Sentronics Support Innovations Bolster IMSA Team Operations
21 March 2024: Sentronics, the UK-based ultrasonic fuel flow measurement technology company, returned to the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship (IWSC) Roar Before the Rolex 24 test week preceding America’s flagship endurance race, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, with its TrackCal fuel flow meter (FFM) mobile calibration rig.
Introduced at last year’s Roar test, the TrackCal performs on-site calibration of the two mandated Sentronics FFMs in the IWSC: the FlowSonic® GT on-board sensor used since 2018 and the RigFlow® sensor fitted to each team’s pit lane refuelling tank since 2023. This year, Sentronics successfully recalibrated over 120 sensors across five days of track sessions, delivering a seamless service to the busy competitors.
The TrackCal makes recalibration simple. Built within a flight case for portability, the laboratory-grade calibration rig is shipped to the race track and wheeled between the team garages and pit locations. Recalibrating at the Roar test is sufficient to ensure that all the sensors stay within their target accuracy throughout the IWSC season.
IMSA employs the compact FlowSonic® FFM in the three classes featuring multiple engine suppliers to set and monitor performance balancing parameters, with all four IWSC classes – GTP, LMP2, GTD Pro, and GTD – relying on the RigFlow® to ensure compliance with refuelling regulations.
Bringing recalibration to the track avoids teams having to ship their sensors back to the UK for their mandated annual service including recalibration, allowing the teams’ off-season preparations and testing to proceed without interruption.
A new enhancement for 2024 is the availability of a secondary CAN port on the RigFlow® enabling teams to receive fuel flow information in real time instead of having to wait for IMSA’s delayed re-transmission of this data as in previous years. Streamlining this data flow has helped refuellers do their work with increased precision and strengthen race engineers’ strategy decisions.
Neville Meech, Sentronics Managing Director, said, “We are delighted to support IMSA with our mobile recalibration equipment again in 2024. After the success from the TrackCal’s debut last year, we are continuing to expand the usefulness of our range of trackside refuelling and on-car fuel consumption measurement tools and we are excited to watch how this year’s championship unfolds.”
