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Join Date: Jan 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Napolis
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https://www.formulapassion.it/motorsport/sport-gt/wec-glickenhaus-007-semplice-affidabile-lemans-luca-ciancetti-podium-engineering-hypercar-543418.html
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Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
Quote:
Expectations are growing for the new course of the World Endurance Championship, which at Sebring will see the debut of the Hypercar category. Among the rivals of the dominating Toyota of recent seasons is the Scuderia Glickenhaus, a reality that boasts a consistent involvement of Italian personnel. The realization of the car in fact is carried out at the Italian Podium Engineering, located in Valle d'Aosta at Pont-Saint-Martin. As also confirmed to FormulaPassion.it, the Italian-American team will not take part in the inaugural appointment of Sebring, with the aim of delaying the homologation to perfect the preparation of the car in the meantime. The intention is to arrive with a better shape at the second race scheduled at Spa and especially at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the real goal of Jim Glickenhaus.
FormulaPassion.it had the opportunity to interview Luca Ciancetti, Glickenhaus team manager for the LMH project within Podium Engineering, who explained the challenges and the main technical aspects behind the realization of the car. Among these, the search for reliability stands out, a factor that has always been central in endurance racing and that has benefited from Glickenhaus' renunciation of the hybrid powertrain. The weight saved thanks to the absence of batteries, inverters and electric motor-generator was in fact partially used to strengthen certain mechanical and structural components of the car.
Another cornerstone of the project is represented by the accessibility to the different areas of the car and in particular to the suspension unit, to facilitate the adjustment of the mechanical set-up that, also determining the positioning and the dynamics in motion of the car body, affect the aerodynamic behavior, as explained by Ciancetti himself.
What were the guidelines for the design of the car and what are its distinctive features?
"The Hypercar regulations are very well defined and you are well guided in what you need to do. One of the big revolutions is that basically the performance is driven. We're talking about a rulebook where aerodynamic performance is defined in terms of efficiency, drag and downforce, with a window within which you have to stay. Power and weight are given by the regulations, as well as the center of gravity of the chassis and engine, so in fact what we are going to do is an exercise that has many stakes. Then, clearly, the car is born from a blank sheet of paper, so there is a lot of freedom, but our point was to respect all these points in the best possible way, creating a car that would be a bit simpler and more reliable than what we have seen before with the LMP1s".
"As a smaller reality than our rivals, our card is to try to maximize simplicity, to try to have a very reliable car from the start. This is the card we have to play to be competitive in this category, in which for the first time in the premier class at Le Mans there is a Balance of Performance, which is a bit of a question mark. The BoP of the WEC is very well done and the cars will all be very close, regardless of their characteristics. That's why we focused a lot on simplicity, on being able to work on the car very efficiently and on being able to change components quickly during repairs for race incidents. We worked a lot on these aspects."
Unlike the hybrid cars, you didn't have to install the electrified powertrain. How was this extra volume and weight available exploited?
"The space was basically leveraged to maximize the volumes dedicated to the impact structures. The reason, again, is that being a team with a tighter budget we wanted to minimize the risk of having to repeat crash tests. We tried to have fairly large safety margins in that respect, to go straight to the goal. The weight, on the other hand, was used a bit uniformly throughout the car, with the idea of simplifying and reducing costs. We adopted more standard solutions a little bit everywhere, with the exception of some areas where we thought weight was a pretty important element for performance. However, in general we have maintained slightly higher weights, adopting slightly higher safety coefficients in the sizing of the components, with the idea of seeking reliability and cost efficiency.
In terms of aerodynamics, what are the approximate performances?
"It's actually not a secret, because the cars have an aerodynamic performance specified by the technical regulations. All the cars have an aerodynamic map that must be respected and we have worked to keep within the most interesting area of this map. Basically, according to the regulations, there is a window of constant aerodynamic efficiency, with limits within which the drag must stay. We move on a fairly limited space of possible aerodynamic configurations. The cars are very stable, they will not have different aerodynamic set-ups depending on the circuit. They will be extremely stable cars over the course of the season once they are homologated."
So is it safe to say that the mechanical set-up will play a proportionally more important role than the aerodynamic set-up?
"I think aerodynamics will still be very important. Clearly, with such complex cars, the mechanical-aerodynamic link is not only given by the aerodynamic configurations, but also by how the car is used to facilitate aerodynamics itself. Sometimes, therefore, between ground clearance adjustments, suspension stiffnesses and the position of the car body, we work on mechanics to achieve the expected aerodynamic behavior. Certainly the fact of having suspensions on which we can work very easily will be an advantage in my opinion, considering the few tests that can be done on these cars. For example, we have maximized the accessibility to all the adjustable parts of the suspension units and we have ensured a great ease in changing set-up".
Earlier, he expressed his satisfaction with the Balance of Performance defined by the FIA, which imposes a power curve that should smooth out the torque differences between the electric and thermal engines. Are you happy with the BoP or do you think that the hybrid cars will maintain a starting advantage, also considering that they will be all-wheel drive?
"Definitely from this point of view the FIA is not leaving anything to chance. There is a very detailed active work to try to balance all the cars, even in different conditions. On paper today it is not possible to define a substantial advantage for hybrid cars over thermal cars, also considering the fact that LMDh prototypes will be introduced in 2023, which are two-wheel drive cars. In fact, therefore, the queen category will be a broad two- and four-wheel drive scenario. I believe and am sure that the FIA is doing everything possible to try to make us all equally competitive. Surely there are still times when the hybrid or four-wheel drive could give advantages, but in the average race or season they will be leveled by the BoP and the regulations.
On your social pages you have illustrated the idea of powering the car in the future with a mixture of gasoline-hydrogen or even exclusively with hydrogen. What repercussions would this have on performance?
"This is an idea that has come to the fore in the last two weeks. Honestly, we are still at too preliminary a stage to be able to give answers on this aspect. It's certainly a nice dream, a very interesting technical challenge. Honestly, we need some work to understand what the impact on the car could be, which today we are really starting [...]. The great thing about working with people like Jim Glickenhaus is that nothing is impossible and nothing can be said. He is truly a person who is projected into the future and is completely free from conformism and impositions. From that point of view, working with Jim opens up a lot of possibilities".
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17 Jan 2021, 14:39 (Ref:4029630)
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