Robert Wickens' racing hand controls could help others, too

“I didn’t really set out to be an inspiration,” says Robert Wickens, the IMSA driver who’s making his Nürburgring debut this weekend in a hand-controlled Hyundai Elantra TCR. “I just want to compete in the sport I love. And the great thing about motorsport is it’s the place I can still compete at the highest level–with no concessions and no asterisks.”

Here’s the elevator version of Robert’s story so far: The 36-year-old Canadian was on track to be North America’s next F1 driver through the early 2000s and 2010s. Success in junior formula series led to success in German Touring Cars, F2, F1 testing and an absolutely blazing start in Indy cars in 2018.

After winning rookie of the year honors at the Indy 500, Wickens had collected enough points to clinch overall rookie of the year honors when he suffered a violent crash at Pocono that left his legs paralyzed. In 2022, he returned to motorsports, driving a TCR Hyundai with Bryan Herta Autosport and winning the IMSA TCR title a year later.

[This is the unique hand-control setup Robert Wickens uses to win]

We got to spend some time with Wickens and the Bosch crew that’s developing the hand-control systems he uses in both the Hyundai and the GT3 Corvette he drives in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Wickens’ physical talents are unquestionable, but the high-tech gear he’s using on his journey is equally as impressive.

Circling back to his comments about competing on an even playing field, Wickens referenced his other sporting outlets, of which the athletic racer has many. “When I compete in golf or cycling or whatever, I’m competing in an accessible division. Motorsport is just motorsport.

“So,” he continues, “to compete at the highest level just requires being fast. There’s no distinctions for being disabled or whatever, you just either win or you don’t. So to have this outlet at all is really satisfying, never mind that it’s kind of my chosen way to compete.”

The gear that Wickens uses on his journey has seen some development since Bosch started on it in 2024, but advances in motorsport tech in general have streamlined the process somewhat. The system uses a ring that slides parallel to the steering column to actuate its own master cylinder, which in turn feeds the car’s main master cylinder, which triggers the Bosch electronic brake units to operate the brakes.

The big black ring is the brakes, and no, you probably can’t squeeze it nearly as hard as Wickens does hundreds of times per stint. The smaller silver lever below is the throttle actuator. The paddles above those are the standard Elantra N TCR shift paddles.

“It’s kind of a hydraulically actuated brake-by-wire system in the TCR car,” explains Bosch Motorsport engineer Jordan Krell. “In the Corvette, the system is entirely by wire, so the install is much more compact. All of Robert’s gear fits on a single spacer between the regular GT3 wheel and the column.”

The hydraulic system is plumbed in series. “We took the inspiration from drifting and their hand e-brake plumbing,” Krell continues. The setup in the Hyundai, though, more or less doubles the amount of brake fluid to provide some reserve capacity, since they have to switch back and forth between hand and foot operation.

The rest of Wickens’ controls are on the wheel as well. The standard shift paddles are in place, but a switch on the center console activates hand-operated throttles on either side of the wheel as well. The controls are synchronized side to side–the brake actuator is a single loop of metal around the wheel, while the throttle levers are connected via a linkage–which was an important part of the recipe in getting the system optimized for Wickens’ needs and wants.

“I find I do most of my braking with my right hand, which frees my left hand to make smooth downshifts, which I do most of my accelerating with my left hand so I can upshift with my right,” Wickens explains. “But it doesn’t always work that smoothly, and I like to do a lot of trail braking, so there’s times where I can’t really reach the brake lever with the proper force because I’m turned so far, so I have to be able to switch smoothly from hand to hand on the fly.”

For just these reasons, Krell says one of the priorities of the system has been balance across both sides of the control surface. This was particularly important when developing the latest generation of the system implemented in the Corvette, which is entirely electronic, eschewing the hydraulic connection in the Hyundai.

“Rob’s feedback has really been huge during the whole process in getting the feel dialed in,” Krell says. “As engineers, we’re sometimes really good at designing things to work a certain way but forgetting that a human ultimately has to operate them.”

Krell says their priorities with the system were threefold: “Our big touchpoints were consistency, resolution and latency.”

Notice that “feedback” isn’t included in that list, which we found interesting. Feedback seems like a key to a solid braking system, right?

This custom dash panel serves as Wickens’ control center for the Bosch hand-control system. The blue knob controls the gain on the brake controllers, while the red knob is assignable by Bosch techs for various functions and mostly used for development purposes. Since the supplemental system is plumbed in series with the standard brake controllers, Wickens adjusts ABS and brake bias through the usual wheel-mounted controls. The foot/hand toggle is pretty self-explanatory. Flipping it disables the foot controls and activates the hand controls and vice versa. When Wickens is entering the car, the able-bodied driver is responsible for hitting the switch and disabling the foot pedals. This prevents Wickens, who braces his feet against the pedals, from accidentally activating the throttle.

“Feedback really becomes a byproduct of doing those other things right,” Krell notes, so Bosch didn’t build any haptics into the controls, opting instead to simplify the control loop and give Wickens a more direct link to whatever he’s activating.

Likewise, on the Corvette’s current setup, the brake lever uses positional data for actuation rather than load cells. “We found load cells were sensitive to temperature changes, where positional sensors were consistent across the widest variety of conditions,” Krell notes.

Still, a system needs a certain tactile quality to make the driver comfortable. For this, the Bosch team turned to methods similar to what sim racers employ, using bump rubbers to provide the “feel” for the application of the brakes. “We did our homework on these,” Krell says. “They were all tested on a shock dyno in various temperatures to get a very specific and, again, consistent feel.”

Still, the system takes a firm hand to actuate the brakes properly. And that’s kind of a gross understatement. Grabbing the brake actuation lever is a lot like squeezing a thick dictionary. You might compress it enough to get to Y, but you aren’t getting to W or even X without some serious effort.

“At some heavier brake pressures, it’s not unusual that I’ll have to put over 150 pounds of force into squeezing the brakes,” Wickens says, and even a cursory glance at his thigh-like forearms confirms this statement. “The trick for me has been finding sensitivity at the moderate brake pressures.

“Getting immediately to threshold braking came quickly as a skill, but finding the sensitivity for the lower brake pressures in momentum sections has taken more work,” he continues. “I find that I’ll tend to either apply brake too slowly and sneak up on my brake pressure, or apply too much initial brake and it negatively affects my momentum–which is tough at the Nürburgring, because there’s so many sections that require way less than max braking.”

Even at that max braking level, Wickens won’t get an ABS pulsing, since the system is largely isolated from that section of the hydraulic circuit. As Krell puts it, though, that’s not really a big deal. “Today, with the electronic braking systems, we’re finding that that sort of feedback really isn’t a requirement.

Front and rear electronic brake controllers are similar to what’s used on the rear of current IMSA GTP cars and sit on the passenger floor, along with the ABS controller.

“We originally started working on possibly having more haptics in the circuit, but we realized pretty quickly that these race cars are really high-vibration environments to begin with. So perceiving tiny vibrations really gets lost in the amount of physical input that’s just being produced everywhere in the car. We found it worked better to just give the driver a very consistent feel with these controls and let them build muscle memory that way.”

Wickens, of course, has had to build a whole new set of muscle memories to master hand controls. But he took to it effortlessly.

“I found pretty quickly that adapting to the controls was not really that hard,” he explains. “There’s a few particular techniques I had to work out, like braking into corners with a lot of wheel input and transferring hands during braking occasionally, but in any race car you get in, you have to work out specific techniques, so that really wasn’t a big deal.

“What I found pretty quick was that I knew how to make a race car go fast, and the key to driving fast is in your brain, not necessarily your feet or your hands or any specific body part. So it was just a matter of using my same brain to work different controls to achieve the same goal.”

Hovering over the tech talk and the particulars of Wickens’ execution behind the wheel, though, was the bigger picture. A common theme in motorsports is the “improving the breed” and “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” marketing ethos that largely justifies the existence of racing in general. The theory is that technology developed on track finds its way to the street to make the cars we drive every day better. The reality, though, is that we usually talk about that like it’s kind of an abstraction. Race track tech certainly does trickle to the street, but the line is long and rarely straight.

Krell says the Nürburgring is an exceptional resource to capture mountains of data on the performance of the system. “When you’re engineering something like this, the most valuable data is all those edge cases where the car is doing something it doesn’t normally do. At the Nürburgring, pretty much every corner is an edge case, so we generate lots of great info here.”

This technology, however, feels different. It’s got an immediacy to it and feels like it could make an impact on a lot of people’s lives on a very compressed timeline. That vibe is not lost on Wickens and the Bosch team.

“Modern hand controls for road cars are some of the most janky-ass contraptions you’ll ever use,” Wickens says. “The setup in my van is basically zip tied and hose clamped around the steering column, and I have to operate it with one hand while I steer with the other. So yeah, it kind of does feel like this system could evolve to something that could easily make people’s lives better.”

Likewise, Krell shows a lot of excitement about the implications of this project. “Making race cars go fast is super fun,” Krell says, “and no one is ever going to get bored doing that. But then we kind of take a step back and look at what we’re doing here and how seamlessly this could adapt to road cars and seriously change lives, it kind of hits you. I’m an engineer, so it feels weird adapting the marketing speak, but Bosch’s mission statement is 'Technology for Life,' and this really feels like we’re hitting that.”

Bosch seems invested in the tech as well. There’s a team of engineers at the Nürburgring supporting the system–Krell insisted that his teammates Jordan Smart, Jeff Blair and Brooke Bond shared the credit for their accomplishments.

“I guess if I’m inspiring,” Wickens reluctantly says, “I really just want to be inspiring because I get results. This tech absolutely gives me a path to doing that. And the path from here to road cars and making people’s lives better is pretty easy to see.”

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