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engine program confident
Armed with the latest electronic wizardry from Stuttgart, Germany, Mercedes-Benz is looking for a second Australian race win in less than a month. West-McLaren-Mercedes driver David Coulthard gave the three-pointed star its first Formula One victory in more than four decades at the season opener in Melbourne, March 9. On April 6, Mercedes' seven-driver CART racing contingent will take a revised version of the IC108D engine to the Sunbelt IndyCarnival Australia in Surfer's Paradise, in search of victory number two.
"There's no substitute for confidence in competition," said Hal Whiteford, vice president of operations for Mercedes-Benz of North America. "David Coulthard and the West-McLaren-Mercedes team have revalidated our past successes and reminded us of our reasons for confidence."
Although Coulthard's F-1 win has done wonders for the Mercedes-Benz Motorsport team, the PPG Cup campaign has received a more tangible performance boost from the transient dynamometer facility at Mercedes headquarters in Stuttgart. A new electronic engine calibration, created through a cooperative effort by technicians from Mercedes-Benz and Ilmor Engineering has improved the IC108D's torque and driveability.
"As the race engine design and manufacturing arm of Mercedes-Benz, Ilmor takes the lead in the development of our CART and Formula One powerplants," noted Steve Potter, manager of sports marketing for MBNA. "But this is a good example of how Mercedes-Benz's resources are applied directly to the development of racing engines."
"It's a huge difference," said Mauricio Gugelmin, who drives the Hollywood Reynard/ Mercedes-Benz for the PacWest Racing Group, after he tested the new calibration at Big Spring, Texas, in mid-March. "It feels like a different engine. The only area I had any concerns (during pre-season testing) was at low RPMs — the engine was a little rough. Now, it drives like my Mercedes street car. I'm sure the added driveability will be very beneficial in Australia, where there are so many slow corners — and really at any of the street courses where we race."
The calibration, a set of electronically controlled variables which determine the fueling and spark of the engine based on throttle position, RPM level and other criteria, was primarily the work of "Dyno" Don Norton, Ilmor Engineering's calibration specialist and a senior trackside support engineer.
"The engine was already optimized for full throttle, top-end performance, such as was required at Homestead (Motorsports Complex, in Miami), through our testing on the regular dyno," said Norton, who has been in racing for more than 25 years. "What we still needed to do, however, was make sure the engine was being fueled consistently in the low speed corners, where the car is in first gear, at low RPM, when the driver goes to full throttle to accelerate away. For that, we needed the transient dyno in Stuttgart."
Norton explained that Mercedes' transient dynamometer allows technicians to simulate racing conditions very precisely and measure engine performance very accurately.
"The transient dyno gives you much better control of your experiments. You can simulate an entire race, avoiding all of the variables introduced through driver input and changing track conditions, while logging much more data than you could in an actual track test. You can do in a day on the transient dyno what would take you a year to do on the track."
In actuality, it took Norton about two weeks to come up with the new calibration; Mercedes is hoping it will take only slightly longer to come up with its second race win down under.
The 1997 season marks the third full year of competition for Mercedes-Benz in the PPG CART World Series, and is a continuation of a sporting heritage that dates back to the first auto race ever, held in 1894.
Source: CART News Service