3D PRINTING

Prodrive 3D prints car parts in the desert with Makerbot

Over 30 car parts were produced for the Prodrive-run Bahrain Raid Xtreme team’s Hunter T1 using MakerBot’s nylon carbon fiber on the METHOD X 3D printer

Prodrive has a long history in motorsports, competing and winning its first event, the Qatar International Rally, in 1984. Since then, Prodrive has been unstoppable, winning a multitude of titles across a wide range of motorsport disciplines.

In 2021, the company entered the Dakar Rally in partnership with the Kingdom of Bahrain, under the new team, Bahrain Raid Xtreme (BRX). The Dakar Rally takes place over two weeks, with stages covering hundreds of miles across a range of challenging, off-road terrain in Saudi Arabia.

To prepare for the event, the BRX team began development on the Hunter T1, its new two-car factory team driven by 9x World Rally champion Sébastien Loeb, and 25x Dakar Rally legend Nani Roma. Roma secured 5th place overall in the 2021 race, the first time any team has achieved such a high ranking on their first attempt at the Dakar Rally.

With work only just beginning in late 2019, the BRX team suddenly came up against what would be one of the biggest challenges that hit the industry thus far. “We often put ourselves in tough positions, time-wise. But COVID-19 really threw a wrench in our already-tight timeline,” said Paul Doe, chief engineer at Prodrive. “In the UK, there was a lockdown that effectively forced us to close the factory for a while. Development that should have taken about a year was compressed into nine months. Instead of testing in July, we didn’t end up turning a wheel on a car until October 2020.”

With the Dakar Rally scheduled for the first two weeks of January 2021, this put an immense amount of pressure on the whole team. Although BRX includes 40 people to design, engineer, service, and operate the Hunter T1 vehicles, the team was stretched thin with an atypically shorter timeline. Additionally, although Prodrive offered in-house manufacturing, fabricating, and machining capabilities, the team was competing for resources with other projects.

When Doe decided to add the MakerBot METHOD X® 3D printer, recommended by DSM, a global supplier of Carbon Fiber materials, to his team’s toolbox, it became a game changer. The METHOD X enabled his team to prototype and print much-needed parts quickly and conveniently as well as experiment with different applications, on and off the course. With the unlimited possibilities of additive manufacturing, prototyping and part production became much more streamlined and cost-efficient.

Innovation has always been a core tenet at Prodrive. The company utilizes a wide range of technology to ensure it stays on top of the competition. Adding METHOD X to its repertoire of cutting-edge technologies afforded the company an added opportunity to save even more time during its shortened production schedule.

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Filed: Moulding
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