Every year, racers attend various trade shows to see the latest and greatest go-fast hardware. In past issues of Circle Track, we've outlined our aisle-crawling visits and highlighted interesting products from SEMA, PRI, and our Stock Car Racing Expo shows. But winning races isn't only about getting the right combination of hard parts together. It's also about acquiring motorsports technical knowledge-mental software as it were.
Stepping off the miles of aisles of shiny parts at trade shows taxes the limits of your purchasing power and soles. Sitting in on the lectures at the SAE's (Society of Automotive Engineers) Motorsports Engineering Conference and Exhibition, and the Advanced Engine Technology Conference (AETC) presented by SuperFlow, exercises your mind and expands your knowledge of motorsports. I went to both for the first time this year and offer here some highlights and technical thumbnails from the eight total days of hyper-information transfer. You must put your mind in "qualifying trim" and hang on when immersing yourself at these two impressive technical gatherings.
SAE Motorsports Engineering Conference Assembled every two years, and in 2002 moved to Indianapolis to link up with PRI, this is four days of concentrated, high-end racing information and theory from an engineering and academic point of view. The driving model of this conference is the exchange of ideas and results from testing and modeling. A rough head count put it at about 600-plus attendees.
Presented by the 80,000-member Society of Automotive Engineers, it has strong OEM presence and support, particularly from the United States' Big Three: Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler. Its technical emphasis has an international flavor as it leans toward open wheel racing at the highest levels such as Formula 1 and CART. Yet, this year there were technical seminars about Sprint Car aero, GM's Ecotec engine in drag racing, and its Vortec 5700 in the ASA. Racing safety was also a prime subject, and that's applicable across all racing series.
If you're comfortable attending college-level courses, not intimidated by computer simulations being applied to racing issues (and the resulting generic PowerPoint presentations stuffed with graphs), and appreciate the quirky exactitude of engineers in the flesh, you are going to revel in this conference. It reminded me of when I worked with computer science researchers in the '80s-steel-trap minds examining every nuance of a presentation and ready to ask probing questions if a point isn't exactly clear.
This can be an intimidating arena, but the prime motivation is pursuing the best information available on a racing subject, not filleting the messenger. That's not to say that every presentation was greeted with slavish acceptance; there were certainly some counterarguments raised in the safety seminars about test data results. Not fisticuffs, you understand, but dueling data and theories, nonetheless.
What prevents this all from drying out your brain like a technical sandstorm is that everyone and every topic is about going faster as efficiently and safely as possible. If you do manage to get bored (or baffled) by the technical papers, there is a compact exhibition area to marvel. Where else can a display by a firm that used to do very high-speed multichannel data acquisition for missile launches (and now has a detuned, but seemingly nuclear-hardened unit for race cars) sit next to a battery-powered dragster with a DC motor drive? So, under all the academic and theoretical trim are the same competitive motivations that jazz the local Saturday-night racer-these guys just have (much) bigger budgets and superior modeling tools.