The Mercedes-Benz Style Edition Garia Golf Car has been built from carbon fibre composites and comes complete with leather seats, LED headlamps and a heated windscreen.

The car has also been equipped with a fridge to store those essential on green beverages and snacks and an integrated onboard 10.1-inch touchpad which controls many functions and can display the layout of the golf course and their current position, or if desired activate an electronic score card.

The cart is powered by a lithium-ion battery which will give it a 50-mile range with a top speed of 19mph, a full charge will take six hours. No information has yet been released on price, and you’ll have to wait if you want to get hold of one as Mercedes isn’t planning to release it for sale until next year.

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The new racing wheelchair features modernised aerodynamic efficiencies, carbon fibre material, a complete chassis redesign and a personalised approach for customised athlete fit.

Brad Cracchiola, Associate Director, BMW Group DesignWorks said;

Working on this project has been a truly rewarding experience for my team and we’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in the last year and half with these athletes and their coaches, from fittings and immersion sessions, to data analysis and real-time testing, we had the unique opportunity to build a fully customised racing device. We’re eager to complete the final product and look forward to watching Team USA compete.

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With the help of Team USA athletes, BMW will work over the next few months to continue to adjust and improve the wheelchair in the lead up to the Games. The final fleet of wheelchairs for use in the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games is slated to be delivered to the U.S. Paralympics track and field racers in the summer of 2016.

The company has been implementing its resources to advance the training and performance goals of Team USA since signing on as a sponsor in 2010. The BMW racing wheelchair is the company’s fourth technology transfer project, following the delivery of a two-man bobsled which helped Team USA overcome a 62-year medal drought at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

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The carbon fibre sledge is the brainchild of Snowspeed, a Norwegian team of designers and speed enthusiasts. Their goal is to beat the world speed record in a gravity powered snow sledge designed to reach 250km/h (155 mph). The current world speed record is held by the British television personality, motor biker and lorry mechanic Guy Martin. In 2014, who piloted a sledge at 134.36km/h (83.49 mph).

The snow sledge that was tested in TMG’s wind tunnel is a 50% scale model. Aerodynamic testing in the wind tunnel delivers data gathered with the same sort of hi-tech equipment that is used to test road and race cars.

Mounted to an overhead strut and with a continuous rolling road under the skis, the wind was turned on and gradually increased to test how the Snowspeed sledge behaves at speed. The wind speed reached 40m/s and stabilised, with TMG’s advanced wind tunnel systems recording sideforce, downforce, drag, roll, pitch and yaw through sensors in the strut.

The data helps the designer continue to improve the sledge in order to minimise drag and maximise speed. Moreover, it aids the fine-tuning of the sledge design to ensure it remains balanced in response to forces such as headwind and turbulence. In addition, analysis of the data helps with the creation of a sledge that is stable at speed, by ensuring there is equal side force on either side of the sledge.

Data on the three movements – roll, pitch and yaw – was also generated in TMG’s wind tunnel. This helps the Snowspeed designers identify how to best position the sledge on the skis. During testing, the base of Snowspeed’s skis were covered in Teflon to reduce friction against the rolling road that rotated beneath it.

The Snowspeed sledge was penned by Oslo-based designers Nima Shahinian and Anders Aannestad. To date, the team has built three prototypes.

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To enable these modern gladiatorial scraps, the company has created the Lorica, a suit of armour made from carbon fibre, polycarbonate materials and elastomeric foam. These materials combine to create a suit that can stand up to a real beating, allowing the wearer to absorb the impact of a weapon and escape unscathed.

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Underneath the armour is a range of vibration sensors and accelerometers that detect where the fighter lands a hit on the opponent and measures the severity of the blow. The team also plans to include technology to monitor biometric data including heart-rates, oxygen saturation levels and body temperature, giving useful insights into the health of the combatants. This data will then be fed back from the suit to a special ringside computer that monitors the fighters and keeps score.

The company is going to start holding small-scale events in 2015 around Australia and will move to larger events from there. The suits will be made available to purchase but the company have not given any release dates or prices yet.

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CRP Technology, the company behind Windform SP say that compared to other 3D printing materials, Windform can maintain its relevant characteristics even at low temperature and that it’s a highly supple material and perfect for absorbing the stresses without the risk of breaking.

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The design uses three different ski-boot insoles, each one slightly higher in the front than the rear, this gives a much better fit and a bit more space for those all important piggies. The boot has a split insole and an integrated wedge which is connected with a regulator, by adjusting this regulator its possible to change the wedge into 3 different positions which also adjusts the height of the foot in the boot.

The boot’s creator, Mr Franz Egger said;

I’m a sporting goods dealer since more than 30 years and I am well aware of the questions regarding ski boots. With the innovation Easystand I wanted to find successful solutions for the manufacturer, for the sporting goods dealer and for the skier. My main aim is to bring back more skiers on the slopes.

At the ISPO Munich the 3D-printed ski boot brought home a reward in the “Ski-product” category, voted best in its class by judges made up of independent sports business professionals.

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The design is a complete change from how the current crop of Formula One cars look whilst still sticking to the FIA’s technical rules. Last season the teams came under a bit of criticism for some of the designs on show, with most of the rage pointed towards the nose cone area.

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The new concept was revealed as the F1 commission met to discuss the future of the sport in Geneva.In that meeting the commission rejected proposals to completely re-work the sports regulations for the 2016 season.

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Ferrari is asking for your thoughts on the design, so if you want to have your say follow this link. McLaren and Red Bull have also produced some concept ideas for new F1 cars at a recent strategy group meeting, but both teams declined to release these images to the public.

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Named the Cirin, this awesome vehicle has been designed and built by Max Greenberg, Ian Cullimore and Sameer Yeleswarapu to take part in the Formula E race at the art centre. The cars engine is a 16-foot long rubber band contained in a carbon fibre tube that runs the full length of the vehicle. This rubber horse power allows the car to reach a top speed of around 30 mph for around 100 metres. A bunch of battery powered electronics are used on-board for breaking, steering and wireless communications with its controller.

Manufacturing of the body was sponsored by 3D printing company Solidconcepts, and utilises a process called selective laser sintering using a proprietary nylon powder formulation. The single unibody construction ensures controlled tolerances of mechanical components and just about removes the need for fasteners. The bio-truss structure is built to withstand extreme stresses put on the frame by the wound band.

Photos Copyright: Max Greenberg

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The woven bamboo mats on the top and bottom are critical components of an advanced sandwich core panel, which is made from End-grain balsa, known to be the stiffest and most shear resistant core material usually found in boatbuilding, experimental aircraft and other high stress applications. The materials used also show superior compressive and bonding strengths to the main skin resulting in a structure that is strong and extremely durable.

the woven wood mats, top and bottom, are critical parts of an advanced sandwich core panel. this component is made of end-grain balsa, known to be the stiffest and most shear-resistant timber found in boatbuilding, experimental aircraft, and other high stress applications. furthermore, the ingredient also shows superior compressive and bonding strength to the skins, resulting in a structure that is not only strong, but extremely durable. truck mounts are reinforced with baltic birch plywood and carbon fibre. The truck mounts have been strengthened with Baltic birch plywood and carbon fibre composite reinforcement.

Professor Rake from the University of Kansas brought several students earlier in the year to Greensboro to prototype and test multiple designs in the field. The result is first skateboard to be created by The Beacon Alley Bamboo Board Co, which will be produced in the makelab’s local shop in Greensboro. The innovative, high-performance products will provide job training and increase employment in the Alabama black belt. the project is still active and is looking for funding on kickstarter now.

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Mark Greve, a physician and assistant professor of sports medicine at Brown University who studied injuries to 3,500 competitive cyclists told the New York Times;

Anyone in a team who’s being honest with you will tell you how frequently their bikes are breaking; everybody knows. Few people in the public appreciate how many bikes a pro team will go through in a season, because they break for one reason or another. The bikes, they completely explode.

The code of silence adopted by the professional riders, mechanics and team officials within the Tour de France named Omertá has allegedly masked the issues of carbon fibre and wheel durability in favour of paid sponsorships and endorsements by the large manufacturers. And when they do speak they are asked not to be identified.

Riders are describing landing on the top, horizontal tube of the bikes during a crash and ending up on the road after their frame had splintered and collapsed. Minor crashes and spills that used to mean straightening the handlebars now often require a complete bike change. Mechanics say they sometimes return the shattered remains of frames to manufacturers in bags intended to hold a single bicycle wheel.

Michael Kaiser, the head of product development at Canyon, a German company that offers both carbon and aluminium bikes, and provides bikes to two teams at the Tour, told the New York Times that with carbon, careful manufacturing was as important as design.

To get exactly the right result is more demanding than with metals, as it requires a comparatively large degree of work by hand. Therefore the entire manufacturing process has to be incredibly precise with extensive quality controls in place to ensure there are no defects in the parts.

To that end, Canyon use CT scanners to discover hidden defects in the forks, a potentially lethal point of failure, and will soon do so on frames.

Doug Perovic, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Toronto, said that carbon fibre was a bit like a diamond: strong while not being particularly tough.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner makes up for carbon’s lack of toughness by building up several layers of material. Bicycle makers go the other route and use its exceptional strength to make the bike’s structure as thin and thus as light as possible.

When a Carbon bike is stressed beyond its limits it fractures into many pieces while metals bend, the energy absorption is the bending. While steel and aluminium bikes generally telegraph an impending failure by displaying cracks, carbon fibre generally fails without warning.

For consumers who are not constantly banging their bikes around on team vehicles and who are unlikely to be involved in crashes, the risks in buying a carbon bike made by a reputable company should be minimal. Greve said many riders had told him that the performance gains from super-light frames reached the point of diminishing returns long ago, and he questions the wisdom of consumers’ buying what are, in effect, very costly throwaway items if they crash.

Source: NY Times

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Standing for McLaren Project Four, The MP4/1 bore the distinction of being the first carbon composite Formula 1 design. The material had been used for small components since Graham Hill’s eponymous Embassy-backed Cars had used it for their rear wing supports in 1975, but not until the MP4/1 made its bow on March 5th 1981 had it been used for the entire chassis.

Together with Lotus chief Colin Chapman whose controversial Lotus 88 would also use the material, Barnard had come to appreciate not just the lightness of carbon fibre but also its tremendous strength, and his new car would set a trend every bit as influential as Chapman’s introduction of the monocoque chassis two decades earlier. It laid the groundwork for material innovation that has become such a hallmark of the McLaren Group’s activities with cars such as the three-seater F1, the world’s first fully composite road car, and the later Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren as the world’s first series production carbon composite car.

The MP4/1 remains a testament to Barnard’s character, drive and imagination. In his early years he cut his teeth with Lola, and then McLaren in the early 1970s, before moving to Parnelli and Chaparral in the United States, yet it was his relative inexperience in F1 that paradoxically freed him to think outside the box. The focus in F1 at that time, he said, was very much on ground effects. To Barnard, the only way to reduce the chassis section while retaining the necessary torsional stiffness was to use an entirely new material rather than just a different gauge of aluminium.

Sometimes controversial but never anything less than a highly gifted and always adventurous designer, he had been thinking about this particular problem long before the merger between Marlboro Mclaren and Project Four Racing. He had also been hearing good things about carbon fibre composites: given the correct application it was clearly light, stiff, and extremely strong — perfect, in theory, for Formula 1.

Very few people knew much about it, however, a contact at British Aerospace provided some clues at a time when the material was being used for engine cowls for the Rolls-Royce RB211 turbofan engine. At the same time, however, its mysterious properties were called into question, Barnard remembers, when someone easily snapped a piece of it in half (actually, a unidirectional piece which he bent the wrong way). Perhaps it was not, after all, the ideal material with which to build an entire Formula 1 car.

The objective was to optimise it, and that meant using the biggest underwing l could get which entailed a very small section chassis. I wanted to get my chassis down to not too much bigger than the driver’s bum.

Others too, Barnard confirmed years later, “thought we were mad,” and even the man he describes as his design hero, Colin Chapman who was busy working on his technically brilliant but ultimately doomed Type 88 with its complex composite—mix ‘twin chassis’, went on record to say that a pure-carbon car of the sort McLaren was planning simply would not be safe enough.

Typically Ron Dennis showed a far more positive approach, or as Barnard characterised it, “He was very gung-ho. It was a very simple deal between us. He said, “you tell me what you want to do technically and I’ll get the money.” That’s how it went, and it worked, too!”

Around this time a contact from Barnard’s Indycar days with Parnelli and Chaparral pointed him towards the Utah-based Hercules Corporation which had ‘Skunk-Works’ research and development section and finally he was in business. Expressly conceived to think the unthinkable and play around with crazy ideas and odd one-offs, Hercules was the obvious place to start building his dream.

Barnard jumped on a flight to Salt Lake City with a quarter scale model of his proposed design in the cabin alongside him and soon after the staff at Hercules set to work the MP4/1 began to take shape. As they lacked the technology and know-how to create curved pieces, the first monocoque was assembled using five major components, each one with flat faces.

It had only a single major aluminium component, the internal front suspension bulkhead, compared to a conventional F1 car of the time which boasted around 50. Perhaps it looked a little rough and wrinkled in places, but it turned out even stronger than Barnard felt necessary, so for the next chassis plies were pulled out of the skin to make it lighter still

Unfortunately the new car wasn’t ready for the start of the 1981 season, so John Watson and his new team-mate Andrea de Cesaris found themselves campaigning the outdated M29C But it was well worth the wait.

In its first two races the sole MP4/1 qualified 11th and seventh, making it to the line for its first race finish in San Marino in 10th. Watson qualified the MP4/1 a promising fifth on its debut at Zolder in the Belgian GP and ran a comfortable fourth until the late stages when gearbox problems dropped him back to seventh by the flag. He qualified 10th at Monaco and was heading for fourth place when the engine broke.

Then came the start of what Wattie would later refer to as his ‘Ted Rogers’ sweep, referring to the comedian’s popular Three Two One game show. From fourth on the grid he finished third in Spain; in France a front-row starting position translated into a superb race drive and second place just over two seconds behind first-time winner Alain Prost. Suddenly, McLaren was back. And then came the 1981 Marlboro British Grand Prix at Silvestone.

Alain Prost led initially for Renault, with team-mate Rene Arnoux riding shotgun. Watson was seventh at the end of the first lap, then was delayed further as he dropped to 10th by the fourth avoiding an accident in the Woodcote chicane at the end of lap three involving de Cesaris, Alan Jones and Gilles Villeneuve. But then he got his head down and charged. Nelson Piquet crashed his Brabham heavily; then Prost’s car burned a valve. Suddenly, the McLaren was up to second place, albeit 25s adrift of Arnoux.

And there it stayed for 30 laps. But on lap 50 the Renault’s engine note changed; as Arnoux slowed, Watson went quicker and quicker and began scything down the gap, cheered on by an expectant crowd of his fellow countrymen. On lap 61 he swooped into the lead, and seven laps later was flagged off the winner of the British GP. It was McLaren’s first Grand Prix victory since Fuji, four years earlier. And the first for a carbon fibre composite car.

Later, came the big shunt at Monza where Watson’s Mp4/1 was cut in half after he went off the road in the two fast Lesmo corners. But even as the engine and gearbox were torn off, the monocoque structure remained intact. Wattie had walked away from a 140mph crash, and while the car did not look very pretty afterwards it had not, as so many sceptics had expected, exploded into a cloud of black dust.”

It was a win-win situation. The McLaren MP4/1 not only radically improved McLaren’s chances but genuinely reinvigorated the sport as well. No less significantly, as rival teams looked at ways of building carbon composite cars of their own, the construction methods introduced by Barnard’s

MP4/1 made possibly the largest single contribution to driver safety of any innovation in the sport’s history. By feeding loads along the axis of the strands in the material, carbon composite cars were able to boast a much higher stiffness-to-weight ratio, making them not just lighter and faster but safer too.

For all its success, the MP4/1 was not the finished article, and with its tendency to porpoise there was certainly room for further aerodynamic development. Nor was it ever a particularly easy car to drive. The nickname earned by de Cesaris – ‘de Crasheris’ – gives some indication as to how well his season went, and also explains in part why after finishing with only a single point he was replaced by Niki Lauda for 1982.

It changed many perceptions, inside and outside the sport. The McLaren MP4/1 had always been interesting because it had become a winner, but now the true advantages of its ground-breaking technology had been demonstrated worldwide. Potential applications for the new material were being identified almost weekly, and videos of Watson’s crash were soon being used in the US to convince the military of the material’s value as cladding for attack helicopters in need of underbody protection against fire from below, For this, and for the major leap forward that F1 safety took, the remarkable McLaren MP4/1 deserves all the credit it can get.

Images copyright: Mclaren

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