ever wanted to print your own racing car?well now you can, thanks to new developments in 3d printing technology. okay well you might not actually be able to,but stratasys, a leading 3d printing manufacturer certainly can and they have teamed up withbritish motor racing team strakka racing to print parts of a racing car. 3d printing technology is quite new to ourcompany. we started working with stratasys in the last twelve months, and they've helpedus in the design and development and bringing this car to reality in a very short periodof time. we really only knew it as a rapid prototypingtechnology that allowed us to do proof of
concept and packaging studies, but what we'vediscovered now is that it's actually a genuine manufacturing technique and some of the componentswe've developed for the car will actually race as we go into our new championship withthis car. the strakka dome s103 lmp2 race car uses 3dprinted components, not just as prototypes, but parts that can actually be used for raceevents. so in the initial phases of design, we usethe printing technology to do wind tunnel testing, creating scale models of the carin a very short period of time. it allowed us to make multiple iterations and try lotsof different concepts to really define the key architecture of the car, which helps theperformance incredibly.
but as we started to build the full-sizedcar, we needed to test some components very quickly and rather than using carbon composites,which is a traditional motor sport material, which has probably two to six week lead timeto get a component from design to the factory, we can actually deliver the components bythe next day, so our ability to test was increased rapidly, and then we found that the materialswere strong enough to run on the car, so we've
3d printing car body panels,started validating some components on thecar using printed components, which is brand new for us, and we're very excited about thedirection the technology is going. the cockpit, dashboard panel and rear wingspoiler on this model have been created using 3d printing.
