Insulating the exhaust on the BT62 Supercar

Rear View of Brabham X Pipe and Silencers

Insulating the exhaust on the Brabham BT62 Supercar

In the Summer of 2019, GoodFabs was approached by Brabham Automotive to provide design and fabrication input for their new BT62 Supercar.

As the engine would be running at temperatures of up to 1000°C, managing these temperatures was a chief concern. Heat shielding provided a solution, utilising both integral insulation and clam shell insulation in different sections of the assembly.

Among the sections of the system which benefitted from integral insulation were the primary pipes and ‘X-Pipe’ sections.

10mm Superwool insulation matting was directly applied in these areas and then covered with 0.1mm dimpled inconel foil. The foil sections were pressed using bespoke tooling which was produced in-house and ensured the best possible fit to the primary pipes. This was then spot welded into position to finish the integral insulation solution.

As the primary silencers had a requirement for repacking of the silencer material, it made sense to opt for a clam shell insulation solution.

The same 10mm Superwool insulation material was formed into a clamp shell shape and covered in 0.15mm SS foil in a similar method as used for the integrated insulation solution.

However, rather than being directly applied to the silencer, the shell was placed around it and fixed using springs on each side of the shell.

This allowed the required protection to be applied to the silencer while providing the flexibility for the insulation to be quickly and easily removed to provide access to the silencer itself.

These heat shielding techniques were successfully applied across both road and track versions of the BT62 which were then shipped from the UK over to Brabham’s facility in Australia.