Competition engineering

Earlier this year, as a service to the motorsport community, we at ChassisSim ran a driving competition based around an LMP2+ category car at Le Mans. To make it rather more interesting, there were two elements to it, and the result was decided not just by who made the fastest lap time but, thanks to ChassisSim Driver in the Loop, a tame driver was used to asses if they could actually drive it.

The results themselves were interesting, but more so were the approaches used by the winning entries, who showed some novel approaches to engineering a car that was an outlier and, in the process, provided some great case studies about how you use simulation to race engineer a car. That is what we’ll be discussing in this article.

Before we get into that though, it would be wise to outline the terms of the competition. Given how much exposure I’ve had to the LMP1 and they were doing, as opposed to just mindlessly blasting through simulations.