If snippets of information that filter down to me turn out to be true, the average motorsport engine ECU of the future will have to work a lot harder. It’s all to do with economy - both in the size of the fuel pump and the amount of power it consumes. While the systems that give these benefits have been fitted on some road vehicles for many years it seems that motorsports, with the emphasis now more on fuel saving than absolute power, is beginning to take notice as well.

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Most of the time many of us are quite happy with just one injector per cylinder. The complexity of EFi arrangements and the software necessary to control an engine under the wide range of anticipated conditions are complex enough without going looking for problems.

But there are occasions when the one injector is not enough, say when the turndown ratio of any single injector is simply not large enough to cover the anticipated fuelling requirements of the engine. A typical example of this could be a supercharged/turbocharged Read more…

One of the biggest changes to the engine ECU in recent years has been the rise of the drive-by-wire system. Generically known as ‘x-by-wire’ or sometimes (incorrectly) as ‘fly-by-wire’, such systems were introduced by vehicle OEMs in response to more punitive emissions legislation in recent years.

Consisting of a throttle pedal device requesting a torque demand from the engine, the engine ECU calculates the ignition and fuelling necessary and requests the appropriate amount of air from the engine throttle. With no physical cable connecting the throttle pedal to the unit on the engine, communication is achieved solely via electronics and digital signals. Systems similar to these were first used without mechanical back-up in the F-16 jet fighter in 1974 and then the Airbus A320 commercial airliner 14 years later. Read more…

If there is one area of engineering that has simply exploded over the past 30 years or so it is that of control. Where once we had mechanical or electrical devices to manage what few systems were around, these days almost all mechanical systems are controlled by some measure of electronics and computing such that a whole new subject has evolved - that of mechatronics.

In the case of a modern race engine, we are all too familiar with the idea of electronics together with a Read more…

In these times of political and economic upheavals around the world it seems there is an appetite for change in other areas of life as well. Suggestions for a revamp to the Formula One engine regulations could fill a whole book but it is the latest - including direct injection or gas turbine technology - that have really hit the headlines recently.

For those with long memories, gas turbines were all the rage in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Read more…

Simply mention the words ‘engine knock’ to any aftermarket EMS supplier and I almost guarantee that the conversation will cease albeit perhaps only briefly. But safe to reiterate that ‘knock’ or more precisely detonation, should be avoided at all costs and that the engine should be mapped sufficiently away from these borderline conditions, the conversation will no doubt continue along the original lines. And in truth for the vast majority of race units, particularly naturally aspirated ones, careful ignition mapping and avoiding detonation at Read more…

In a conventional multi-point port injected gasoline engine the fuel is introduced into the air stream in the form of a jet of liquid. Atomising into small droplets, these mix with the air, begin to vaporise and eventually get carried off past the intake valves and into the combustion chamber. In between, varying amounts of this fuel might condense on the wall, travel along it and eventually vaporise back into the air stream. However the presence of this fuel, often referred to as a ‘puddle’ can have a significant effect on Read more…

Can you imagine waking up one day and not remembering where you are? I’m only too certain that this may have happened to many of you after the recent festivities but the experience is probably something you would prefer to forget. Perhaps then you might spare a thought for the feelings of an engine upon being cranked into life. Waking from its enforced slumber the camshaft will tell it when to open and close the intake and exhaust valves but who tells it when to fire the charge and more importantly on which cycle?

In times past the ignition was triggered from a mechanical Read more…

The news that the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva in Switzerland is back in commission, is to be greeted with relief by all who have a genuine interest in particle physics. Designed to answer fundamental questions about the Universe by accelerating beams of high energy particles creating proton-to-proton collisions, the results, it is hoped, should provide explanations to some of the most basic of laws surrounding the most elementary of objects in space and time. And from all this we might just gain a further understanding of our Universe and its beginning, starting with the Big Bang. Read more…

Even as a boy I was continually mystified, and occasionally perplexed, by the operation of the carburettor. The myriad of main jets, air correction jets and emulsion tubes and the science on the fixed jet DCOE was a veritable minefield for the inexperienced, but once mastered, the satisfaction of getting an engine to start let alone run sweetly on the road or track, was reward in itself. The arrival of electronic fuel injection with its altogether totally different approach was greeted with relief more than any other emotion, not least because it solved the perennial problem of under bonnet packaging of large carburettors. But although the fuel could be

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