Going From Zero to Sixty Without Leaving Cyberspace

The world’s newest automobile--a thunderous blending of high-tech materials, computer-assisted design and engineering, and old-fashioned horsepower--will be built in Southern California by a firm whose heart may be planted firmly in the world of high-performance motoring but whose head is exploring the wonders of cyberspace.

The car, unveiled Saturday at Monterey’s famed Laguna Seca Raceway, is the Saleen S7. Its originator is former race driver and longtime car builder Steve Saleen, whose Saleen Mustang--a thoroughly redesigned and re-engineered version of Ford Motor Co.’s pony car--has been a staple of the performance car world for 14 years.

Now, after selling more than 8,000 of his Mustangs and several hundred hyper-tuned Saleen Explorers, the onetime Indy car driver has succumbed to a drive even stronger than the need for speed: the desire to design and build a car from the ground up.

The resulting mid-engine super-car, which Irvine-based Saleen Inc. maintains is the rival of the best that legendary car makers such as Ferrari and Lamborghini are producing, is a $300,000-plus two-seater capable of topping 200 mph on roads posted for no more than 75 and, Saleen hopes, of making the hearts of 100 or more wealthy enthusiasts and collectors swell with desire each year.

It features a carbon-fiber body and aluminum frame reinforced with honeycomb aluminum panels, and tips the scales at a mere 2,600 pounds. The bantamweight car, which stands only 41 inches high but is 88 inches wide and 15.5 feet long, is outfitted with a 7.0-liter V-8 engine based on an all-aluminum 427-cubic-inch Ford block heavily modified by Saleen. It pumps out 550 horsepower and 520 foot-pounds of torque, the pulling power that is the real measure of a car’s muscle.

All that, enveloped in a svelte body and outfitted with all the modern conveniences--leather seats, air conditioning, CD player, air bags, adjustable control pedals (in fact, the seats are fixed in place and the driver moves the pedals to maximize his or her fit in the car)--should capture the interest of exotic performance car fans all over the globe, industry insiders say.

“Saleen’s got a good reputation for building performance cars, Ford’s got a good reputation for performance engines, the stock market is high and consumer confidence is too, so if you were going to bring out a brand-new vehicle like this, now’s the best time in the last decade to do it,” says Jim Hossack, vice president of AutoPacific Inc. automotive market consultants in Tustin.

The S7 also has captured the interest of engineers and product planners at Ford--a company with which Saleen has a long association. It isn’t so much the car, though, that captivates the world’s second-largest auto maker. It’s the computerized development process.

Ford is not a partner in the program--Saleen gets his backing from private capital and funds generated by his successful Saleen Mustang line.

But the company supplies the S7’s engine block and has been watching with “great interest” how the Saleen team has used computer technology to design and engineer the car and all its components, says John Coletti, chief engineer of Ford’s Special Vehicles Team. From the day Saleen’s design consultant handed him the first sketch of what was to become the S7 until the day the first and still only prototype rumbled to life in the Saleen Inc. garage in an Irvine Spectrum industrial building, a mere eight months had passed.

Compared with the development cycle of the typical mass-production car, that is blazing speed--and in automotive development, as in most enterprises these days, time gained equals money saved.

The mainstream auto industry is working toward the day when it can eliminate the time- and money-consuming process of building model after model, prototype after prototype, to test aerodynamics, engineering, fit and finish and safety. Saleen did just that.

“It is exactly the right way to do it, the modern way of developing a car,” says Gerhard Steinle, former director of Mercedes-Benz’s North American advanced research and design center and now president of Prisma Design International in Tustin.

“If they did all that on the [cathode ray] tube, from first sketch to finished prototype, that’s great, it really proves that this is where the industry is heading.”

Phil Frank, Saleen’s designer since the two met at an automotive performance and appearance industry trade show in 1993, says it all, indeed, was done on the tube. A designer for athletic shoe giant Nike Inc. in Portland, Ore., by day, Frank retires to his home office after putting his daughters to bed at night and becomes an automotive stylist.

Frank’s initial drawings were based on a merger of Saleen’s ideas Frank’s own design for an exotic touring car, done in the late 1980s when he was an industrial design student at San Jose State.

Refinements came after Saleen took the computer-generated studies to his chassis engineering contractor, Ray Malich Ltd., in central England, an area with a rich history of race car development.

“It’s the Silicon Valley of motor sports,” Saleen says.

RML’s engineers informed Saleen that to get everything to work properly, he would have to abandon the idea of a typically American front-engine layout and build a mid-engine car. Placing the engine behind the cockpit can improve road-holding capability by putting the heftiest component almost directly dead-center to anchor the car to the road.

Frank, who says the sleek and somewhat sinister shape of the shark was the inspiration for his initial design, describes the final version as “very wide and low, with some very voluptuous surfaces that meet at fine, sharp creases that give it definition.”

Saleen--whose degree is in business administration, not design, and who speaks the language of a businessman and a performance car driver--says the design “came as much from the wind tunnel as anywhere else.” He declines to reveal the statistics yet but boasts that the S7’s aerodynamics equal or better those of any car on the road today.

Frank says aerodynamics didn’t dictate the entire design, though, and that with Saleen’s backing “we were able to draw the line with RML.”

“They wanted a really low tail, which spoiled all the lines, so we took the design package and loaded it into their engineering program and fought it out and came to a nice compromise,” Frank says. “The end result not only looks great, but it is aerodynamically very efficient.”

Using a computer program for automotive body design, Frank rhapsodizes, enables a designer to come close to perfection with the finished product.

The design lines, created in the computer as mathematical representations of the three-dimensional surfaces, are transferred as digital data to the program that controls a computerized lathe or milling machine. The program guides that machine as it carves from clay or some other substance an exact replica of what the designer drew in his computer.

“The old way, you had to rely on the model makers’ interpretation of your design,” Frank says. “They’d carve scale and full-size models out of clay and you had to go in and get them to correct this line and that, and they sanded and filed and filled things with putty. And when you pulled a mold of it and made the part, you could see every flaw.

“But with computer design, the machine carves exactly what you put into the computer and the surface comes out perfect, as long as you drew it that way.”

The process Frank describes--loading his computerized design into the engineering software package--is what the industry calls computer-assisted design and computer-assisted manufacturing, or CAD/CAM: engineering’s “E” gets left out of the acronym because it is part of the manufacturing process.

Doing it all on computer, Saleen says, cuts hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the development process.

He boasts that only 18 months will have elapsed from the day he made the decision to go until the day early next year that he sits in the first production model S7 and drives it off the assembly floor.

Tests on the prototype so far show that the decision to do it all in cyberspace--from exterior design and component engineering to crash-test and engineering simulations--was the right one, Saleen says.

The mainstream auto industry has been working to get to the point Saleen says he has reached--to be so confident of the results of computer simulations that the need to build scores of full-size models and working prototypes for testing can be abandoned.

If the process saved Saleen even a modest $250,000 (he won’t share specifics) on development of a single vehicle, think what it would mean to a Ford or General Motors Corp., each with scores of car and truck models in its lineup.

“The savings can be incredible,” says David Littman, chief economist and auto industry specialist at Comerica Bank in Detroit.

GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler’s Chrysler unit all are doing similar work on computer simulation, but none has yet taken an all-digital approach to bringing a vehicle from start to production prototype, he says.

“Each has contracts here in Michigan with Altair Engineering Corp. to do computerized crash-testing using the CAD/CAM data for the various models,” Littman says.

“This lets them figure out how the various pieces of a vehicle will behave in a crash, where to put things like the emergency brake lever and the armrests to minimize possible injury to the occupants, and where the stress points are on each part of the car,” he says. “But they still have to do actual crash-testing and engineering tests” with full-size models and with working prototypes.

Saleen also will have to build several pre-production models of the S7 to crash into barriers and cut into pieces to satisfy government safety regulators who won’t trust the word of a computer program.

But presuming the data generated in his simulations hold up, Saleen will be able to whisk through that process too, in less time, and with far less investment than has been the norm in the auto industry.

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Computer Creation

The Saleen S7, a mid-engine, two-seat, high-performance road car, was completely designed and developed on a computer. The artist’s lines are translated into mathematical formulas that are used to make perfect models for testing. This speeds getting the into production.