So, I went to the Pistonheads Sunday Service today and attended the talk by Ben Bowlby on the Deltawing. I recorded the whole thing and have transferred to text here; the questions were made by a combination of Tony Jardine and members of the audience, including me. They were in a slightly different order, but I've tried to order them to make them flow a bit better, there were others but these were the most interesting:-
Q: You’re working with some big names; what do they hope to gain from it?
Ben Bowlby:Its an extraordinary opportunity to challenge things and determine exactly what we can do in terms of efficiency whilst still maintaining performance.
Its a massive honour, really its a genius from the ACO to have an experimental class. I think what the Deltwaing does is quite significant; its an ultra light-weight car made from advanced materials; its the real deal; it actually can do the improvement in efficiency whilst maintaining the same performance, an electric car can’t do that at the moment. For that reason, the ACO chose us.
Q: You aren’t elligable for the win, but you will certainly have a lot of attention at Le Mans; its a very dramatic looking vehicle....
It does look like the Batmobile, but this IS a real project; its not a marketing exercise; This is the absolute most efficient vehicle to do an LMP1 lap time that we could come up, I’m sure there are cleverer people out there that would come up with a better way of doing it; but we’ve done the calcs and our simulations show this configuration is the fastest car that we were able to simulate that could do the performance we needed and burn about half the fuel of a petrol LMP1 car.
Q: Those simulations were around Le Mans, I guess, but around a circuit like Brands Hatch Indy (which is slower and twistier) do you think it would still be the best configuration, or do you think a ground effects rectangular shaped car would be better?
Urrrmmm... I think it could take on anything... its a tricky question... what’s the parameters? If you are looking at fuel consumption being the denominator of performance I think we could take on anybody no matter what format....We have greater efficiency... its going to have to be a two wheel drive car because although 4 wheel drive (there’s going to be no rules right?) 4 wheel drive is very high performance but also higher weight, so you’d go with 2WD and then you want the weight over the driven wheels. The aerodynamics, the mass, and the tyre sizes need to be in harmony with each other, once you have that you basically have a car that behaves like a normal racing car.
We did some sims with 500bhp to see what it would do... and.... it was very fast!
Q: Did you ever think about making it 3 wheels?
At one point I thought ‘yeah we’ll make it a 3 wheeler’, but a 3-wheeler isn’t a car under the the FIA definition; its a motorcycle, so what we did was put the front two wheels close together so that they act as one. We looked at racing sidecars to see what technology they’re using for steering and things like that, in fact we built a 3 wheeled radio control model to test the concept, and actually the model behaved exactly like the real thing. That was in the pre-budget; it was my own money!
Q: Its basically a mid-engined Reliant Robin isn’t it?
It is! A Reliant Robin with the mass in the right place!
Q: Does the Delta configuration make the rectangular configuration obsolete?
I don’ think so, no.... but I do think its important that the motorsport industry has a wide spread of projects; look at what Nissan are doing with the Leaf, I think its good to promote efficiency.
Q: You are in the experimental class; You are not expected to finish the race
Our expectation is that we have done enough work to finish the race, but the reality is that we probably won’t. We’re having to temper our hopes; If you were going to win Le Mans you would have probably 2 years of testing with multiple 30 hour tests, we’ve done 25 laps in succession so far without hitting a problem; Its a tough challenge; the problems haven’t been the things we thought we’d have a problem with, its the things we were certain would be OK. But each time we test we go a little faster and get a little more reliable.
Q: Under race conditions what does the engine do MPG wise?
On the dyno it does 230g/kWhr... there is virtually no petrol road car that makes horsepower at that small a fuel burn... on the race track it equates to around 12 miles per UK Gallon; it doesn’t sound that good but that is actually an impressive number; about double what the petrol LMP1 cars will get.
