DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The annual 24 hour race that kicks off the American racing season took place this past weekend at Daytona International Speedway. Each year, the crowd gets bigger and bigger, drawn in large part by the hybrid prototypes that contest the GTP class for overall victory. After Formula 1, these are some of the most complex, sophisticated race cars ever to turn a wheel—and it doesn’t hurt that they look extremely cool too. But yet again, endurance racing wants to offer more than just entertainment.
A large number of automotive technologies or safety features that we mostly take for granted today made their way into road cars from the race track. Seatbelts, rear view mirrors, turbocharged engines, aerodynamics, direct-injection engines, dual-clutch gearboxes, and more owe their existence to competition. Although, truth be told, direct examples of racing technology transfer in the mid-21st century seem less common than the intangible benefits gained when a bunch of motorsports-trained engineers have lunch every day with their road car colleagues.
That is starting to change, though, but now the domain is in simulation. Vast amounts of data are generated during the course of a race—each of the 11 GTP cars that raced at Daytona collects 1,600 different channels of data from onboard sensors, with nearly as many on the GTD machines that are based on road-going cars like Porsche’s 911 or Chevrolet’s Corvette. With 60 cars running for 24 hours—and that’s just the first race of the year—that’s a heck of a lot of high-quality data being generated, and now IMSA wants to leverage that to help automotive and technology companies develop better simulation tools, with the creation of IMSA Labs.
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