Automotive Engineer

Most people only see trucks on the motorway when they are overtaking them. It doesn’t take much for a car to shoot past a commercial vehicle with a restricted speed limit. But some trucks can give cars a run for their money.

Every year MAN takes one of its racing trucks and lines it up against a NASCAR and a German touring car. It wouldn’t stand much of a chance in a straight drag race but, from a rolling Indianapolis start, the truck wins every time.

Unlike the race cars it runs against, the truck takes most of its technological development from the commercial vehicles on the road, and feeds developments back to them.

“The regulations state that we have to use series parts,” says Ralf Marquard, head of MAN’s engine research and development. “We don’t have a special race team, they are all part of the research department. People normally work on commercial truck engines and from time to time work on improving the behaviour of the race engines.” That work involves changing the parts from road going commercial vehicles by machining them differently. “You could say our crankcase is completely original and the cylinder head is modified, but only by the machining operation,” says Marquard.

Those changes can have a large impact on both road and race versions, however.

“We have one unique cylinder head for all six cylinders, which is in general bad for a race engine. 

But we learned a lot about the technology, and even managed to help the development for series vehicles,” says Marquard. “We saw small problems in the casting of the cylinder head, which wasn’t noticeable in the validation processes for series production but we could really see because we have more than double the power in the race engine.”