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News | 25/09/2011

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Lotus Renault GP strategic partner Total regularly offers F1 news on its site, with information ranging from the relationship between fuel and F1 to interviews with their leading scientific delegate. This week Philippe Girard, Total's Assistant Scientific Director, talked about what motivates Total's involvement in motor racing: designing the best possible products for consumers.

What would happen if ordinary consumers used motor racing oil in their engines?
PG: Their engines would run smoothly. They'd just have to change the oil a lot more often.

And if Vitaly Petrov's F1 car used "conventional" oil?
PG: The V8 would run, but because the viscosity would be far from optimal, the engine wouldn't deliver the power needed.

What type of racing offers the biggest benefits for series-produced engines?
PG: The main benefit motor racing gives series-produced engines is methods and procedures. Because our engineers are focused on "cars" and "applications," they can develop specific tests that are representative of circuit or regular road conditions. We develop test methods and procedures for motor racing, to study or simulate friction conditions for different engine components and then adapt these methods to series-produced components. That saves us a lot of time. It's an important two-way advantage, not just for the engineers' research and development process, but also for technical solutions related to testing and formulating lubricants and greases.

When designing vehicles, both for the road and racing, computer tools are critical assets. Have computers made lab experiments obsolete in your area too?
PG: More and more, we're using digital simulations to fast track optimisation of a development when we know that the mathematical models are accurate. For example, computers let us identify the optimum viscosity of oil films faster. We started doing this sort of study for combustion four years ago, and extended it to lubricants for all types of bearings in 2005. Today, formulators use this tool to optimise lubricant bases. But simulations have to be accompanied by actual physical experiments. It's the combination of the two that allows us to develop the most appropriate products.

Researchers have already developed highly competitive products for motor racing applications. Now they are working on unlocking that little extra bit of improvement. Is it the same for series-produced components?
PG: For a specific mechanical configuration, as is often the case in racing, there is less and less margin for potential improvements offered by lubricants. For series-produced vehicles, we are working hand-in-hand with carmakers. When mechanical design and lubricants evolve jointly, there are big benefits, especially in terms of carbon emissions. Without this common approach however, no progress can be made. In series-produced vehicles, lubricants have to meet the specifications of several carmakers. That limits the specific features of the product, because we have to come up with a compromise. But the next ten years could see the emergence of dedicated lubricants developed for specific applications. This would deliver fairly spectacular gains, all due to what's learned in motor racing.

Motor racing requires constant responsiveness - is the world of regular cars less quick to change?
PG: The thing that takes the longest for series-produced products is the validation process for new products. It has to be broad, because we have to deliver reliability for an oil change around every 30,000 kilometers and an engine lifetime of 300,000 kilometers. Simulations are only used in motor racing. Today, given the changes in specifications for engines designed by leading carmakers, our formulations have a very short lifetime of around two to four years, depending on the product, which itself takes three years to develop. That's down from at least five years in the past. Given the time it takes for carmakers to validate products, we have to anticipate needs and fine-tune products over the shortest possible period — just like in motor racing.

To find out more on Total's involvement with LRGP, click here.