Formula One teams rush to order 24-carat gold ZircoFlex to repel 98% of heat from exhausts and engines

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Published: 16 January 2013

RACING TEAMS are rushing to fit this season's racing cars with a new ultra-thin sheet of flexible gold ceramic - 2013's most advanced innovation in repelling heat away from exhausts and engines.

Motortrades Insight spoke in detail to Terry Graham, Managing Director of Zircotec, on the new product, how it could impact motor racing and the automotive industry as a whole.

McLaren could benefit greatly from using the product in comparison to simple gold leaf.

The company already supply 11 of the 12 Formula One teams, many of whom use the original three-year-old ZircoFlex, which is a sticky aluminium-backed material. And while it proved revolutionary as a heat-shield for years, aluminium is only 90 per cent reflective and can tarnish to reflect between 60 to 70 per cent of heat.

"Gold does not tarnish," Terry said. "F1 teams and a lot of top race teams use gold leaf but of course, all that's doing is reflecting the heat. There's nothing under the gold leaf to protect the underlying materials so what we've got is ZircoFlex Gold, which has the ceramic backing so it's ceramic combined with gold - a high performance product.

Terry Graham poses for a photo. He said: "We've had a huge amount of interest. I'd say we have had more interest than we were expecting but then we've had a lot of interest over the last couple of months."

"It's 24-carat gold and very, very highly reflective of radiant heat. What it's doing is reflecting heat away. Any radiant heat from the exhaust is being reflected by the gold. It's ultra-light and weighs only 230 grams per square metre compared to 460 grams on ordinary ZircoFlex. So it's half the weight. It's thinner: 0.17mm. It's an incredible material and is extremely effective."

THE MOMENTOUS DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE

In what has been a two to three-year development programme for a company with around 25 employees, Terry's experienced team of researchers and engineers have encountered major challenges on the road to the finished product.

"We use real ceramic," he said. "We are spraying ceramic at 10,000 degrees Celsius onto a very thin substrate - a major challenge in itself because it's so easy to melt the substrate or blow a hole in it, which we found while testing.

In this example, the exhaust runs alongside the front right door and the gold ceramic is said to prevent heat from entering the car compartment and damaging delicate components.

"ZircoFlex Gold is so thin that you can almost hold it up to the light and see light through the backing because obviously you do not want to put too much gold down. So spraying ceramic at those sorts of temperatures onto such a backing and such a lightweight material is a major challenge.

"It's important to get the manufacturing processes right so you don't get too much scrap material. Otherwise, it puts the costs of producing the product up."

THE VISION

Having provided heat management materials for the ninth-placed Ferrari 458 GTE (JMW Motorsport) in the Le Mans 24 two years ago, it seems the company's gold-backed products to take teams to even greater trophy-winning heights.

"It's aimed at top-end motorsport. The F1 teams and the Le Mans Series, where there have been major heating problems. But we could also see it being used on some of the high performance supercars. McLarens, for example, have real gold leaf inside the engine compartment and this ZircoFlex Gold would perform better than that with the ceramic backing."

Terry firmly believes the product could solve a lot of the heating issues in the Le Mans Series - a major market for the company. "One of the main issues in Le Mans is to keep the temperature of the passenger compartment down," he explained.

Zircoflex Gold

And while this 24-carat gold revolution is aimed at high performance sports cars for the road and racing teams, Terry has not ruled out the possibility of targeting the large OEMs and the growing electric car market in the near future. "Electric cars have a surprising amount of heating problems. We haven't looked seriously at electric cars as the volume is still very small. As you move into larger manufacturers, the margins start to reduce and they expect the costs to be driven down. It's that sort of balance between volume and price."

FROM HARWELL ATOMIC ENERGY RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT TO CREATING MOTORSPORT INNOVATIONS

"When the company was set up, it had a number of technologies and a number of people from the nuclear research site that transferred into Zircotec and so in that sense, we're quite an oddity because you wouldn't set up a company like Zircotec if you were starting from scratch.

"We've got a number of things that we've inherited from the nuclear industry. So that's where some of the technology comes from - core technology from the nuclear industry. A lot of the products and product development really comes from the fact that we have people who have come out of that research environment and have continued developing and inventing."

Images: Danny Hewitt.