Practical Wiring - Professional Motorsport: How Professional Motorsport Wiring Differs
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How Professional Motorsport Wiring Differs
03.40
| 00:00 | - Before we begin our design process, we need to have a look at why our harness design and construction process is different to that used for a modified street car or a club day track car. |
| 00:10 | This comes down to two main reasons, the first is that the stakes are typically much higher at the professional motorsport level. |
| 00:18 | The vehicle the harness is being fitted to could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and the overall cost of competing at a race event might be equally as high. |
| 00:26 | With these sorts of stakes on the line, all parts of the car need to be engineered to not only work correctly but be flawlessly reliable. |
| 00:33 | The second is that the conditions the vehicle is to operate under will be an order of magnitude harsher than that seen by a typical modified street car or a club day track car. |
| 00:43 | The car we're building our motorsport wiring harness for could be vested for hundreds of kilometres of sustained full paced driving on a circuit or become caked in so much mud that the vehicle is unrecognisable. |
| 00:55 | It could also achieve blistering speeds on the salt flats with that salt trying to corrode our electrical connections the entire time. |
| 01:03 | How our professional motorsport wiring harness consturction will differ from the club level construction is in three main ways. |
| 01:10 | The first is in the design documentation. |
| 01:12 | The decisions we make while planning our wiring harness construction need to be thoroughly justified and those decisions documented. |
| 01:19 | This gives us the ability to trace any possible faults to their origin, eliminate them, and ensure that they're not repeated. |
| 01:26 | The second is in the materials we use to construct our harness. |
| 01:30 | At the professional motorsport level, there is often no option to use a cheaper material, even if its specifications, while not as good, might still be up to the task. |
| 01:39 | We nearly always need the extra safety factor the most expensive materials offer. |
| 01:43 | And they also have the added benefit of usually being smaller and lighter which reduces the bulk of our harness. |
| 01:50 | To give a couple of specific examples of material differences, we will exclusively use M22759/32 or Tefzel wire for our professional motorsport harness. |
| 02:03 | Whereas at the club level, TXL wire might have been a better choice. |
| 02:07 | We will sheath our harness entirely in Raychem DR25 heatshrink as the expandable braid used at the club level is not going to give us the sealing reliability that we require. |
| 02:18 | Where we transition our harness out to multiple branches we're going to use a specific moulded shaped shrinkable boot and we'll be using a potting epoxy resin to completely seal that transition point. |
| 02:28 | The final way in which our professional motorsport harness will differ from a club level harness is in the specific construction methods that we will use. |
| 02:36 | Most notable of these is the concentric twist that we will give to the wire in the sections of the harness. |
| 02:42 | And the strain relief loops that we add immediately behind a connector pin. |
| 02:46 | These techniques are critical in the motorsport environment. |
| 02:49 | The concentric twist ensures that our harness is uniform in appearance and will always remain flexible. |
| 02:55 | The strain relief loops making repair of what could be an expensive piece of the vehicle, possible in the future and giving us that added strain relief that we're looking for at the connector termination. |
| 03:06 | The cost and time that these elements add to a professional level motorsport harness construction cannot be understated. |
| 03:12 | I would estimate that if you were to build two harness which made all the same connections, one to a club level specification and one to a professional motorsport specification, the motorsport harness would take at least four times as long to complete. |
| 03:25 | This needs to be factored in when making the decision to undertake a harness construction using these methods for your project. |
| 03:32 | Or how much your time is worth if you're doing the work for somebody else. |
