First build a race car, then a spaceship?

Published on May 9, 2016

It was a sunny August day. The sun shone brightly on the

concrete laboratory building in Ben-Gurion University. From the outside the Combustion laboratory door seemed just like any other door in the building. But over the threshold a metal-carbon fiber beast was under final assembly. 

I woke in the morning jumping out of bed. Today was the last day of assembly. Tomorrow at 7 am the car would be placed in a crate and shipped to Italy.

After thoroughly testing the firewall I had invented to keep the driver safe from fire, heat and flying debris, I was confident the driver would be safe no matter what.

However, I have run into trouble with the manufacturing. The

firewall was made of several independent layers. In its’ small 20X20 cm

version everything seemed to work, but when I manufactured several meters of

firewall the adhesive kept failing. I had made a fix a few days prior, but

could not install it in the car because it was being worked on 24-7 by other

teams. 

When I finally installed it on that fateful day, one of the

team members noticed to my dismay that the new adhesive failed as

well. The team leader asked to install the backup aluminum firewall. All

that work hard gone up in flames.  

I stood atop the race car determined to find a solution. The hustle and bustle around me faded into silhouettes in the background. My mind was blank and bereft of thoughts. “There must be a solution, there must be a way!”, I said to myself.  After a few minutes it occurred to me that the solution was right in front of me.  The firewall was made of two parts

On the upper left is the “batman” shaped upper part and on

the lower right is the large problematic part. I realized that in the batman

part the layers held together just fine because the small size limited the mass

of the inner filling and therefore the forces it was exerting on the adhesive

and that if I could just partition the large firewall into several “batman”

sized firewalls then the adhesive problem would be solved.

For 30 minutes I worked frantically: opening the layers and

placing several polymer film separators. After I closed the firewall back up,

it was held together much better.

The car was already fitted with the aluminum replacement, so

we carefully put the firewall in one of the crates and off it went to Italy.

The car was already fitted with the aluminum replacement, so

we carefully put the firewall in one of the crates and off it went to Italy.

A day later we were on the competition grounds, in Riccardo

Paletti Circuit, located in the province of Parma.

On the morning of the competition car still needed work and

the team was busy assembling the different parts. I had made some final

reinforcements to the firewall and it was ceremoniously installed in the car.

Things progressed rapidly from then onward; a tough

technical inspection – passed; static tilt test – passed; acceleration test,

autocross competition and the grand finale – the endurance competition. Faced

with well-funded and very experienced teams from all over the world, our car

got to 7th place in the engineering design competition!