Supercars recently took delivery of a high-end 3D scanner that allows officials to quickly and accurately measure the bodywork of the cars to check conformity.
Made by Canadian company Creaform, the hand-held device – named MetraScan – features 30 blue-light lasers that project a pattern of laser lines onto a car’s surfaces.
That’s paired with a tracking camera, called C-Track, and a series of tracking dots placed on the car and existing on the scanner that combine to produce a highly accurate digital model.
Two teams, Erebus Motorsport and Dick Johnson Racing, are known to already possess the Creaform technology and Supercars has upgraded to ensure it too has the latest and greatest.
It was rolled out for the first time at Symmons Plains last month and is again among the category’s tool kit at the Perth Super440.
“For us it’s about being able to monitor the cars,” Edwards told Speedcafe of the device.
“Typically, even when we went to Windshear [wind tunnel], we contracted somebody to come and scan the cars for us because we didn’t have that capability ourselves.
“We had quite a low-level scanner but obviously that technology advances at a fair rate and what we had was about five years old. Now we can do it without external contractors.”
Edwards stressed Supercars’ purchase of the scanner is as much about helping teams ensure accurate body fit for their own performance purposes as it is about policing tolerances.
Panel fit has been among several areas to come under increased scrutiny during parity analysis work undertaken during the Gen3 era to date.
Even the tiniest gaps between panels can have a significant impact on drag at high speed.
“We’ll start opening opportunity for teams to scan their cars so they can understand where they sit and do a better job, because we don’t expect everybody to go out and buy a scanner,” he said.
“[The panels] naturally go together close [to homologated], but the more we race the cars, the panels tend to come on and off quite regularly and it’s easy to get a little lost with your body fit, particularly when you’ve got tight turnarounds.
“A lot of the teams have got either scanners or Faro Arms that they use, old school jigs that you take measurements off, but this will help them to make sure their bodies are accurate from a regulatory point of view and a performance point of view.”
While Edwards would not be drawn on an exact number, the Creaform scanners are known to cost in the vicinity of $250,000.
The complexity of the technology has also required Supercars’ technical staff to undergo multiple days of training to operate the scanner correctly.
Supercars’ splurge also included a third element named HandyProbe, which can be used instead of or in unison with the scanner depending on the required task.
“It’s not a cheap technology,” he said.
“There were options for cheaper ones. We assessed and demonstrated four versions of scanners, and this was the best one, particularly because it’s got a probe function.
“Rather than doing a full scan, sometimes you might just want to go ‘where does that rear wing sit in space relative to where it should be with the datums on the car?’
“With the probe you can just pick the two points that you know are datum points, ping a few points on the wing and within a matter of minutes go, ‘that wing is sitting in the correct position, that wing is too low, high, backwards, whatever’.”
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