The Seat Cordoba WRC part 3

There's not much that is revolutionary about the Cordoba WRC. The team, lead by Spaniard Jaime Puig, an ex-racing driver himself, opted for largely field-proven solutions and initially targeted reliability rather than speed. That proved to be a wise choice since it allowed Seat Sport to accumulate experience and allowed their car to finish almost all the rallies to which it took part. The car's technical specification can be found here. You can also find pictures of the Cordoba Evo 2 shot at the 1999 Finnish rally here and those shot at the 2000 Acropolis rally starting here. The main problems with the Cordoba WRC are, first that it shares too many technical solutions with its predecessor, the Ibiza 2lt kit car and second that the whole project lacks homogeneity, too many companies are providing parts for the car and it is difficult to integrate them to one, coherent, whole. But let us look into detail how the car is made.

The Cordoba's engines are prepared for racing at Daniel Snobeck's workshop in France under the direction of chief engineer Serge Meyer.

The engines have proved reliable so far but seemed to lack power during the 1999 season. Seat and Snobeck were planning a major injection/ignition remap for the 2000 season in order to render the engine more useable in low to middle rev speeds were it is most solicited by the sport's specifics. The fact the engine lacks low end torque could only be expected because the Snobeck team's experience is mainly related to track racing, turbocharged engines where low end torque is not as important as it is in rallying.

Seat Sport's facilities in Abrera Spain (at 30Km of Barcelona) are very well equipped to perform extensive engine test and tuning, the total staff allocated to the project being just over 100 persons. The base engine used to develop the WRC version comes from the commercial Cordoba SX2.0 16V launched in spring 1997. What's amazing is that this unit has been dropped from the Seat's commercial version to be replaced by the VW 1.8lt 20V turbo engine! The 2lt unit that serves as a base for the WRC engine dates back to the early days of the VW take over of Seat and is home designed and made by the Spanish manufacturer. Anyone remember VW's marketing plot of the "Design by Porsche" logos at the time? Basically it's the engine that allowed Seat to win three successive 2lt championships in is normally aspirated version to which the Spaniards added the advanced Garrett turbocharger and moderately altered bore and stroke. The biggest problem in this department comes from the engine's position in the car. The inlet side faces the front of the car and this forced Seat to fit the turbocharger on the hot side of the engine compartment. In the Ibiza kit car, where the engine was also placed in the same way, this was not a major issue due to the lack of a turbocharger. In the Cordoba WRC however the temperatures reached inside the engine bay is significantly higher. Additionally the compressed air coming out of the turbocharger has to travel quite some distance within the engine bay before reaching the inlet manifold and, naturally, gets heated on the way thus lowering the overall efficiency.

The car's suspension is based on a classic McPherson strut including lower wishbones front and rear. The dampers used come from the renowned specialist Öhlins (Mitsubishi RalliArt also use Öhlins dampers on the Lancer Evolutions) and are fully adjustable for ride height, compression/rebound and speed relative damping. Seat had to use rear McPherson struts since the base Cordoba model uses them too and WRC regulation prohibit radical suspension geometry changes. One of the car's handling problems, the chronic understeering, could have been cured or at least lessened much easier had the rear suspension been based on a multilink layout for instance.

The transmission of the Cordoba WRC is based on a transversally mounted 6 speed sequential gearbox whose pinion and shafts origin is traced back to the British specialist Hewland while the complete box is assembled by Prodrive! Seat Sport are customizing the shift command and gear ratios as well as they are reworking the gear kits themselves but still the car would certainly benefit from a more adequate gearbox mounted longitudinally like in other WRC cars such as the Ford Focus or Peugeot 206. A longitudinally mounted box would allow for a better mass distribution and would lower the weight on the front axle making the car handle more neutrally. Certainly Seat's new ambitions will eventually lead them to redesign the box by allocating the, extremely high, budgets necessary to the operation. This will however require a new homologation sheet and no such demand has reached the FIA for 2000 consequently no such box will be be fitted during the 2000 season. Note that a similar gearbox was used in the Ibiza kit car...As of the Catalunya 2000 rally the Cordoba uses a joystick operated gearbox (like the "old" Toyota Corolla WRC) that controls electronic circuitry which, in turn, operates the gear changes through hydraulic circuits.

While the first release of the Cordoba WRC was using a front and center active differentials and a mechanical rear one, the Evo 2 used three active differentials right from its appearance. Most other cars go through a period during which they use one or two such devices in order to allow the engineers to fine tune the car's handling. In the Cordoba's case the Seat team opted for the use of three active differentials most probably to force a more neutral character to the car's natural understeering. Active differentials allow much more parameters to enter their locking characteristic and torque distribution than mechanical ones and can, thus, modify radically a car's handling. Ideally a WRC car should be developed based on mechanical differentials and only make the transition to active ones once the car's handling has been sorted out. That was obviously not the case for Seat's entry and the main reason to that was that the base car, the normal Cordoba sedan, was not the best car on which to build the WRC version. Not to say that either the base Cordoba or its WRC descendent are bad cars, absolutely not, the problem is that when you're racing to the tenth of a second the smallest detail can cost precious seconds at the end of a stage. Things may have changed for the better when Seat was to release it new WRC car based on their brand new commercial model, the Seat Leon in late 2001 but, as mentioned earlier, the company withdrew from the World Rally Championship by the end of 2000.

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