Revolutionizing Racing: Inside Automation at a Leading Race Shop

Summary

You’ve heard the expression “where the rubber meets the road.” It’s the catchy alliterative that outlines the point in time when an idea or concept is initially implemented, and any results or expected achievements are still unknown. It’s about to get real.
 
It doesn’t take a Henry Ford or Karl Benz to figure out the expression originated in the automotive industry as a take on the literal place where complex engineering comes into contact with a driving surface. You also don’t need to feel the impact of 3Gs in a high-speed turn to know that where that wheel attaches to the car is equally important.
 
When Richard Childress Racing (RCR) in Welcome, N.C.–just north of the best-smelling barbecue in the state–was tasked with designing and manufacturing the new, single lug for NASCAR’s move to the Next-Gen cars in 2020, the team knew it would need to learn more about automation. With 16 championships and more than 200 victories across the sport’s three series, RCR knows firsthand that teamwork, flexibility, and best-in-industry offerings are among the keys to success. That’s why they expanded their partnership with Okuma America Corporation and its cutting-edge machine tools and technologies, including automation-friendly solutions, to manage the Next-Gen transition and its own critical role in delivering safe, exciting, and reliable parts–because the rubber has to stay on the road.
 
To help keep costs from reaching astronomical levels, like other international racing classes experienced, NASCAR officials determined that a common car with single-source suppliers for those parts would be a sensible and economical solution. Some parts could still be manufactured by teams in-house, but the chassis and suspension would all utilize the same pieces and parts. The creativity and ingenuity of the crew chief, driver, and race engineer, and their simulation work of how to make those pieces and parts work better together, would be the differentiators.
 
The move changed everything: for the teams, the drivers, and the parts suppliers responsible for filling orders with a quick turnaround. Previously, teams designed and manufactured their own parts, meaning employees would come into the shop on Monday morning after a race weekend and find a list of new parts needed before the coming weekend’s race (or races). They’d design, manufacture, and test the parts the best they could in three or four days and then head to the racetrack. It was a lot of work with high costs, and every team was doing it.
 
COVID-19 delayed the launch of the Next-Gen car by one year, buying everyone involved some more time. When the time for rollout of the finalized design finally arrived a year later, NASCAR reached out to vendors interested in submitting bids to build the individual components. RCR bid on several and won the single lug nut—very likely the most talked about and scrutinized part.
 
Okuma’s ARMROID system was relatively new at the time, so the RCR team was introduced to robotics—something it had never done or worked with before. Okuma provided some quick training, and it wasn’t long before the team was producing parts with extra efficiency. It’s a good thing RCR had automation on their side. Races and pit crew practices used the precious parts quickly, and it wasn’t long before NASCAR’s initial projections for the number of single lug nuts RCR would be tasked with manufacturing in a single season more than tripled.
 
The change from five lug nuts to a single point of attachment is a byproduct of NASCAR’s shift from a 15-inch steel wheel to an 18-inch aluminum wheel, a move that required a single nut that was durable enough to stand up to the demands that come with high-speed racing.
 
Before the Next-Gen car, a run of 30 parts was a big order for the team to fulfill. Now, RCR would be responsible for manufacturing every single lug nut for every team in the series. What would that weekly consumption look like? How many teams would change all of their lug nuts every three or four races?
 
The team wanted several options to take advantage of the flexibility automation truly gives them. Sometimes, it would run the parts complete on one machine, doing op 10 machining or op 20 work. Sometimes, it would need to break the process up.
 
Or depending on the speed they needed, RCR might do some turning on a lathe and then move the part over to the 5-axis machine to get faster throughput. If all 40 teams need just one set of lug nuts on a Monday, that’s 160 machined parts that would need to be produced  within a few days. But that flexibility remained important, because if a team changed their mind and their order, RCR needed to be reactive to avoid scrap.
 
So, what happens if you want to get into automation but don’t have any experience? As RCR shows, Okuma makes it easy—the RCR employees actually call their shop “Okuma” because of all the eponymous machines there. Collision-avoidance software and self-teaching robotics mean the machine knows where it needs to load the part, and it finds its own path into and out of the machine. Once the ARMROID is taught basic movements, it can be trusted to execute each job, including lights out operations. RCR even used their least-experienced employees and trained them using the ARMROID, because the machine-automation pairing does all the work once it’s programmed.
 
See how automation can work for you. Lights out, worry free, and no trouble in Turn 3.