Cold And Lifeless?

COLD AND LIFELESS?

IGNITION

TDC

NOPE. ENGINEERING IS THE HEAT OF LIFE

KEVIN CAMERON

A11 my life I have been told by artier folk that engineering is cold and lifeless. They, in their chambray shirts, have asked me how l can occupy myself with "dead" materials, such as aluminum, steel and titanium, rather than "living wood." Even my computer is wrong—a pedestrian HP instead of a quirky, creative Mac. My dear old dad expressed dismay that his son would "rather overhaul an engine than go fly fishing."

What could be hotter and more full of life than riding a motorbike? To flick into corners with the greatest of ease, with your own quite modest muscular power multiplied by the complex chemistry occurring in your engine’s cylinders? Horseback riding—the first such power multiplier—is well accepted as an art, right up there with Henry Moore’s mighty but puzzling sculptures and Beethoven’s bang-crashing 9th Symphony.

Well, shucks, folks, beauty is where you find it. I propose that Jorge Lorenzo, Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa pull forth the superb beauty of controlled motion from the chaos of all other possible motions.

They are dancers on machines, living proof that perfection, even if unattainable, does not have to be too far away.

Engineering is neither cold nor lifeless, as my dad well knew. As a boy, he went often to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, summoned by the strong emotion of following the actions of the Millers and Duesenbergs of that time. How do I know? He went to Cape Canaveral in July of 1969 and was among the throng assembled to see men leave earth to fly to the moon, transported by engineering (and a fair amount of national treasure). When Apollo 11’s five F-i rocket engines ignited and their great roar and cracking of the air bore the 3100-ton Saturn V into the sky, my dad looked around at his fellow worshippers and saw that “there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.” That grand accomplishment of our species filled everyone present with powerful emotions that squeezed hot tears from their eyes.

One day in 1983,1 finally realized that Freddie Spencer was applying throttle super early in corners, not because early is good and earlier must be better. He was doing this because, at his higher-than-normal entry speed, he would lose the front if he didn’t transfer some weight off of that overloaded front tire with some throttle. The elegance of what he was doing stayed with me all that day—like a powerful dream that fades only slowly. I walked up and down in my house, elated, drinking coffee, thinking my own thoughts.

Years later, Spencer told me how he developed this method on a couple of Kentucky dirt tracks that were more elliptical than oval.

“I was turning for a long time, and I could kind of play with the throttle,” he said.

Trying such a thing on pavement was a leap. Spencer made it work at an AMA national and went on to use it to win three world championships.

Thinking of this, I considered the finish order of this year’s Sachsenring MotoGP race. The winner was 20-year-old Marc Marquez, Honda’s new hire. The romantic belief is that the “young gun” is hot and hungry, while his older opponents are cooling, losing their thirst for danger, their trophy cabinets crammed with engraved silver pots and jars. According to this popular theory, winning has nothing to do with skill or understanding; it’s just a matter of squeezing out 110 percent, that he who slides and wobbles most wins the race.

Oh, yeah? Then why is it so often true that the winner looks the smoothest, the most in control? And why is it the men following him are the ones wobbling and sliding in their efforts to keep up? At Valencia, at the end of 2004, there was Valentino Rossi, smooth and stable, followed by men who were clearly riding harder, and therefore sliding and wobbling more the farther they were from the front. This was backward! That was a year of only slightly tamed 990CC MotoGP bikes, so the non-virtual powerbands of that time were still rich with steep places that constantly threatened to kick the back tire loose during off-corner accel eration. Rossi and crew chief Jeremy Burgess had carefully used the laptop to soften their engine's torque in those places. With more usable power, Rossi used more. Those behind him, with less usable power, had to use less.

BY THE NUMBERS

1:29.210

WAYNE RAINEY’S POLE-WINNING TIME FOR THE 1988 USGP AT LAGUNA SECA. AVERAGE SPEED: 88.615 MPH

1:21.176

STEFAN BRADL'S POLE AT THE SAME TRACK, THIS YEAR. AVERAGE SPEED: 99.280 MPH

12

PERCENT INCREASE OF BRADL'S AVERAGE SPEED OVER RAINEY'S

I watched one of Valentino's com petitors that day slowly lose positions. He was riding too hard, sliding and spinning. Each time he lost a place, he worked harder not to lose another place, and thereby fatigued his tire even faster. As a rider tries harder and harder, he makes more and bigger mistakes-mistakes that take time to gather up. This causes his lap times to vary more and more. Finally, he makes a mistake big enough to put himself off. That is what happened.

This underlined for me the relative value of head versus heart in racing. We want to believe what the success coaches tell us, that we can achieve

our goals by pure yearning. Lovely thought, but sorry, I'll take the laptop.

Pratt & Whitney's R-2800 radial piston engine powered such iconic aircraft as the P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair and the classic longserving DC-6 airliner. Early in the i8-cylinder engine's development, engineers knew the trickiness of coupling a thumping piston engine to a flexible metal propeller. Each combustion "thump" accelerated the prop hub, slightly bending the blades as they were momentarily left behind. Months of intensive effort, combining analysis and testing, were required to develop and tune "counter-vibrators7 the massive swinging pendulums attached to the crankshaft. Their cyclic motions would cancel enough of the engine's thumping to isolate prop blades from vibrations that would otherwise quickly fatigue and break them.

Every four-stroke motorcycle engine today contains a miniature

THEY ARE DANE~ MACH NE~, LIV NC PRUDE I A~ PER FELT UN, EVEN UNAI lAIN AE~LE, DOES NOT HAVE TO BE TOO FAR AWAY.

version of this problem: its cam drive. The crank moves in a series of impulses, while the cams resist strongly as each valve is acceler ated up off its seat, then reverse as each valve returns energy in closing. Especially in racing, the drive connecting the two complex motions can be an extremely diffi cult problem. Every engine's design must be pushed through this. Today, analysis is performed by computer, but when it falls off the end of its finite drop-down menu, an imaginative human mind must work out a fresh approach. Just as the race continues while a rider searches for ways to make his tire last, so the cam-drive engineering team must keep pace with the rest of engine development, through ideas, analysis and testing. Life is hot. Engineering-thinking and experimenting your way to suc cess-is an integral, essential part of that hea`t. CMI