A Harsh Environment for motorsport exhaust technology

So what has changed over the years?

In the 80s and even into the 90s the biggest problem was packaging in the car, not to say that this is not still the case; but back then the exhaust was the last thing designers considered.

It was more the case of a couple of Fabbies(exhaust fabricators) arriving with a box of bends, a hacksaw, an under powered portable sanding machine and a welder to mock up the exhaust on the car.

“See you at the end of the week boys, we are firing up Friday night” were often the mechanics words, with that we are working all nighters this week tone, only to find at the end of the week that the gear change mechanism from the manually selected gear change had not been finalised so all our hard work just needed to be moved by 5mm. Or perhaps there was an electrical box of tricks or heat exchanger right where we thought our exhaust could be routed.

In exhaust terms 5mm is a mile, as changing the path of one pipe results in all of the pipes being moved, plus they must all be within a tolerance of plus or minus 5mm in (tuned) length from one and other. Easy!

There was no CAD designed exhaust then (although I did once see a hand drawn exhaust by John Barnard - impressive), so they were never really a part of the car as such as they are nowadays. Every single part of the car is now drawn on CAD and part numbered and then given a life span which is carefully monitored to reduce the chance of a part failure.