World Superbike remains a popular series in motorcycle racing, its enduring appeal stemming from the fact that the machines are based on the same motorcycles that you can find in your local showroom. Twenty years ago, it was a competition full of limited-production homologation machines, such as the Honda RC30 and Yamaha OW-01, which were produced at great expense and which required a racing kit that at the time dwarfed the cost of the motorcycle. In 1990, if we discount the Bimota machine, the most expensive road bike was the Read more…

The British Touring Car Championship is in a state of flux at the moment, with cars running to different sets of rules and with different engine regulations in play. As we might expect, no ’side’ is happy when the others are winning. It would appear that teams operating under the new rules, with the so-called Next Generation Touring Cars (NGTC) such as the Toyota Avensis campaigned by Dynojet Racing and driven to good effect this year by Frank Wrathall, are becoming more successful, at the expense of teams operating under the more established Read more…

The new McLaren MP4-12C roadcar is a real looker, and has had some great reviews in the motoring press. It didn’t take long before the car was taken from the road to the track, competing in the Blancpain Endurance Series in Europe. This is a race series specifically for GT cars. Stories in the press suggest that there are up to ten teams considering racing this car in 2012. Read more…

Not only is rallying an exciting sport to take part in and to watch, it places unusual demands on many of the components that make up the car and engine. Turbocharged engines in particular, with their anti-lag systems to aid transient response, place a lot of stress on components. In this regard, exhaust systems stand out as having to cope with more than their fair share of additional stress and hardship. Read more…

Race engine exhausts are expected to do a tough job without suffering failure, a job they generally do very well. The results of a broken pipe can be very noticeable for two main reasons - loss of performance and a marked increase in the amount of noise generated, especially on silenced systems where the breakage is upstream of the silencer. With a premium placed on both reliability and system mass, many race exhausts therefore use titanium, stainless steel and Inconel materials. Read more…

MotoGP represents a real technical challenge for those who have the resources to design a bespoke race engine. The rules are refreshingly simple and short. There is very little to restrict irresponsible levels of spending, apart from common sense. The engine may have any number of cylinders in any configuration. Where Formula One dictates the number of cylinders and layout of the engine, MotoGP allows any design. Although we don’t currently have anyone using more than four cylinders, we do have a mixture of inline four-cylinder engines and V4s. Read more…

Although using engines that, in the words of TRD’s Lee White are “rooted in 1960’s architecture”, much about NASCAR is right up to date, employing modern design trends and manufacturing methods. NASCAR appeals to a specific audience, who are perhaps less technically motivated than those who follow MotoGP or Formula One, yet it attracts and retains a lot of the very best engineers in racing - precisely because of the technical challenges that the pushrod V8 engines present. Read more…

At present, exhausts occupy a strange position in Formula One engine development and are treated very differently in the regulations from most components that make up these highly specialised engines.

Along with the snorkel (air horn), they are the only components able to influence engine performance that are not deemed to fall within the ’sealed engine’, inside which no development or design changes are allowed, except for clearly defined reasons such as cost-cutting Read more…

As long as there is the pursuit for extra power there will always have to be a commitment to using more advanced and exotic materials. Exhaust design is no exception, and many exhaust systems - both classic and contemporary - provide us not only with engineering artwork but a technical challenge.

One criterion expected of performance exhausts is their need to work at sustained elevated working temperatures, which has necessitated the use of more Read more…

We have become accustomed to the fact that many race motorcycle exhaust systems are made from titanium. Owing to the fact that they are generally much better supported than on most racecar installations, the problems with fatigue and creep are nowhere near as serious.

One company, Good Fabrications, with extensive experience of many types of exhaust materials has applied its knowledge of special high-temperature Read more…