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| The Weissman tranny, torque tube and rear diff are shrouded by suspension, turbo system and diffuser tunnels so they are kinda hard to show in pictures. They live under all of this stuff. You can catch a peak of the rear diff here. |
6 months before the event, work on the car was initiated. A production based chassis would simply not do. Rhys’s choice as a base vehicle was a Palmer JPI. A Palmer JP1 is a two seat race car especially designed as a gentleman’s trackday or driver’s school car, very similar in concept to the Radical sports racer. It features a mid mounted Jaguar V6, a tubular space frame with inboard damper push rod suspension and full body aerodynamics.
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| The power is transfered to the front diff via this complicated multi piece driveshaft, here it is as it goes through the rear bulkhead. It has many U-joints. |
Upon its arrival at RMR, the crew proceeded to study and discard most of the Palmer. In fact so little of the original car remains it should be called an “RMR”, instead the car was christened the PM580. The Palmer was cut apart and completely redesigned to meet the requirements of Pikes Peak. To get lots of power to the ground on slippery dirt, an all wheel drive system was deemed mandatory. The trouble is some of the exotic AWD drivetrains capable of handling the power needed for a record breaking Pikes Peak effort cost $250,000 and are near unobtainium.
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| The transmission is shifted via these steering wheel mounted paddles, just like an F1 car but at a fraction of the cost. |
This was way too much cost for anything other than a full on factory backed effort and the RMR crew set about the difficult task of engineering their own system from standard commercially available racing components. The resulting RMR system is ingenious and cost effective; for instance instead of an exotic AWD transaxle, RMR sourced a standard Weisseman 5 speed constant mesh racing gearbox with a separate center differential.
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| The driveshaft takes up power from the center diff and feeds it forward to the front of the car. |
Power is fed to the transmission via a low inertia triple disc 7.5 inch Tilton clutch with exotic amorphous carbon discs and floaters. The Weissman transmission is a conventional dog shifted constant mesh unit with straight cut gears for efficient power transfer. The shift drum is cut for the sequential shifting which is critical for the use of an innovative semi automatic shifting system which we will talk about in a bit.
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| This is the controller for the Aeromotion rear wing. It has internal sensors for G-force, yaw and interfaces with the AEM EMS to get a speed signal. It computes the appropriate wing angle from these variables then commands the wing to move via cable driven electro mechanical actuators. It can move the wing in a fraction of a second. See the video linked on the first page of the article to look at just how fast it can move it. |
The center diff is a Borg-Warner part with the torque split controlled by planetary gears with a Weisseman control unit operating electro-hydraulic clutches controlling the planetaries. The torque split is controlled by an ECU and can be infinitely varied from 10-100% statically or with a variable ramp function. Currently the team has found that a 50/50 torque split works best but they can and may vary the control strategy as the car’s development progresses.
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| Power to actually shift the transmission comes from this nitrogen bottle working through pneumatic cylinders. The bottle has enough capacity to make 1000 shifts. |
