Should I worry about you Simon?!
Passion is a great thing, I like a man on a mission.
Good luck!
Ian
LOL!
You’re quite mental.
Keep it up.
This crank of yours Simon… is that the same one you asked NME to make? Who is making it for you now?
Simon - please, please stop with your preaching�s. We have heard them all before, over and over.
Also, stop comparing Judd engines to BTCC spec Honda as none of us are going to ever run engines like that, nor do they tell you anything about the base engines that we all use. Trawling up second hand knowledge about BTCC cars is simply irrelevant.
If you want to compare reliability then take a look at Freelanders and Honda Civics or the 60 odd Honda Elises out there (the ones with properly manufactured kits) and compare them to 60 odd STANDARD Elises.
Well no luck, so the paragraph goes…
"So far the Judd BTCC engine has never suffered a single failure in the series, whilst the Honda K20 suffered 3 complete failures in ln the 2004 season , its third, and 15 complete failures since the honda first ran in that series.
simon
Hi Simon,
I don’t think it is quite correct to draw parallels between race engines and road engines. You have quoted reliability, but not power. Any race team in the world will trade a certain amount of reliability for an amount of performance if that is the difference between winning race or coming nowhere in a tight formula.
In short, Matt Neal has out-performed Rob Collard in 13 out of the 15 rounds this year that Rob has contested. Indeed, Matt Neal currently leads the drivers championship and Team Halfords lead the team championship.
Now then, seeing as neither you nor I know the power outputs of both, I’d have to say that I’d go with the Honda unit. You can’t win races and lead championships with a bad engine.
Also, Judd is always going to say nice things about the engine because they are contracted to develop it. They originally developed a 2litre unit speculatively for single make running (MG Rover) and kit car based series as it was a widely accepted engine. I also know that they had a lot of trouble initially getting it to run reliably. However, I would imagine that this became the basis of their BTCC engine. If they were choose an engine for outright performance, I’d be surprised if they made the same choice.
To my mind, the Honda units performance is proven. The K-series, at that kind of power output, is not.
For the record, I still have K-series and don’t intend to change it in the near future. It IS a great engine, but only in its own context. Whether agricultural or not, the Honda is a very impressive piece of road car engineering.
Simon,
The thing that worries me about your posts is that some are obviously based in fact, but there is always an evidence of smoke-screening. e.g
What is it with a poorly toleranced bottom end that makes it ‘difficult to drive’? Many top end factors effect driveconditions, e.g. transient fuelling, air velocity / fuel atomisation etc, but very few, if any, bottom end (which normally only has an input into peak power and reliability).
F1 engines are not ‘impossibly sophisticated’, because (a) ‘impossibly’ states that they would not be possible and (b) they are based on improvements to manufacturing processes, materials and either iterative or numerical development. In a lot of cases the changes are very subtle, but, for the most part the components are superficially very similar. The devil is in the detail.
Finally, stating that stress was reduced by 98% is quite a claim. What stress do you mean and how did you measure it?
I’m honestly not trying to undermine your interest or development, but I am very keen on splitting theoretical claims from measured benefit.
You can definitely aruge with the reliability if the power of the comparison is poorer. As said, I’d rather have a higher powered motor with a low but existent failure rate, than a poorer engine without any failures. Also, it is quite possible that the engine weight is not an issue, particularly if it is low in the engine and if the car is ballasted back up to minimum weight anyway.
Also, Judd had developed an 2 litre K well before MG’s interest in BTCC, in fact they started on it to speculatively develop a project after losing the Nissan BTCC deal in 1998. Very few engine programs in the BTCC are run for the badging manufacturer - most are done directly for the teams contracted to run the ‘works’ program.
This is exactly it. In the paragraph where you mentioned reducing stress you didn’t mention dynamic load stress, and ditto for the driveability. This is why it is difficult to seperate fact from fiction. Also, whilst I completely agree a poorly balanced engine is unpleasent it doesn’t affect the ‘driveability’ in a performance sense unless it causes a failure. I agree that for any engine it is extremely undesirable and I am completely aware of the mathematics.
Finally, I believe I have a vague idea as to how complicated a Formula 1 engine is, as I am a Senior Performance Development Engineer for Cosworth Ltd and have worked on a fair number of the bits you mention, in F1 and in IRL and CART.
We can certainly bounce back and forth all day.
Whilst you don’t have to write everything out each time, it is important to either re-mention the salient fact(s) or refer to another thread. If the data is robust then it will aid your case, otherwise it looks like a sweeping statement.
As stated, I’m certainly not arguing against you but am merely trying to get to facts. I appreciate that your are trying to do the same thing and therefore in this regard we sing off the same hymn sheet. However, I think you have to be very careful about claims. For instance, stating that none of your engines will ever have HGF is implausible - what happens for instance if there is a batch problem with gaskets? You will claim its technically not your fault, as it may not be, but it is a valid failure as far as the owner is concerned.
My advice, and you definitely don’t have to pay any attention, is to fully substantiate anything you say with only tested examples (unless clearly presenting it as a numerical or theoretical idea, and therefore subject to not actually working in practice!) and never make a statement that ‘X’ will NEVER/ALWAYS happen as this will, eventually, be disproven (whether you agree or not) and no-one will believe the other claims.
Even better than all the above is to keep quiet about what you are doing (at least on the forums), produce the Honda-humbler and then sit back and answer questions later. Your work will speak for you without all the arguments and you will be a hero. Alternatively, you won’t come out of it a hero, but you’ll have learnt a lot and very few people will be the wiser…
At that time I was F1 track based for Jag, so I’m afraid I don’t know. As rule we make cranks in-house and have done for a long while, although there are exceptions.