One of the major talking points ahead of the FIA World Endurance Championship’s visit to Mexico is the impact that altitude will have on oil and engine cooling. Aston Martin Racing’s Technical Director Dan Sayers explains how the teams are preparing for their journey into the unknown.
The Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez sits almost 2,230 metres above sea level, making it the highest event on the WEC calendar. Although teams can use simulations to model the effects of the low air density, they will only discover the true extent when the cars run for the first time in Thursday practice.
Aston Martin have been making extensive preparations for several months in order to be ready for Mexico, but as Sayers explains, it’s not only the power output that will have to be closely monitored.
“Obviously power will be quite significantly reduced, but it’s going to be all about engine cooling, brake cooling, driver cooling and the gearbox as well, so we’ll be analysing the temperatures and trying to reduce them,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll have a few issues and have to add extra ducting, electrical fans and there are other methods we’re discussing in the working group as well.
“You can anticipate it to a certain degree, but we haven’t got much data on that circuit. Brake temperatures are something in particular we haven’t got a lot of information on – we anticipate that temperatures are going be higher, which could increase pad wear – so we’re having to anticipate having issues with lots of things to at least have a method of reducing temperatures and making it last for the duration of the six hours.”
Sayers added that he doesn’t expect to see significant variation amongst the turbo-charged and normally aspirated entries in the GTE-Pro class, but concedes that some cars will inevitably perform better at altitude than others.
“The turbo cars will be using a boost ratio, so in theory they should all lose the same amount of power, but some will definitely have more cooling capacity than others,” he said.
“It is going to be quite different, a big learning curve in FP1 to get everything up and running because you want it sorted by FP2 and FP3 to get some long runs in. Any problems should be apparent fairly quickly, but if you’re still struggling in FP3 then you’re in a bit of trouble!”
