Red Bull Air Race gives a nod to its Edwardian heritage
SALZBURG, Austria – This month sees the 100 year anniversary of the first ever international air racing competition, held in Reims, France in August 1909 as part of a week-long celebration of aerial advancement, or the ‘Grande Semaine d’Aviation’ as it was called. Today’s interpretation of the competition format, the Red Bull Air Race, is a little more dynamic than the comparatively sedate event of 1909 and certainly a lot faster... four times faster in fact.
As the Red Bull Air Race World Championship reaches a vast global audience of over 300 million in more than 180 countries via its television programme, three-dimensional racing has returned to its former glory as a captivating form of motorsport that would make the Edwardian pioneers proud. The Red Bull Air Race attracts an average audience of 400,000 at each race. Even back in 1909 in Reims the air race drew in a crowd of 300,000. It seems spectators have always loved watching this type of motorsport and the Red Bull Air Race has captured that sense of excitement and entertainment in its modern-day format.
Blueprint for racing
The 1909 contest provided the blueprint for today’s race environment with the machines used showcasing the very latest in airframe and engine technology. Today’s Edge 540 and MXS-R race planes are equally at the forefront of aerodynamic and mechanical aviation technology and have been continuously refined to push the boundaries further. Those involved in driving the technology forward agree the sport is at the cutting edge of aerobatic aircraft development.
In the Red Bull Air Race, the secret to race plane success is a good power to weight ratio. By stipulating a minimum race weight of 540kg for the planes, the management can ensure the teams do not ever risk safety in the pursuit of speed. Having a feather-light plane and phenomenal amounts of horsepower up front is tempting but clearly not a wise move, as the teams are fully aware. In 1909, things were a bit different and the pilots didn’t have a century of flight to review in order to assess these factors – they really were the pioneers and were out on a limb. Luckily the power available at the time was no more than 50hp, which is a world apart from the 300hp – and more – available to today’s race pilots.
Race format
Governed in 1909 – as today – by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the rules stated that countries could each enter a team of up to three pilots in the competition. For the French pilots, eager to display their prowess on home turf no doubt, there was an abundance of potential competitors and so an elimination round took place. In stark contrast to the stringent safety measures employed today by Red Bull Air Race, the 1909 pilots flew the elimination rounds in shockingly bad weather and the airfield became flooded making takeoffs and landings difficult.
The Qualification sessions in today’s race format provides a chance for competitors to prove their worth and battle for a place in the latter Top 12 and Super 8 rounds. The four fastest pilots then move into the Final 4 and the overall winner is the fastest pilot from this race. The time difference between the top pilot and second, third and fourth is often only a fraction of a second. Back in 1909, the winner was almost 6 seconds ahead of the second place pilot – which is an eternity in the context of modern-day racing.
For those competing in the Reims race, the pilots had to fly a course covering 20km. On average it took 15 minutes to complete which is around a 1km every 47 seconds. Today’s race pilots whizz through the race tracks covering 1km every 12.8 seconds.
Back to the future
The most famous of the successful French entrants was Louis Blériot, who just a month earlier had been the first pilot to fly across the English Channel. He flew his own design, the Blériot XI, which was a 28hp rotary-engined contraption that could reach a maximum speed of around 75km/h. Sadly for him, American pilot Glen Curtiss went all out in the race, banking hard to pass around the turns as efficiently as possible, and was the first recipient of the Gordon Bennett Trophy, stealing the Frenchman’s glory.
Curtiss had quickly identified the need to improve his race plane while at Reims and carried out technical modifications in secret to squeeze more power from his Reims Racer biplane. He also tried to lighten the machine where possible, aware that the single-winged competitors may have had a speed advantage at the start of the course. Maybe the secretive behaviour of the Red Bull Air Race technicians is not that surprising after all?
Swedish pilot Mikael Carlson rebuilt a version of the iconic Blériot XI plane many years ago and recently flew it at the AirPower show in Zeltweg, Austria to demonstrate its performance against the hugely refined race planes we see in the Red Bull Air Race today. Carlson flies with a vintage 60hp engine that was installed in the Blériot after the 1909 event and is considered an expert on this type of machine.
“The tricky part of flying the Blériot is when it’s gusty and windy because of the wing-warping not being efficient enough to roll the aircraft,” explains Carlson, who has also built a host of other difficult-to-master historic aircraft. “Also, a modern aircraft is stable in the stall as it drops the nose and helps to regain flying speed. If the engine stops in the Blériot and you lose the slipstream over the tail, you lose lift and can’t get the tail up to push the nose back down. There is no means of controlling pitch and therefore no control of airspeed.”
Wood and canvas to carbon fibre
Carlson’s explanation highlights the huge void between his machine and those flown in today’s Red Bull Air Race, which are made of either a steel tube frame or carbon fibre construction with carbon fibre wings for added stability and reduced weight. It’s a far cry from the open box metal frame with wood and canvas wings that Blériot raced in Reims and indicates just how far the sport has come in its first century.
Current day race pilot Nigel Lamb (UK) can recognise the challenges Carlson faces and is full of admiration for the piloting skills of the air racing pioneers. “Flying a machine from that era takes huge amounts of skill and seeing Mikael flying the Blériot 100 years later is remarkable” says Lamb, who has watched many of Carlson’s air displays. “I imagine the Blériot is very hard to fly from a controllability point of view. Racing one of those would have been very difficult as with even with the tiniest amount of turbulence or wind shear it would be tough to control in the course. Even turning around becomes a challenge. Today everything happens so quickly that we don’t have time to think twice about those issues – we have the opposite challenge. Our race planes are so sensitive that you can easily over-control with the tiniest control inputs.”
Those daring, yet skilful, pilots who flew in the world’s first international air race were subjected to rather tame G forces of up to 2G so it may have been incomprehensible at the time to imagine their future protégés would pull up to 12G doing the same thing... but you can be sure they were just as excited about the future of air racing as the Red Bull Air Race pilots are today.
“Given the vast differences between racing in 1909 and today, trying to predict what could happen in the next 100 years in terms of technology is only limited by our imagination,” Lamb says.
Giant leaps
Aircraft designer Eric Zivko, the creator of the Edge 540, is certainly not limited in terms of his visionary plans for the future. “I’m looking five, six, seven years down the line in terms of ideas for race planes,” he explains. “Collectively we are pushing the boundaries and with further investment I think we’ll take some giant leaps in the future.”
Probably the biggest developments in aircraft design over the past century can be attributed to computerised methods of performance analysis. “Aerodynamics is the area which I believe has changed the most and computers have played a big part in this,” starts Eric, before describing a system known as CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) which allows designers to theoretically test the aerodynamic performance of their designs without the element of ‘trial and error’ that characterised the nature of aircraft design in the earlier part of the century.
The unassuming man behind the Red Bull Air Race’s first significant race aircraft is excited about the next generation of Edge race planes but is well aware that the environment in which to experiment has drastically changed since 1909. “Racing nowadays is definitely still about experimentation, but in a safe manner.”
Comments
Add a comment