Dyson Racing has been a fixture in sports car racing in North America for over three decades. Over the years, the team has won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, and many other races, including the driver’s title for Elliott Forbes-Robinson in the ALMS’ inaugural season. Over the past three years this has been the team that has pushed – and sometimes defeated – the best in the world, Champion Racing and its Audi R8. In the process, Dyson Racing again demonstrated why it has always been among those few teams at the pinnacle of sports car racing. In 2006, Dyson Racing debuts an entirely new and exciting Lola B06/10, powered by Advanced Engine Research’s Twin Turbo V8. dailysportscar will be bringing you reports from each of the team’s American Le Mans Series events, along with other special features throughout the season. The first of these, an overview of the new car and engine, launches our special coverage, less than a week before the first outing at Sebring’s “Wheels Down Winter Test,” January 23-25. We hope you come back here for Dyson Racing coverage throughout the season.
The
Dyson Racing Lola B06/10
While it benefits from the development of last season’s B05/40, the B06/10 (below) is specifically designed for the new Automobile Club de l’Ouest LMP1 prototype rules.
Lola Cars International, Ltd. provided the following technical specifications for the LMP1 B06/10: REGULATIONS WEIGHT MONOCOQUE BODYWORK SUSPENSION GEARBOX Semi-auto (“paddle”) shift system. BRAKE
SYSTEM ENGINE
INSTALLATION CLUTCH WHEELS INSTRUMENTATION ELECTRICAL
SYSTEM ENGINE
OIL SYSTEM COOLING
SYSTEM FUEL
SYSTEM STEERING OTHER
FACTS AND FIGURES The
AER P32 Twin Turbo V8
AER provided the following technical specifications for the AER P32 Twin Turbo V8: REGULATIONS CONFIGURATION
All Alloy 75° V8 As AER’s Mike Lancaster told dsc in July, “The additional skills available to us now have enabled us to design an LMP1 engine that is absolutely state of the art – it’s a clean sheet design, and it’s ground-breaking, too. In terms of its strength and weight, its direct injection variant and the drive by wire electronics, it is state of the art. We haven’t based this on the block of anything else, for example. We are convinced that it’s in a different league to anything else that’s available to a customer.”
So Dyson Racing
comes to the 2006 American Le Mans Series campaign armed with the
best hardware available in the world of sports car racing. We’ll
see the first results of that at Sebring’s Wheels Down Winter
Test, and we’ll bring you a report of those results –
after a break for the team’s outing in its Crawford Prototype
at Daytona.
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The
similarity of the LMP2 rules to those for the larger, more powerful
Le Mans Prototype 1 (LMP1) machines augers will for the success
of the new Dyson Racing prototype. The Dyson crew is more than a
little familiar with Lola prototypes, of course, having raced the
B01/60, first as an LMP675, then as an LMP1, in the ALMS over the
past three seasons. Originally designed for a “lighter”
class, that Lola was a speed, but not a “thoroughness”
match for the tank-like Audi R8. 
By
mid-November, when the tub passed FIA crash testing, the new car’s
aero design had already logged 260 hours in Lola’s own Composite
Tooling and Structures, Ltd., wind tunnel, which produces wind speeds
of 145 mph. A similar amount of testing of the B05/40, plus a season
of “on-track” experience, certainly further contributed
to the knowledge of Lola aerodynamicist Phil Tiller (who runs the
design team’s Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations) and
Composites Manager Craig Turner. The Chief Designer of the Lola
B06/10 is Julian Sole, who has spent his considerable career with
Lola, and set out – in contrast to the B01/60 – to build
a customer car. As Head of Engineering Julian Cooper told dsc about
the B05/40 last year, and the difference is substantial. We can
expect significantly improved reliability in Dyson Racing’s
new Lola.
Advanced
Engine Research (AER) will provide the power for Dyson Racing in
2006, as has for the last three years. But, as with the Lola chassis,
there is a significant difference. To produce this V8, AER started
with not only a “clean sheet of paper,” but with the
additional experience from personnel from F1. What (or who) they
added to their already considerable skills were Chief Engineer Ian
Prosser, who has been in charge of “above decks” (heads
and valve train) design of the engine, and Oliver Allen, responsible
for “below decks,” (crankshaft, etc.), and recently
appointed AER’s Technical Director. Ian had responsibility
(in F1) for port and combustion chamber design, and, strangely enough,
for the cylinder head of a racing diesel engine. Oliver was in charge
of piston/con rod assembly and pump design with his former employer.
Both, having worked on Ilmor’s CART engine programmes, and
along with AER’s already talented staff, have no small amount
of turbo engine experience either.
With
this augmentation, AER set out to design the “sports car racing
engine of the future.” Well, the future is now, as Dyson Racing
will fire up the engine at Sebring’s Wheels Down Winter Test
within a few days’ time. The keys to that design have been
minimizing parasitic losses, improving combustion efficiency, and
reducing internal friction losses. The result is the smallest and
lightest sports car racing engine ever. A conservative approach
means the engine will be introduced initially without it, but the
design contemplates the use of gasoline direct injection (pioneered
by Audi’s R8) after the engine has “gotten its legs,”
and been sorted in traditional indirect injection form.
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