Race Car Design

Product Information

If you are planning to participate in a sanctioned race series, the regulations published by the sanctioning body will also form part of the vision for the race vehicle. Although regulations are often seen as limitations, they should also be seen as opportunities, assuming there is leeway in the interpretation of them. Example Objectives/Vision Statements During this step, the design team will gather information that will serve as a foundation to set the design constraints and goals. Here, all the regulation changes are reviewed, and their impact on the design is assessed. For example, the refuelling ban implemented in the 2010 Formula One Season, forced teams to run larger fuel tanks, and they also had to take into account the changes on CG height due to fuel burn off. Also, the introduction of restrictions on fuel flow and fuel load per race, in 2014, forced manufacturers to increase their engines efficiency. Solidworks isn’t just used for practical, real-world car designs, but some of the most creative car designs in films and TV shows, too. One particularly interesting is its use by Dave Clark who used it to both create and visualize designs for cars featured in Mission Impossible, Terminator, and Ready Player One. Fusion 360 is great for collaboration as it’s cloud-based, and it has instant data-management tools that help bring teams together and streamline workflows. The first semester of the first academic year is common with the other 4 curricula of the AAE Master’s Degree (Advanced Powertrain, High Performance Car Design, Advanced Motorcycle Engineering, Advanced Sportscar Manufacturing).

Bear in mind that Fusion 360 is more limited when it comes to controlling things like surface curvatures than the likes of Alias, but it’s certainly more beginner-friendly. Plus, there are lots of tutorials to help guide you through the process. Sponsorship and partner acquisition is crucial in motorsport, which creates various vehicle livery branding opportunities when partners and sponsors join a driver / team. MDM Designs are able to cater for creating livery designs intended to work as proposals for drivers and teams who want to give their interested party a complete visual of how their branding will be displayed on the racing car. Car design is iterative (that is, requiring repeated re-designs) because with the exception of a few parts on a car, all parts attach to another in some way.Testing is the most crucial aspect of a race car’s design. A great design effort might be lost if not enough tests are carried. Some categories, such as Formula 1, impose restrictions on off-season tests, aiming to reduce costs. This leaves only the specified pre-season tests and the free practices for the engineers to work on the cars. After the design constraints are identified, it is necessary to define the goals, which will guide the whole design process. These could be specified in the form of measurable parameters and should specific enough to allow for design orienting. The goals are related to the following areas: Depending on whether you are starting from scratch or a donor car (The “Design Start point”) or are designing with sanctioning body regulations or your own vision (The “Design Basis”), there are four possible variations in the car design process.

Blender is used by professional car designers at Tata Motors, a leading Indian automotive manufacturing company. Mathilde Ampe, a digital modeler at Tata Motors, explains how integrating Blender into their workflow helped to speed up and simplify the process.

For racing cars, the objectives are much more oriented toward pure performance. The primary objectives of most race cars or performance cars are: Catia, Solidworks, Fusion 360, Autodesk Alias, and Blender are all popular car body design software. What skills does car design need? There’s a fairly steep learning curve, all things considered, but there are courses that teach car design using Blender, as well as numerous YouTube videos showing what’s capable with this program. Alias offers a wide variety of features that makes it a favorite of car designers. You can use subdivisional modeling tailored to product design to bring your concepts to life, and then fine-tune your surfaces to a professional level using the Class-A surfacing tools.

The best way to understand CATIA’s utility as a car designing program is to read the Tesla case study. This is because its smart, intuitive design makes it more accessible than other programs, but it still offers all the tools you need to make high-quality car designs. If you are designing a car from a donor car chassis, your process will involve determining how the vehicle components can be changed to meet your vision/objectives. If you are designing from scratch, your process will involve the design and selection of components from the rubber on the road on up. Iterations

Vision/Concept

Fabricate the chassis and bodywork, preferably after the components arrive. Fit and finish can be adjusted when the parts are in your hands. We touched on earlier how the team at Tata Motors used to Blender over Alias in certain stages to speed up processes, but it still uses Alias for the more advanced stages of modeling once design volumes have been decided. This is very common in car manufacturing and companies typically use several different software instead of just one program. Car design software isn’t exactly a simple task – far from it – so you need to find software that matches your experience level. 2D programs like Illustrator are the simplest, and if you’re looking to model in 3D then the likes of Fusion 360 are more beginner-friendly than programs like CATIA or Rhino 3D.