Follow The Lee Company
For Pratt Miller Motorsports, this is more than just a mindset – it is how they approach every aspect of their business. We recently caught up with Brandon Widmer, VP Motorsports and Kyle Millay, Director of Competition & Engineering for Pratt Miller during the Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta to talk about their remarkable achievements on the track – and how The Lee Company’s vent valve helps them leave the pit box with higher acceleration and better performance.
Since their start in 1997, the Corvette Racing Program by Pratt Miller has racked up an impressive number of accolades – over 128 wins in the International Motorsports Association (IMSA), nine wins in the GT category with the 24 hours of Le Mans, among countless others. But what makes Pratt Miller unique is that they are more than just a race team: they’re an engineering powerhouse committed to continuous improvement.
“Not only do we race cars… we actually design them in-house,” says Widmer. “We can design a new system or develop a new tool and then build and implement that in our race teams [or] customer race teams.”
An accelerated feedback loop is crucial to improve future performance outcomes – especially when taking on the challenging task of adapting production cars to the motorsport environment. In order to gain better control and position targeting of the electronic clutch system in their GT3 racing car, Pratt Miller looked to The Lee Company for an off-the-shelf solution that could help them improve performance overall.
Precision is paramount to the outcome of any road race. Even the smallest amount of air in the clutch can negatively impact vehicle performance. Air pockets can interfere with system startup and may cause issues with cavitation or noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH). On the track, Pratt Miller found that air was causing major performance issues in their race vehicle. They needed to find a solution that would enable them to achieve more consistent and lasting performance, lap after lap.
When Pratt Miller reached out to inquire about an off-the-shelf offering from The Lee Company that could help them remove the air in their clutch, they did not have to wait long. Our degreed Sales Engineers sprung into action to provide them with an innovative technical solution – and parts they could test immediately.
“We were basically less than one week from initial cold call email to having parts in hand,” says Millay. The parts in question? The Lee Company’s precise and dependable vent valve.
Vent valves — also known as bleeder valves — provide a more efficient way to prime a system and minimize the effects of trapped air. They are normally closed valves that start by prohibiting air from being drawn back into a system during shutdown. During startup, the system pressure increases and opens the valve, allowing any trapped air to vent out of the system. The valve then closes as the system approaches its operating pressure, eliminating further hydraulic losses.
The vent valves have proved to be a winning addition to Pratt Miller’s race vehicles, directly leading to increased performance and endurance.
“The most significant benefit to the use of the vent valve has been the improved consistency of the hydraulic system […] due to the fact that we don’t have any more entrained air,” says Millay. “[This] gives us better position targeting and control, which is pretty critical to our systems.”
Outside of technical performance benefits for their GT3 racing car, Pratt Miller also gained the support of a partner similarly committed to constant innovation. Due to our experience in the automotive industry and extensive catalog of proven COTS products, Pratt Miller could trust in our engineered solution. Per Millay: “The responsiveness and lead times – working specifically with the Sales Engineers has been a big benefit and helped us get solutions into the field and into the fleet with quick turnaround.”
For over 75 years, The Lee Company has supplied a vast range of miniature components that have been field-proven in millions of vehicles around the world. Every day, we help automotive innovators like Pratt Miller save valuable time so they can focus on system level challenges instead of in-house component level design. We look forward to continuing our partnership and providing field-proven precision fluid control components to help fuel future success.
Always verify flow calculations by experiment.
*There are many parameters to consider when determining V-Factor. Click here for more information.
