Wen the first stereolithography (SLA) machine from 3D Systems arrived at Stewart-Haas Racing’s North Carolina facility six years ago, Production Manager Reneau Van Landingham held his breath. Would it be able to run throughout the weekend? Would it be fast enough to deliver dozens of parts by the following week?
Quickly, Van Landingham tells TCT, it became quite normal that the answer was, yes.
“Wednesday night, we would deliver parts to the tunnel, ready to be tested at six in the morning the next day, just in time,” Van Landingham shares. “Sometimes we would bring parts off the printer directly to the wind tunnel.”
The NASCAR team is co-owned by three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Tony Stewart and Gene Haas, founder of Haas Automation, North America’s largest machine tool maker. Last year, the team entered a three-year technical partnership with 3D Systems to deploy additive manufacturing technologies to further increase the speed of its racecars, and at RAPID + TCT 2024 in Los Angeles, the two have come together to tell the story.
As Van Landingham puts it: “We want our cars to go fast with the best technology that's available.”
“We get tremendous learnings,” adds John Murray, VP, Global ISG Segment & Business Development for 3D Systems, of the motive behind the partnership. “We started with technical partnerships back in the late 1990s, both in NASCAR as well as Formula 1. No one pushes harder than motorsports teams. It's a 24/7 job feeding these wind tunnels that have enormous appetites. The ability to produce accurate parts and do it quickly was critical. We learned and developed quickly regarding materials, processes and the needs of our customers. That allowed us to apply it to other industries as well. But in motorsports it's go fast or go home.”
Speed is, naturally, the championship-winning NASCAR team’s key driver and it has relied heavily on 3D Systems’ ProX 800 stereolithography and Figure 4 Standalone 3D printers to improve speed and performance across its vehicles, of which it fields four in the NASCAR Cup and two in the NASCAR Xfinity series.
“We're in the wind tunnel every week on a regular basis, and we're wanting to test dozens of parts – it's very expensive to do that,” Van Landingham explains. “If parts don't show up at the wind tunnel in time to test them, then we're wasting a lot of money and people's time and effort.”
The team had previously used 3D printing to produce individual parts for its cars but now, with a larger capacity SLA system in-house, it’s able to produce much bigger and accurate parts to the point where its engineers can divide the whole body of a racecar into smaller pieces to prototype and swap out hundreds of optimised aerodynamic shapes for wind tunnel testing. On the recent 2024 NASCAR Ford Mustang Dark Horse, it did just that with various 3D printed tiles fastened to the sub-structure of the full-scale car to analyse aerodynamic coefficients and determine the optimum shape for speed before making the final carbon fibre body panels.
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“Now, printing hundreds of parts like that over a few weeks' time is not only possible,” Van Landingham says, “but it's kind of normal.”
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Part printed in Accura Composite PIV for wind tunnel testing
Not only has it become the norm, but it’s also enabled the team to explore entirely new applications. That’s largely down to the scope of engineering-grade materials, which have opened up opportunities not just for prototyping and fit function testing, but production parts such as TV camera, pit gun, and pit cart components, as well.
“With these printers come materials that we weren't used to using,” Van Landingham explains. “We began to explore rubber materials and now all of a sudden our engineers were able to do gaskets and flexible bellows and things that they weren't doing yesterday. The technology opens up a whole world of possibilities that we didn’t have before.”
3D Systems has even developed a material specifically for wind tunnel testing. Instantly identifiable by its purple hue, Accura Composite PIV was developed in collaboration with BWT Alpine F1 Team to build aerodynamic parts for Particle Image Velocimetry testing. “It's very purposely purple,” according to Murray, who explained how the bold colour helps to reduce the laser reflection effect from background surfaces other than airborne particles when taking reliable PIV measurements.
Race against time
Motorsport truly is a 24/7 operation to be the best. Machines run at full capacity as much as possible, and the team often outsources to Ford’s Additive Manufacturing Center in Dearborn, MI or service providers to meet demand.
“Our most precious commodity is time,” Van Landingham said. “We race every weekend, and everybody sees that on TV or at the track. But on the engineering side, we're racing between the races against our competitors to design and 3D print parts for our race cars for that next race. That's how we compete between the races. And we can't do it without this technology and this partnership. We're a competitive sport, so we use technology to try to advance our cars faster and better than our competitors.”
Stewart-Haas Racing has embraced additive. That’s largely down to a want to win but also a willingness from its engineers, particularly its younger cohort, who have grown up with 3D printers in their bedrooms and are now getting to play with that same technology on an industrial scale. But Murray believes there’s another important factor at play.
“It always takes leadership,” Murray said. “You can have all the machines and all the resin you want, but you have to have people with vision and people who really are dedicated to making it perform.”
Van Landingham added: “Like any new technology, we have to get used to it internally, how to run it, how to operate it. But once that honeymoon period was behind us, these machines have just been workhorses for us.”
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3D printed windshield defogging system
And the machines have been put to work. There’s the driver's side mirror housing used for speedway tracks at Talladega and Daytona, which not only holds a reflective mirror so that the driver can see outside but also acts as an aerodynamic device that reduces drag to make the car go faster. Then there are the printed hose couplers which can be quickly connected and disconnected to the top of the driver’s helmet to provide air conditioning. When NASCAR recently began permitting racing in the rain, there was a sudden requirement for vehicles to include a new windshield wiper, lights and a way to defog the windows. A system was designed, printed and mounted on top of the dash to allow fresh air to blow to the inside of the windshield and keep it from fogging.
“Because we have the additive manufacturing tools in house,” Van Landingham elaborates, “it allowed us to even conceive of this system.”
Then of course, there’s the critical weight reduction advantages and Stewart-Haas Racing’s engineers are constantly evaluating the designs of countless parts to uncover where more weight can be taken out.
“It's amazing, year after year we think we've got the car as light weight as it can be within the rules that NASCAR provides,” Van Landingham says. “But inevitably our engineers are tweaking the parts over and over again to reduce the weight. Not only that, but to lower the centre of gravity of the overall mass of the car, which is really important in racing.”
In the six years since that first installation, Stewart-Haas Racing has added more machines and materials to its toolkit. Van Landingham says he’s keen to get his hands on 3D Systems upcoming PSLA 270 high speed, projector-based system, which is said to combine the accuracy of SLA with the speed and materials of Figure 4. That need for speed keeps them focused but the team’s ambition is even grander.
“If we could just 3D print the whole car, that would be great,” says Van Landingham.
Is he serious?
“Oh yeah, I'd love to do that,” Van Landingham says, turning to Murray, “So, hurry up!”
This article originally appeared inside TCT Europe Edition Vol. 32 Issue 5 and TCT North American Edition Vol. 10 Issue 5. Subscribe here to receive your FREE print copy of TCT Magazine, delivered to your door six times a year.
