes, as the Sporting Regulations limit the number of tires that competitors can use during a race: 48 in LMP1, 56 in LMP2 and 60 in LMGTE Pro and LMGTE Am. However, teams may be tempted to try a different strategy.
So every year the team’s strategists find it difficult to make the right choice at the right time, and things can get complicated if the safety car appears during the race (see 24 Hours of Le Mans – Rules of the Game). Ultimately, though, strategy isn’t what matters: mechanics also need to practice over and over again to perfect their moves. When it comes to winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans, nothing is left to chance.
The Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR-LMH recently hit the track for the first time, marking the start of a thorough testing phase for the British marque – the first stage in its quest to win next year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans.
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Emmanuel Pirro: “the passion [for 24 hours} is still alive in me, like in my childhood”
Chosen to drive the 1974 Matra MS670B winner at the Goodwood Festival of Speed (July 11-24), a jewel of the 24 Hours Museum’s permanent collection, four-time winner Emmanuel Pirro spoke of his passion for the history of the Le Mans classic.
Since the Le Mans Prototype 3 (LMP3) class was introduced at the 4 Hours of Red Bull Ring in 2014, countless drivers and teams have taken advantage of this affordable competitive route into the world of endurance racing.
The 1974 Matra MS670B 24 Hour Museum winner is set to appear at one of the summer’s premier classic car events: the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK from July 11-14. Based on a prototype chassis, the amount of technology on board meant that packaging the transmission and cooling systems were major challenges.
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Hydrogen is an abundant element when it comes to engine fuel. Its potential to replace liquid fuels in internal combustion engines is an exciting prospect for many car manufacturers, and the incentives to implement it in such a mode are extensive. However, there is another significant opportunity to use hydrogen in vehicle engines in the form of hydrogen fuel cell electricity.
A team of Delft University of Technology students, who are training to be tomorrow’s engineers, designed, built and raced an electrically powered hydrogen fuel cell prototype to demonstrate the potential of hydrogen in motorsports, mobility and more.
The team, called Forze Hydrogen Racing, was formed to accelerate the marketing, activation and visibility of hydrogen and technology in fuel cell vehicles. The result is a collaboration of academic programs and design developed by industrial partners, providing a laboratory environment for the development of hydrogen fuel cell technology under rigorous racing conditions.
Forze Hydrogen Racing was founded in 2007 and began by installing small fuel cells on go-karts. The final car, the Forze IX, is a full-scale prototype racer currently competing in the Open GT racing class in the Netherlands. This is considered a breakthrough in the performance of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles.
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The Forze IX is an electric prototype racing car with a supercapacitor battery and two independent EKPO fuel cell systems that produce electricity. The sensitive operation of a hydrogen fuel cell makes developing a cell for a racing car a challenging task.
The necessary oxygen comes from the outside air, which is taken from the main inlet on the roof and fed to the two cathode systems. Before the air can reach the fuel cell, it must be conditioned to remove contaminants and rainwater. So it passes through filters developed with one of the team’s partners, Donaldson, before being compressed by an electric turbocharger from Fisher Spindle.
Due to this compression, the air is heated, so before entering the cathode, it passes through an intermediate cooler that cools it. Air compression also allows energy to be recovered from the exhaust streams, which significantly increases the efficiency of the system.
The compressed, intercooled and humidified air then flows to the cathode inside the fuel cell. Both cathode systems consume up to 16 kg of air per minute.
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At the anode, hydrogen molecules are split into atoms and stripped of electrons, leaving a proton that must pass through the fuel cell membrane. Meanwhile, the hydrogen electron passes through the electrical circuit. This movement of electrons is the current that the car can use as a drive directly in the engines and power systems or to charge the battery.
At the cathode, a proton combines with oxygen in the air and recombines with an electron to form a water molecule, which is then expelled from the system using excess air.
“What makes the car really unique is that it runs on two separate and independent fuel cell systems,” explains Abel van Beest, Forze Hydrogen Racing Team Principal. “There have only been a few experiments with twin-engine cars in the past, and this is the first for fuel cells.
“Working on a dual fuel cell system like this has several advantages. Starting with redundancy can help in the event of a partial system failure and reduce engineering risk as one system can be designed and tested before another is produced.”
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“The two EKPO fuel cells have a lot of power and are therefore excellent for a powerful, tightly packed vehicle,” continues van Beest. “The two fuel cells work simultaneously according to independent deployment strategies to provide the most efficient performance for any part of the track and allow our engineers to design and implement upgrades much faster.”
The total volume of hydrogen on board is about 8.5 kg, which is stored in four tanks at a pressure of 700 times more than atmospheric pressure (bar). From the tanks, it is transported through high-pressure, vibration-resistant Parker pipes to a pressure regulator that reduces the hydrogen pressure.
Next stop is the hydrogen management system, specially designed by Forze fuel cell engineers in collaboration with Burkert.
This system constantly supplies the fuel cell with the right amount of hydrogen. In some conditions, excess hydrogen is delivered to the fuel cell to increase performance and life. The recirculation system was designed using a special component called an ejector so as not to waste the hydrogen coming out of the fuel cell. The ejector is a passive device used to maintain hydrogen recirculation into the fuel cell, specifically the anode side, without power.
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“The ejector can essentially be thought of as a pump, a device that increases fluid pressure to overcome frictional losses associated with mass transport,” explains India van Dornen, chief engineer of Forze Hydrogen Racing. “As part of controlling the various mass flows into and out of the fuel cell, the job of the ejector is to maintain a flow of hydrogen on the anode side of the fuel cell, which is normally done by a recirculation pump.
“However, a recirculation pump requires significant power, usually on the order of several kilowatts, to achieve the required pressure rise,” he continues. “This energy will come from energy generated by the fuel cell system and directly consumed by the systems that keep it running, creating parasitic losses. On the other hand, the ejector reduces the parasitic losses of the fuel cell system by tapping into another source of energy: the potential energy stored as pressure in the hydrogen storage tanks.’
The stored hydrogen must be brought back to near atmospheric pressure before the fuel cell can use it, and the ejector system uses this potential energy to increase the hydrogen pressure at the anode