NEW YORK – It’s only halfway through the 2010 Red Bull Air Race World Championship but already we’ve seen a record number of engine replacements due to the teams’ insatiable appetite for horsepower, or in some cases, just plain bad luck.
Team Chambliss tech Jason Respo has got this time-consuming task down to a fine art, switching Lycoming engines in a matter of hours. He’s hoping the most recent motor installed for the New York race will be worth all those long nights in the hangar.
The performance-hungry American team is all about horsepower and has invested significantly in the development of a super-tuned powerplant to help them move up from the middle of the pack this year. It hasn’t been without problems though. “We’ve had three engine swaps so far this year including taking one off and putting it back on, plus I did a couple in the off-season,” says Resop. “It’s a theme that I don’t particularly like but it’s all been necessary. I don’t mind doing it from a safety standpoint and Kirby trusts me 100 per cent so I don’t want to let him down.”
It’s not exactly as easy as ‘plug-and-play’ when you’re hooking up a new lump of metal though, as Resop knows only too well. “The basic engine swap is quick but there are tons of little things that can take forever,” he explains. “The more you can minimize those things, the faster you can do it. We’ve made it a lot easier, having done it so much. Before we put the engine back in, we look at the two of them together on the floor and say ‘OK this needs to go on’ as it’s much easier to do that when it’s not in the aircraft. There’s not a lot of room to work in there once the engine is in.”
Attached to the horizontally-opposed or ‘flat’ engine are Medusa-like clusters of hoses and wires connecting mechanical and electronic components as well as engine monitoring equipment. This is the fiddly part and can add hours to the basic installation. “It’s mostly the accessories – like the alternator or other instruments – and fittings that are the issue. We’ve got a totally different fuel pump on this new engine, a completely different design. The hoses are all different sizes. That’s part of us upgrading next year as they will all have the same stuff.”
Matching correctly-angled hoses and tying up all the wires are additional headaches for the techs. Fittings are often straight or 90-degrees but will inevitably vary from one engine to the next. “The more you can have the same on both, the better,” advises Resop. “We’ve also had the same air intake system for all engines so each time we’ve changed the engine we’ve had to drop that and put it on the new one. Next year we’ll probably have another intake system so it takes that whole part out of it.”
Although the basics of the aircraft engines are the same, the individual teams’ approach to gaining power varies hugely and there can be all sorts of weird and wonderful components used. However, all engines and mods must comply with the detailed Part E Red Bull Air Race technical regulations to maintain safety. “The technology we’re using now, we’re putting in a lot of nice additional parts,” says the tech. “I think though it will get to the point where we have a separate engine mount that we can take straight off the frame and then bolt the new one back on. Really what you want is all quick-disconnect parts, plug a couple of hoses in and off you go.”
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