Conquering the toughest desert race on Earth with 3D Printing

Playing To Win

Prodrive has a long history in motorsports, competing and winning its first event, the Qatar International Rally, in 1984. Since then, Prodrive has been unstoppable, winning a multitude of titles across a wide range of motorsport disciplines. In 2021, the company entered the Dakar Rally in partnership with the Kingdom of Bahrain, under the new team, Bahrain Raid Xtreme (BRX). The Dakar Rally takes place over two weeks, with stages covering hundreds of miles across a range of challenging, off-road terrain in Saudi Arabia.

To prepare for the event, the BRX team began development on the Hunter T1, its new two-car factory team driven by 9x World Rally champion Sébastien Loeb, and 25x Dakar Rally legend Nani Roma. Roma secured 5th place overall in the 2021 race, the first time any team has achieved such a high ranking on their first attempt at the Dakar Rally.

Building a Racing Team from scratch

With work only just beginning in late 2019, the BRX team suddenly came up against what would be one of the biggest challenges that hit the industry thus far, Covid-19. Paul Doe, chief engineer at Prodrive said. “In the UK, there was a lockdown that effectively forced us to close the factory for a while. Development that should have taken about a year was compressed into nine months. Instead of testing in July, we didn’t end up turning a wheel on a car until October 2020.

With the Dakar Rally scheduled for the first two weeks of January 2021, this put an immense amount of pressure on the whole team. Additionally, although Prodrive offered in-house manufacturing, fabricating, and machining capabilities, the team was competing for resources with other projects. 

3D Printing Finished Carbon Fibre parts

When Doe made the decision to incorporate the cutting-edge MakerBot METHOD X® 3D printer, highly recommended by DSM, a renowned global supplier of carbon fiber materials, it completely transformed the game. The addition of the METHOD X allowed his team to swiftly and conveniently prototype and produce essential parts, while also providing them with the opportunity to explore diverse applications both on and off the course. With the limitless possibilities of additive manufacturing, the process of prototyping and part production became significantly more streamlined and cost-effective.

Adding METHOD X to its repertoire of cutting-edge technologies afforded the company an added opportunity to save even more time during its shortened production schedule. “There is a massive list of benefits from using the MakerBot METHOD X compared to a normal production, such as speed and responsiveness. When it came to designing parts on the car, the first thought often starts with printing a part off the 3D printer to see how it would turn out. The ability to try the part first before committing to the final product allows us to make changes easily and quickly. This rapid iteration also allows us to stay pretty close to our production timeline, while also saving us a ton of money,” Doe noted.

With two METHOD X 3D printers, the BRX team was able to engineer some parts at the factory in the UK as well as on site at the Rally. 

From the workshop to the desert

METHOD X was loaded onto one of the BRX team maintenance trucks that they had set up in the desert. It was used on-site to print fabricated parts, or to fix a part that would have required steel or aluminum fabrication. “We carried this machine with us in the truck and printed remotely in the middle of nowhere; literally where you can’t see traces of civilization, yet here we are using this kind of machine with that industrial 3D printing technology. We took advantage of the speed of 3D printing parts in the middle of our test program,” said Doe.

 The BRX team used METHOD X to print over 30 parts on the Hunter T1, including a mount for a suspension position sensor and a sculpted nozzle mount for the cockpit’s fire suppression system. The suspension position sensor allowed the engineers to look at the damper performance, vehicle dynamics, wheel alignment, drive shaft, and more. The sensor generates data and relays information back to the team for better analysis, which can then be used to improve vehicle performance. The mounting system was printed with MakerBot’s nylon carbon fiber and was one of the ideal applications with which to utilize METHOD X. The entire process to get the suspension mount just right took only one and a half hours, from having the 3D printed mount on the ground sheet in the middle of the desert, to observing it, to making updates and reinforcements to the design in the truck, to launching production on METHOD X. With the new part in their hands, the team was ready to put it on the car and continue collecting data.

“That was new for us. In the past, we’ve used additive manufacturing, but we didn’t have the capability to do this so immediately,” stated Doe. “In addition, the materials we used on METHOD X, particularly the nylon carbon fiber, exhibited higher performance than what we had experienced in past years. There are quite a bit of parts in the car, such as the engine bays and wheel side near the brakes, where the environments reach up to 120°C and where traditional FDM materials start to struggle, forcing us to revert to aluminum which is costly. In this case, we were able to print parts in nylon carbon fiber which is able to reach very high temperatures. The carbon print heads on METHOD X really opened up access to a lot of new applications for us.”

Parts that perform and look great

Using the nylon carbon fiber, the BRX team also printed a lightweight sculpted mount for one of the nozzles of the fire suppression system located at the center of the cockpit. Due to the sheer size of the cars, each vehicle was outfitted with two fire suppression systems. With an extremely hot turbo engine, 500 liter fuel tank, and other highly flammable materials, fire suppression is critical. Typically, the team would have needed to create that nozzle out of traditional heavy metal, like steel or aluminum, which can be time-intensive and costly. Nylon carbon fiber is an ideal lightweight alternative to metal due to its high strength, heat resistance, and stiffness properties.

“We wanted to move away from the typical folded aluminum bracket as much as we could, and instead have a more premium feel in the cockpit. METHOD X allowed us to experiment with a new type of nozzle. The sculpted mount was a nice balance of form and function. In fact, it looked 10 times better than what we had in the past, and with no egregious costs,” said Doe.

To learn more about Method X, visit https://makerbot.com.au/method-x/