Digital prototyping races to success

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Vauxhall’s British Touring Car Team, VX Racing, has announced it has used digital prototyping software to design the cars that just won a series of premier UK motor sport titles.

The race-modified Vauxhall Vectras driven by Fabrizio Giovanardi, Matt Neal and Tom Onslow-Cole won all three HiQ British Touring Car Championship (BTTC) titles, for the driver, team and manufacturer contests.

The cars designed were designed, engineered and built by Triple Eight Race Engineering using Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Inventor Professional three-dimensional software products.

The design team said that digital prototypes created by Inventor enabled them to visualise, simulate and analyse their ideas more quickly and cost-effectively before they are made real.

“This enables us to work creatively – but faster than if we were using a traditional solution. Plus, it gives us the flexibility to model conceptually and trial different scenarios early in the development process,” said Kevin Berry, Triple Eight’s engineering director.

“We’re a small company that thrives on our responsiveness, he added. “Inventor ensures we can act quickly and smoothly – to give us the winning edge.”

Triple Eight Race Engineering was founded twelve years ago to design, build and race the Super Touring Vectra on behalf of Vauxhall Motors. When the firm took part in an Autodesk design review process to assess processes and workflow, it identified that the need to re-create data at each stage of the design and manufacture process was jeopardising their lead times.

As a result, Triple Eight has also implemented Autodesk Productstream, an incremental data management solution that has been adopted to ensure design data is kept securely, but is still easy to find and access.

This will be the fifth time the VX Racing team has won all three championship titles – although the first since 2004, narrowly missing out during the intervening years.

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