Engineering and Alfas in the Netherlands

[Bruce Brandt <brbrandt@krusty-motorsports.com>]

Sorry but I've been out of touch for the last week while working in the
Netherlands. BTW the Dutch seem to be big Alfa fans. I saw several of the
new 156s in additiona to a lot of 33s, 164s and 155s. I didn't see any GTVs
or Spiders but as it's Feb I didn't really expect to see any Spiders. The
156 is even better looking in the flesh, steel?, than in the pictures I've
seen.

On to the thread about automotive engineering, as a mechanical engineer I
find people's "trust" in the automotive engineer more than a little
amusing. If you are much a student of automotive history at all you already
know that many of the best "engineers" were really self taught and probably
even started as draftsmen. Much of their design was intuitive, aerodymanics
for instance, and often wrong. Look at the lift generated by the Disco
Volante that caused it to be unstable at speed. The 1963 Vetts would lift
the front wheels off the ground at something over 100 mph! Even where the
designs were based on engineering calculations the designers, Colin
Chapman, would still emperically test the design. Chapman was particularly
infamous for making it lighter until it broke and then heavying it up
again. Then there were the things that the original designer/engineer never
expected they'ed do to his car. There was a recent story in one of the
classic mags talking about Tigers and how to make the Ford V8 fit there was
a person with a sledge hammer denting the firewall until the engine would
clear!

Many of the techniques that Chrysler are touting now in the design of their
new cars, like finite element analysis, are relatively new in the
automotive industry and are even relatively new to engineering. Many of
these techinques simply weren't possible before the more recent
supercomputers and have only recently reached the desktop. Even the math,
matrix algebra, behind this type of analysis wasn't taught when I took my
degree in the late 60's we had to pick points to analyze usually based on
where things connected together. 

Next time you get too caught up in the purity of the design just get out
your history books and see what really went on.

Bruce Brandt
Austin, TX