Amzel Ltd.

23/03/2016

Lister Storm LMP. This was one of my favourite projects. I had a very small team - 2 of us in my office in Norfolk to start with, then joined by a third, with assistance towards the end of the project by Lister's design draughtsman working at their place down in Surrey. Laurence Pearce left me to get on with it, and it was a real bonus to be remote from his workshop. We got along fine, by and large, and it was only when I moved down to Leatherhead for the build that there was some friction. In fact, the build was remarkably smooth, and the car went together very well.

Here are links to a two-part magazine piece I wrote a while ago:
http://docdro.id/Ptf86LA
http://docdro.id/tCrA0aY

View and download lister1insight.pdf on DocDroid

23/03/2016

Part 2

View and download lister2insight.pdf on DocDroid

18/02/2016

Ni**od contd/ Richard Williams' team then became the A-M works team, and the doors closed on our little workshop in Fauld. Despite the fact that the C83 never reached the track, and despite the fact that I'd uprooted my family and moved them to rural north Staffordshire (which is lovely by the way) for a job that evaporated after a year, I was, and am, proud of the design. Who knows if it would have won races, but there were some good ideas in there.

18/02/2016

Ni**od contd/ The C83 was not an Aston Martin works supported programme. Aston Martin Tickford built the engine, based on the 5.3 litre V8 road car unit, and I imagine there was some support from A-M on that front. Robin Hamilton, boss of Ni**od, approached Victor Gauntlett, Aston Martin chairman, in an effort to get works backing. I wasn't present at the meeting, but I gather Gauntlett visited with Ray Mallock and Richard Williams, who were developing their own version of the first Ni**od Group C chassis. They looked at my design and Gauntlett turned down Robin's request. It was understandable - apparently to them, it looked like a spaceship (which it was, compared with the very traditional car they were used to) and they probably thought I was a space cadet (and there's also some truth in that - I was young and fairly inexperienced). The refusal killed the project.

16/02/2016

Ni**od contd/ A clean underbody meant keeping the rear suspension above the diffuser. That necessitated a very high lower wishbone - only a little lower than the driveshaft. I'd had experience of that with the Lola T600 GTP, on which I was Project Engineer. That car was very much Eric Broadley's design, and I was detailing his schemes. Eric once told me that I tried too hard. That comment said as much about him as about me, I felt. Eric was a remarkable designer, of great flair. His schemes, though you could say they looked messy, were done incredibly swiftly and very accurately. I was constantly amazed by him. However, he tended not to get bogged down in the detail. I, on the other hand, tended to sweat the small stuff. I think the arrangement worked well on the whole. But I knew I wasn't going to get the opportunity to stretch myself at Lola, which is why I took the gamble on Ni**od.

The high rear lower wishbone meant a high rear top wishbone, to get enough separation to give a rigid installation. This was the reason for the hybrid magnesium/carbon fibre bellhousing. The lower section was a machined magnesium casting, linking the engine with the Hewland gearbox, and carrying the lower wishbone. The upper part was a carbon prepreg moulding which had the wings that I described earlier, reaching out to the outer corners of the extended chassis and the tubular stays. It also provided a mounting for the top wishbone. In those days, it was very unusual to have a bespoke gearbox case, with the suspension mounts placed to suit your installation: certainly it was out of the question for us at Ni**od, with little money and a design staff of one. You had to figure a way to make your geometry work with whatever fixings Hewland saw fit to put on their boxes, or get creative in other ways. Having said that, the VG was a good gearbox in terms of its day job..

I'm making it sound as though those parts actually existed. Unfortunately, they didn't. They were never made, and the company ran out of money and time before we saw either the casting or the moulding. Unfortunately, that applies to a lot of this car. Sadly, it was a paper project to a large degree. I regret that, but it happened quite a lot in those days, when technical regulations were quite free and small outfits still saw some hope of being competitive at a high level, but often over-reached themselves.

14/02/2016

Ni**od contd/ The floor (carbon-kevlar hybrid prepreg/aluminium honeycomb) of the chassis kicked up at the legal minimum distance from the front axle, and continued back past the firewall, to the back of the engine. Imagine the bed of a pick-up truck, but angled to create a diffuser: it was cut away in the centre to clear the engine block and sump. This was a key part of the structure of the engine bay, providing the lateral stiffness and strength. The vertical stiffness and strength were supplied by 2 large diameter tubes, from the rear top corners of the roof down to the rear outer corners of the floor. The wings of the gearbox adaptor/bellhousing picked up from those points. The front of the engine had a shear plate, which fixed to two points in the floor, near to the firewall. and those points were braced back to the chassis. So the engine contributed to the stiffness, but was not the complete structure as was the case for the Cosworth DFL.

The idea was to make the underbody as clean as possible, and maximise the "kick point" area, around where the diffuser starts. This is the part of the underbody where the lowest pressures are seen. You can see from the photo the effect on the flow-viz of the acceleration of the air as it crosses the kick point. The model was pretty crude, but had the wind tunnel programme continued I would have addressed the other flow issues you can see there, and tried to use the vortex created by the air spilling in from the sides.

14/02/2016

Ni**od contd/ Here are the photos of the chassis. As I said they are horribly under-exposed, the reason being that I took them in a hurry just before they closed the workshop doors for the last time. I hope you can make out some of the detail. As I said previously, the idea was to eliminate as far as possible the weak zone of the conventional A-pillar. so the cantrail, or screen header, virtually meets the front top corner of the door aperture. Around the door opening was a box section, and the cant rail itself was a deep beam. There was no steel roll cage. At the time it felt quite adventurous to make the screen pillars so thick, but I worked out that the driver could still see his aiming points and his mirrors, which was all he needed to see. And by today's standards, it would be way too generous.

The chassis, which was made by Advanced Composites, was pretty light, which I felt was necessary because the engine was very heavy. If I remember correctly, the Aston Martin engine weighed about 220kgs. The Cosworth DFL of the time weighed about 150kgs. We couldn't hope to find all that 70kgs in the chassis alone, but it was a good start.

12/02/2016

This was an interesting project from 2009 - a ultra-efficient city car, powered by a H2 fuel cell, with super-capacitors for energy storage. It was a collaborative project and the consortium comprised OSCar Automotive (for whom I was working), Oxford University (whose lead was Dr. Tim Woolmer: he subsequently started Oxford YASA Motors), Cranfield University, and BOC.

The deliverable was initially going to be purely a technology demonstrator - sort of a flying bedstead - to show the efficiency of the HFC-supercap-YASA motor powertrain, and the energy network prociple which permitted very efficient energy recovery. However, it soon became more ambitious, and we decided to produce a credible concept vehicle. I was tasked with the design of the vehicle, and came up with a design concept which packaged the above components (fuel cell, H2 tank, supercaps, control electronics) and running gear, plus two occupants and a little luggage space, in the minimum volume. I also had to think about weight distribution, since that affects the energy harvesting under braking. With optimum system efficiency being the target, I also wanted minimum aero drag. I produced an external envelope with which Jonny Holt worked to produce the pretty shape you see in the photo.

I then got into detailing the suspension. The electromagnetic modelling of the YASA motor was by then very refined, but no physical motor had been designed. I volunteered for that, and I found it very interesting - new territory for me. The YASA principle suited wheel motors, so I integrated them into the suspension upright. The suspension itself was semi-leading arms at the front, and semi-trailing at the rear. That was mainly for packaging reason, but also to use the torque reactions from the wheel motors to stabilise the vehicle under acceleration and braking. One problem that couldn't be solved, however, was the horribly high unsprung:sprung weight ratio, since the complete car weighed around 350kg, if memory serves.

Riversimple (www.riversimple.com) are about to launch a new car. It will be a fully type-approved 2-seater. "My" car has served as a powertrain mule but will now be retired.

11/02/2016

Ni**od contd/ A major drawback with the Group C cars of that era (and the LMP cars of today) was aerodynamic pitch and heave sensitivity. I'd read about an active ride system that AP were developing, basically for use on road vehicles such as ambulances. It was purely mechanical, with damped inertia valves to discriminate between road-induced and acceleration induced ride level changes. I visited AP, and drove the road car that had been fitted with the system. I felt it would be a major performance advantage, but unfortunately a tiny, relatively poorly resourced, team such as Ni**od couldn't compete with Williams Grand Prix, who shortly after that bought the rights to the system. It was the start of them developing an active ride system for their F1 car.

11/02/2016

11/02/2016

More on the Ni**od aero. The gap between the basic body shape and the base of the rear half of the front fender "bubble", which is visible in some of these photos, is not poor model-making, it was there to vent the front wheelarches. My alternative to louvres.