Indy racing is not for the fain-of-heart. The costs are incredible and the stakes are high. There has never been an all encompasing document that cannot be interpreted more than one way. As long as there are creative engineers and lawyers, the rules will be interpreted and bent as much as possible in order to gain a slight advantage. The people racing in the Indy League are some of the most competitive people you'll ever meet and without a "standard" engine and chassis, every team would spend whatever is necessary to win. The use of 200 or more channels of telemetry to monitor all aspects of car, engine and driver performance provides an opportunity for the engineers to make minor tweaks between races that may (or not) improve one aspect of a cars performance in the next race (assuming the air temperature, tire compound, humidity, wind, barometric pressure, time of the day and phase of the moon are within the predicted range). The fact that outsiders are able to be in the pit area and observe the team in order to report in this forum is remarkable. Keep up the good work.
My comment about cheating in sports is the old saying, "hate the sport, not the player". All organized and professional sports have rules, rules sometimes get broken, some detected, others not, punishments levied according to the rules and the organization.
That's exactly what happened at Indy, ChasChas, when one chassis was winning all the races. Now there's one chassis maker for Indy cars and only three engine manufacturers.
Charles, the way I understand it is the rules are governed by two things. The races must be (1) kept close to keep fan excitement/loyalty and (2) safe but, with enough preceived danger (and crashes) to entertain the crowd. The bottom line is money, of course.
Your right though, this used to be where the car companies showed of their wares in true competition. Now if some company gets too strong, they make new rules to rein it in. It's no longer FAIR to win too consistenty.
Makes you wonder, ChasChas, if they're doing the right thing by using such confining rules. Maybe it would discourage cheating if they went back to the era when the choice of engine or chassis was more open.
Almost every good inside story from racing is how they cheated, won, and got away with it. Many racers say that you must cheat to win. They find ways to "cheat within the rules" (it passed inspection somehow) and then they are called tactics.
I'm sure Kanaan is checking the data to see how well a new "cheat" is working out.
Kanaan was likely looking at the data and trying to see opportunities to improve his lap times. Things that he likely was observing were cornering G forces, steering angle, braking G forces, wheelspin, rev limiter application, rpm & gearing....all specific to critical segments of the course. He is looking for hundreths of a second anywhere possible.
I don't know what Kanaan was viewing at the moment, Beth, but acquired data includes fuel pressure, oil pressure, engine rpm, clutch rpm, acceleration, velocity, split times and maybe a few others (readers might know better), such as shock travel (?) or tire pressure (?). I'm told that KV Racing uses 200 data channels.
Never fear you comments about the new IndyCar design is true. The "more closed" wheel version will appear on the Ovals.Up until now all tracks have been city circuits or race tracks. Watch out at Indy for a different looking car and these will appear on all the Ovals. That livery on the Mouser car looks great. Go Tony Kanaan
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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