Why NASA, IMSA, and tech companies are teaming up on tech transfer

Why bother racing?

Car racing is, at its heart, a sport. And it’s also entertainment. But it also serves as an engineering exercise, with each race series balancing those three elements to different degrees. And the engineering is why companies like Bosch get involved.

“We have our technology up from the Bosch side that we use in our everyday vehicle engineering,” said Joe Capuano, regional president of Bosch Engineering. “We’re able to bring those components in different ways to the racetrack, where obviously the requirements are different, and it’s really a loop of learning. So we take our base components, we apply ’em in different ways to the needs of the race teams, and then we take the feedback from the races and we can improve our products that we have in our automotive portfolio.”

A company like General Motors, which competes in IMSA under both the Cadillac and Chevrolet brands, mostly does it to beat other automakers. But that’s not the only reason.

“It really teaches engineers, teaches us to advance quickly, be able to analyze data, adapt, discard things. And inside General Motors we really connect engineering and motorsports directly,” said Eric Warren, vice president of global motorsports competition at GM. “Motorsports really resides in the engineering groups. So as we develop new simulation methods and things… it directly connects with the groups that are designing our cars. And so not only do we get to compete from that standpoint, that drives this brand against brand, but also helps us train engineers to really relate to those technologies and drive that technology that ends up on the road,” Warren said.

“Literally what we do is we learn here on the weekend and then Monday morning we’re back in the office and we’re designing based on what we learned over the weekend into the products that we can drive ourselves through the rest of the week,” explained Matthew Cabe, president and CEO of Michelin North America.