When a Diesel DOMINATED at Le Mans

look at this it's a diesel race car and it was rapid Audi in 2006 decided that diesel isn't the fuel of Satan and thought it could be the recipe for a Le Mans color that could go fast but efficiently and it was they created a monster a 5.5 liter V12 turbo diesel and it created enough torque to make the earth spin just a little bit faster well maybe I made that up but it was quick in addition to the history made by bringing a diesel-powered car to overall victory in LaSalle it takes a special kind of stubbornness to decide that the way it's been done for decades is in the best way Audi looked at the Decades of petrol-powered winning Limon cars and decided to do it differently and that's what great innovators do an Audi are no different I wonder what they're gonna do in F1 and it's not like they really needed to innovate the Audi teams had been winning for years the R8 series of cars had one limo in 2000 2001 2002 2004 and 2005. and in 2003 it was beaten by the Bentley Speed eight a super cool looking car that essentially was an Audi underneath and yes the R8 Road car took its name from the R8 race car not the other way around so they weren't exactly struggling with the r10 which was the Redevelopment of the R8 they went a bit mad but why because petrol engines work really well first thing about petrol engines is that they can rev really high meaning they typically create more Peak pad than diesel engine the parts inside the petrol engine are also relatively light meaning that they can rev faster and be more responsive for a driver but they also allow Engineers to get the overall engine that bit lighter petrol engines are also very Compact and in a race car getting everything to fit well is tricky a smaller engine allows the engineers to mount it lower in the car for better weight distribution as well as allowing more space for Freedom with aerodynamics then there's a small fact that petrol engines have been this staple for years manufacturers know how to make high performance petrol engines work they know how to make them powerful responsive and reliable so why did Audi decide to experiment with a diesel well there's another Factor here that we haven't mentioned a limol it's Unique because pit stops are a massive deal when you're Racing for 24 hours straight in a Sprint race like F1 you start with a full tank of fuel and you run that fuel for the entire race well that's the case at the moment it wasn't always that way but you get my point fuel efficiency isn't that much of a factor whereas overall engine performance is much more important but at Le Mall the top class pit every 45 minutes or so so in a dry race with no reliability issues they can pit upwards of 30 times another point that it would be wrong not to mention is that at the time over half the road cars that Audi sold were diesel so I guess it would be a case of win on Sunday and sell on Monday now I'm sure you know diesel engines typically produce lower fuel consumption and I own a diesel Road car for that reason and the reason that's possible is that diesel has a higher energy density there is 10 to 15 percent more chemical energy in a liter of diesel than there is in a liter of petrol so when you fill up your 90 liter tank at Le Mans you're getting an advantage straight away more energy per tank but there are other factors that add to this diesel engines run a lower fuel to air ratios so they run leaner meaning you're injecting less fuel per cycle then there's the torque benefit diesels create a load more torque for a few reasons and here's the oily nerdy stuff that I love diesel engines typically run with a longer stroke than ball so the bore is the diameter of your piston and this stroke is how far it travels from the top to the bottom now petrol race engines like the F1 engine that this piston is from run a wide piston so a large ball with a shorter stroke this means they can rev very high creating more power and generating more bangs per second but because the diesel liquid is thicker and burns more slowly you typically engineer them to have longer Strokes so you're pushing the piston for longer per cycle creating more torque two different ways to create power but there are some downsides to this so let me explain diesel engines don't have a spark plug they ignite the fuel with compression in the cylinder so they squeeze the fuel in the air so much that it reaches temperatures of about 550 degrees C so when the diesel is injected it immediately ignites but this means that the Pistons have to be stronger the rods have to be stronger and more importantly the cylinder block has to be stronger meaning they have to use heavier or thicker materials meaning that the entire engine is just heavier where petrol engines can run aluminum blocks diesels typically have to to run heavier iron blocks there is another downside too because of this higher compression and longer stroke the Pistons are heavier and have further to travel per cycle and so diesels typically don't reverse high as petrol engines they did the Pistons would just explode because of the acceleration that a piston goes through the effective weight would be multiple tons leading to the Piston ripping itself apart however Audi decided that the efficiency benefit outweighed these downsides so they got to it designing the engine and it was epic a 5.5 liter twin turbocharged V12 diesel despite Audi having several road cars with large displacement diesel engines at the time Audi started this one from the ground up and the first logical step was the cylinder block initial designs used cast iron it was then machined however the lead designer for the car decided that this was too heavy so Audi developed a custom aluminum silicon Ally block instead and using this material ad you were able to create a lighter and stronger block it was still heavier than a pet block but it was a big step forward they used a Bosch fuel injection system that delivered fuel directly to the cylinders at 23 000 PSI that's 1600 baht then to provide the Boost Audi decided on Twin turbochargers one for each Bank as this is a v engine the exhaust come out of the side of each cylinder head so combining them into one exhaust to feed a single turbo just didn't make sense using twin turbochargers allowed them to mount them low in the side pods of the car keeping the weight low down and keeping the rear of the car slim after 10 000 miles on Audi's engine Dyno the engine ran at 650 horsepower at Lamont now you can get the most powerful engine in the world for its size at the time that's not the impressive number It produced 1100 newton meters of torque and that is a lot the NASCAR garage 56 lemon car we spoke about in the previous video was a powerful car and that produces 850 newton meters we made a whole video about that mad car you can check that out at the end of this video so 1100 newton meters of torque and the best bit is that the engine produced 80 of that from 2000 RPM all the way up to the red line of six and a half thousand and that red line is super low compared to the petrol engines at the time they were running up to 12 000 RPM meaning that this car could pull itself out of Corners like nothing else and it could do it in almost any gear Audi paired this with a super Light chassis that was designed and manufactured with the help of delara they made the current F2 cars and indy cars amongst many of the race cars an Audi placed the engine very low and as far forward as possible in the chassis leading to the car being the iconic looking opened up lemon car of that era with the arrival of the Carter Le Mall wasn't entirely popular the thought of bringing a diesel to this iconic race was very new and not everyone liked it especially with Audi rocking up and aiming at the overall win and nobody knew how it would do but it'd be slower and make up all the time in it's or would it actually be fast the Audi r10 made an immediate impact by being quick out of the gates only was it quick over a single lap but the car conserved fuel like nothing else where other lmp1 cars were doing 12 or 13 Laps on a tank the Audi could do 16. it ran at 5.7 miles per gallon where a Formula One car from the same era was doing just over three miles per gallon an Audi was super proud of this and explained that one of the larger factors affecting the fuel economy was that the car burned zero fuel on overrun let me explain on a race car it's very normal to get Flames coming out of the exhaust this is unburnt fuel that is spat out by the engine normally when you lift after a long straight and however cool this might sound it's not great for fuel efficiency with the diesel of the r10 doesn't do this down to the car not having a throttle the car controls its power by the amount of fuel it injects so when a driver lifts there's no excess fuel to be burnt in the exhaust and that actually makes the car a bit weird to drive and apparently the weirdest thing about it was the last of engine noise Alan mcnish said that over 100 miles an hour the loudest thing heard was the air rushing over the car and that he'd never heard so many bizarre noises before in the car you could hear the diff chattering the gearbox wine even the tires whereas normally these noises are covered up by a screaming petrol engine but the torque made the car super drivable in some cars like late 90s F1 cars for example the power is all up high in the Rev range meaning you have to shift gears a lot and change your driving style to make sure you're always in the right power band but in this Audi the power band was so wide that the car could pull in almost any gear so you were never between gears in a corner the number eight Audi r10 driven by Frank Beeler Marco Werner and Emmanuel Pirro secured pole position during qualifying it was the first time a diesel-powered car had ever achieved pole position at Le Mans but during the race it wasn't all smooth sailing the number seven car experienced clutch and gearbox issues thought to be down to the torque that this thing created but the number eight car was incredibly reliable and not only did it go on to dominate the race and win by a long way but it also broke the record for the most laps at Le Mans hitting 380 laps Tom Christensen also broke the record for the longest thing in an LNP one cup with a 16 lap stint with only 90 liters of fuel it was clear that this diesel idea was a good one and for the next year Peugeot rocked up with their 908 HDI and that was actually quicker taking the fight to Audi but by that point the organizers realized a thought in the rules to limit the consumption of the cars they placed a limit on the maximum tank size meaning that the diesel cars were a huge advantage and to the energy density of their fuel as I mentioned before so they started bringing the tank size of the diesel cars down and down again for the next two years meaning that after 2016 LMP one colors basically only ran on petrol and that's a shame remember that NASCAR I mentioned well that thing was also rapid at Le Mall check that video here and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Driver61

Views: 517,284

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, Scott Mansell, Callum McIntyre, Le Mans, Audi, Audi TDI, V12 TDI, Audi R10 TDI, R10 TDI, WEC, ACO

Id: rIvJ6XyFgM0

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023