Data collection programs reinventing how things happen in the garage
There were days when the cars in a NASCAR race were the same ones you could buy off the showroom floor. Tape up the glass, maybe move the radiator around a bit, duct-tape or paint a number on the door and you were good to go.
Now? Not so much.
It’s all about technology.
Gone are the days when geniuses like Smokey Yunick or Vic Edelbrock came up with an idea, modeled it out of clay or wood or metal, set up a smoke box and measured what they could. Or, in Yunick’s case, cut a hole in an intake manifold, plugged it with clear material and watched the air flow through the plenum.
Instead of doing their work in a noisy, greasy garage, today’s geniuses sit in cube farms and move pixels, postulations and theorems around to produce a 3D version of a piston rod, cam shaft or cowl assembly.
It’s called Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manuacturing (CAD/CAM), and it was developed for a variety of applications. Hendrick Motorsports was one of the first teams to use it, and today nearly every major team has some version of it in the shop.
At first, it was used to save money. Racers tend to use available cash judiciously, figuring that one mile per hour was worth whatever it cost. By doing all the research and development with computer models first, they had all the kinks worked out before they put it in metal or carbon fiber.
Dodge, in its return to the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in 1999, used this kind of Finite Element Analysis to shave months off its ramp-up to competition.
Not only did such wizardry cut time, it also improved consistency in manufacture. Nothing irritates an engineer more than having his design mucked up by a hundred-thousands-of-an-inch mistake in casting. It also irritates the quality control people — and doing that too often can put you in the unemployment line.
The end result is teams now have a way to input massive engineering information — whether it is CAD models, CAM programs, digital simulation data, engineering reports or process matrices — into their computers.
Combining all that data into one big picture was a missing step that had to be solved. Teams aren’t just drivers, crew chiefs and mechanics. There are engineers, chassis specialists, aerodynamicists, and so on, and all need access to pieces of that electronic pie, which is stored on more than 25 servers and hundreds of virtual server points at HMS’ campus in Concord, N.C.
So what did Hendrick do? They contacted experts at Siemens — and engineering and electronics company — and found the answer. It’s called the PLM system.
“Without some way to manage all this information, we waste time and sometimes people aren’t looking at the latest version of what they need,” said Hendrick Motorsports application manager Jim McKenzie. “If we have a problem at the race track, we have three days — at most — to fix it. If you spend a few hours of that time searching for data, it can really handicap you.”
Say hello to Teamcenter, Siemens’ product lifecycle management digital enterprise backbone. In five months, with help from the Siemens techs, it was up and running. It is keyword-based, which means you can type in something like “Piston HMS 3517,” and it spits out all the relevant data.
And there’s a lot of data. When you can match up a dyno sheet to a particular engine configuration with a parts list and other specs, you’re cooking with gas. That’s what Teamcenter does. You don’t even have to be in the building to access it, either. You can do it remotely, like at Talladega, too. You can dial up a particular configuration (cams, pistons, settings, valve assembly, etc.) and match it to track data, weather factors — the list is endless. It is all done by satellite, too.
The program also allowed for plug and play. New configurations happen all the time, but never as fast as they do now. A generic, base-model engine is the standard, and engineers can switch parts out at random to come up with new ways to make speed. If something fails, the bulk data is there to find the source, and eventually, the solution. It can also identify, through process, other items which might be at risk of failure.
The simplest example is the valve train, traditionally the weakest link in the engine as a whole. A spring or tappet goes funky, and the software can trace the manufacturer, lot number, forging data, and other details of the part. Vendor management has gotten a whole lot easier with this kind of program.
NASCAR has been known, on occasion, to make changes in the rules concerning parts and pieces. Product lifecycle management systems play a big role in this. If NASCAR mandates a change, the PLM system has the ability to incorporate “serialized, as-built configuration data” to the process. What that means is HMS spends a lot of its time remanufacturing parts to fit all scenarios.
The PLM system is useful in myriad other ways, too. You can incorporate and interpret data from other manufacturers, import and export race and test data to work into the mix and even present the data to engineers and crew chiefs in virtually any format, any time. You can send a 3-D image that people who don’t know a slide rule from a ski pole can understand and manipulate. That greatly enhances the speed of the work flow, as you might imagine.
“Sometimes within a week, we have to have a new part designed, built, tested and put in place before the next race,” McKenzie said. “Having Teamcenter manage the engineering review cycle could save us half a day or more in getting that done.”
It’s a brave new world — one that men like Yunick could not possibly have envisioned back when they were making everything by hand.