Racing Fuel Tanks Are an Essential Race Car Component
Race cars are phenomenal monuments to engineering and mechanics with a million and one separate parts and pieces, all of which come together as one to create the perfect racing machine. To really get top performance out of a race car, it is absolutely fundamental that every single part be absolutely perfect, with no detail being too trivial to be heeded: every part, from the smallest O Ring right up to the largest gasket, a winning race car needs every aspect to be ideal.
With the advance of technology, one part in particular which has been changing a lot is the fuel tank on racing cars. Otherwise known as fuel cells, they need to fulfill certain criteria in order to be incorporated into a race car that don’t apply when dealing with an ordinary vehicle.
As with pretty much every standard auto component that goes into a race car, it needs to be smarter, better, tougher, and longer lasting. Especially considering the highly volatile nature of gasoline and the breakneck speeds accomplished on the race track (and hence the extreme violence of racing vehicle crashes), race car fuel tanks need to exhibit very special traits to be reliable and safe.
A major difference between racing and ordinary auto fuel tanks is the inclusion in the former variety of elastic inner liners within the tank structure. This sort of liner is specifically added to decrease the chances of a fuel leak and ignition during high impact situations, as the liner is able to stretch and absorb the blow, thereby keeping fuel from spilling out. This feature is a major fire prevention aspect of race cars.
Another special feature of racing fuel tanks is their form: they tend to be designed with more detail and particularity, so that they may be fitted into exactly the precise spot within the car architecture that is needed. This economizing of space increases a race car’s performance. For example, a tank may be placed directly atop the rear axle instead of in front of it.
The kind of technology designed for preventing the event of a fire in a race car is quite sophisticated and interesting. Many race cars incorporate an open-cell foam core into their fuel tanks, which effectively helps reduce the risk of the floating fumes inside from creating a problem.
To keep a race car nice and stable, it is important that the fuel tank have some sort of balancing mechanism inside of it so that as the fuel sloshes from side to side during abrupt and speedy twists and turns, the vehicle doesn’t suffer from undue performance loss. This same problem may also induce fuel starvation in the race car, something which is absolutely not to be tolerated in the racing industry.
Though almost all racing fuel tanks have been built with materials such as aluminum and steel for many long years, in the last couple of years or more there has been an upsurge in tanks produced with high density polyethylene (HDPE). The material has drawn much appeal due to the fact that it is possible to blow and mold it into highly elaborate shapes, yet at the same time such tanks are bad for long term use given that they are vulnerable to saturation from the fuel, which can permeate the HDPE material.
