Seat Sport wins FIA World touring Car Championship with PTC software tools

The body, chassis and engine of the popular Seat Leon were redesigned and optimised using PTC’s Pro/Engineer 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software and its PLM (product and process lifecycle management) software Windchill. Benoit Bagur, chief engineer of Seat Sport, explains that WTCC is similar to Formula One, but for real world cars that have to be produced in at least 25,000 units a year. To safeguard competition among manufacturers and restrict development costs, regulations of which components may be changed and to what extent are stricter. Form and thickness of the shell, for instance, have to be identical to the commercial car, although aerodynamics can be improved. Similarly, suspension components may be substituted by similar parts of different materials, but the structural concept has to be the same. “Adapting an existing production car to the WTCC specifications within only a few months requires close collaboration between engine, transmission, body and chassis specialists,” says Bagur. “It is quite similar to the normal development process in the automotive industry, but under the constraints of time pressure and limited resources. We cannot afford to have specialists and specialised tools, and we need tools that are easy to use. For this reason we decided to use the PTC software for all our work rather than the toolset used for commercial production for this model.” He says that Seat engineers relied heavily on Pro/Engineer to redesign the engine and suspension, to create the tubular structure that reinforces the cockpit and to model the complex free form surfaces of wings and body components. All critical components were simulated under worst case conditions, using its thermal and structural analysis tools. Pro/ Engineer Behavioural Modelling Extension (BMX) also allowed them to optimise the geometry of some parts under physical constraints, such as weight and mass inertia in a matter of minutes. “PTC’s Product Development System has strongly contributed to shorten our design iterations and to get things right at the first time. It allowed us to bring a competitive car to the circuit in only five months,” says Jaime Puig, managing director of Seat Sport.