Penske Racing's 3D printing partner 

at SEMA 2019

At Team Penske the phrase "Effort Equals Results" is ingrained in the culture, as evidenced by eighteen (18) Indianapolis 500-mile race pole positions starts and eighteen (18) Indianapolis 500-mile race wins. Remarkable. 

One of the ways that Team Penske has remained on top at Indianapolis is to embrace technology, and an example is the use of Stratasys® 3D printing. According to Team Penske’s Matt Gimbel, they first used 3D printing in the early 2000’s to support their wind tunnel model program, but it has grown into much much more.

Team Penske signed a multi-year partnership with Stratasys in 2017 to further the advancement of additive manufacturing into their racing programs. Penske is not alone, as Schmidt Peterson Motorsports and Andretti Autosport also use Stratasys® technology and equipment for prototyping.  

3D printing allows Team Penske to update cars as fast as possible with multiple iterations of new ideas. According the Tim Cindric, “Stratasys® helps us get to the next solution quicker.”  An example is the fueling probe handle for INDYCAR that debuted in 2017.  

photo courtesy of Stratasys

The 3D printed carbon fiber fueling handle improved on the former all-metal design and Team Penske believed that it shaved a couple tenths of a second off the refueling time -  critical at Indianapolis where the cars travel at over 300 feet per second.  

For the probe handle project, Penske printed the master pattern tooling for the composite components using Ultem™ 1010 resin high-strength high-performance thermoplastic and ST-130 soluble material for the sacrificial tooling core to laminate the housing structure, and Nylon 12  to make a connector housing on the probe handle frame.

Team Penske uses both Stratasys® FDM® and PolyJet™ technology to produce smooth, accurate parts, prototypes and tooling. PolyJet™ additive manufacturing provides microscopic layer resolution and accuracy down to 0.014 mm, and can produce thin walls and complex geometries using the widest range of materials available with any technology.

FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), which Stratasys® invented more than 20 years ago, uses specialized 3D printers and production-grade thermoplastics to build strong, durable and dimensionally stable parts with the best accuracy and repeatability of any 3D printing technology to build parts layer-by-layer from the bottom up by heating and extruding thermoplastic filaments.

Stratasys' Amy Teal poses with the F370 printer 

Stratasys® had a top-of-the-line high-capacity F370 Industrial FDM printer on display at the 2019 SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association) show. This printer which supports a build size up to 14 inches by 10 inches by 14 inches, includes support for TPU-92A elastomer and PC-ABS, ABS-M30 and PLA thermoplastic materials with tolerances of .002 inch. The cost of the printer is around $50,000.

For more than 25 years, Stratasys Limited (https://www.stratasys.com/) has been an innovator and dominant player in shaping the way things are made. The company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota has more than 2,700 employees with over 1,200 granted or pending manufacturing patents.

Photos by the author except where noted