Q&A with Steven Sander, Director of Aerodynamics, LEGACY MOTOR CLUB

For readers who may be less familiar with LEGACY MOTOR CLUB, can you describe your role and how the team operates in the NASCAR Cup Series?

I’m the Director of Aerodynamics at LEGACY MOTOR CLUB. Since NASCAR introduced the Next Gen car in 2022, we’ve done a complete 180. In the past, there was much more design freedom working with sheet metal, welding it into whatever shape we wanted. Today, this is constrained to promote parity so the cars are closer in performance. There are still some parts that can be designed, but it’s a much tighter box.

The way we set ourselves apart from other teams is by how we consistently build high-quality cars twice every weekend - fielding the No. 42 and No. 43, and sometimes the No. 84 - week after week, so when our teams arrive at the track, they know exactly what kind of car they have and can focus on balance, setup, and have a solid chance to compete.

How tight a build timeline do you have to get the cars ready?

In a perfect world, we’d have about five weeks to build a car from scratch. The chassis arrives as raw components, including the center section, front clip, and rear clip, and from there, we start by assembling the underfloor before moving on to fitting and aligning the body panels. Each of those stages takes roughly a week of focused work, followed by full assembly and a final trip back onto the hoist so we can reset the underfloor and hand the car over to the race team for setup and all the finishing details. In reality, we rarely get the luxury of five weeks; it is usually closer to four. So for us, a four-week turnaround from raw components to a car ready to go to the track is pretty typical.

How does that level of time pressure influence your approach to manufacturing?

Time pressure drives everything. Our cars are rebuilt weekly, and the performance margins are extremely small, so we need to prototype, iterate, and produce parts very quickly. That is where having in-house additive manufacturing becomes a real advantage

What role do the BigRep printers play in that process, and what kinds of 3D printed car parts are you producing?

We run two BigRep STUDIO printers almost 24/7 at the shop. They produce fixtures and templates that help us execute consistently week in and week out, as well as functional parts that go on the car. For example, we print nose ducts for the front brakes, which are basically one-time-use parts and not practical to make in carbon, and we also print a large gear cooler plenum at the rear of the car. That component is far too big for a hobby printer, so we need an industrial, large-format system with accurate dimensional control and a big build volume.

We have been working together for a little over a year now. What was it like before you had large-format 3D printing in-house?

The part that really exposed the gap for us was the gear cooler plenum. We iterate that design frequently, and it is a large, complex component that you simply cannot print on small hobbyist printers. Our only options were to buy a carbon part from another team, which was very expensive, or outsource to a 3D print shop. The typical lead time from sending a design to receiving a part was about two weeks. In NASCAR, two weeks is a lifetime. By the time the part showed up, we could already be on a new design.

What materials are you using for these applications?

We’ve been using BigRep materials exclusively; there’s always a material for every requirement. TPU works well for flexible parts like gaskets. HI-TEMP CF is used when we need strength and thermal resistance. And then we’ve been using PRO HT very heavily for 3D printed car parts that need a good surface finish and moderate strength. We’ve also been impressed with HI-TEMP for higher-performance applications.

BVOH has been especially useful as a water-soluble support material and has opened up a lot of possibilities for us. We can print complex geometries and just snap the supports out, or just wash them off. Outsourcing was also not cheap, and my biggest frustration was not getting any support on materials, wall thickness, orientation, or infill, so we had to be very conservative. The result was parts that were often twice as heavy as the carbon components we were trying to replace.

How did bringing BigRep in as a partner change that situation?

The partnership lets us experiment on our own BigRep machines while still having access to BigRep’s engineering support. We can send designs over, get feedback on how to slice them, which materials to use, and how to optimize the print. Sometimes we will say, “Let us try it this way at BigRep,” and your team will test different slice settings, materials, and print orientations on your end. Once you have it dialed in, you send back the G-code, and we simply run it on our STUDIOs with confidence that it will work. That collaborative process is how we took the same gear cooler plenum from being heavier than the original carbon part to matching its weight.

A 3D printed rocker extension skirt produced with the BigRep STUDIO.

What kind of impact has that had on cost and performance?

The difference is huge. The outsourced 3D printed plenum costs around 2,000 dollars per part. With our current setup, the material cost is about 56 dollars. In motorsports, saving weight usually costs money. Here, we are saving weight and saving money at the same time. That is rare. We are on roughly the fifth iteration of that design this season. If we had committed to carbon tooling, there is no way we could have justified doing that five times in one year.In 2024, the CLUB consumed 20 of these pieces with different configurations based on the track.

• On average, a single print would cost $2,000
• 20 Gear Cooler Plenums at $2,000/unit = $40,000 per season

A 3D printed gear cooler plenum for LEGACY MOTOR CLUB's Toyota Camry race cars.

2025 Season (projection) savings of 32,540 USD

• Gear Cooler Plenum printed in-house on the BigRep STUDIO, using 1.5 KG of material per part at $37.95 per KG. Total material cost for plenum is 56.93 USD.
• 20 Gear Cooler Plenums @ $56.93/unit = $1,139.50 in 2025.
• By printing the 20 gear cooler plenums in-house on the BigRep STUDIO, the projected cost for the 2025 season is 1,139.50 USD and year-over-year savings of 32,540 USD.

People often say in engineering, you can only pick two of speed, cost, and quality. How does that apply here?

Typically, you give one of those up, but with large-scale 3D printing, we really are getting all three. We move fast, we control cost, and we maintain the quality we need. It has also changed the way the shop works. I often hear, “Can we print this part too?” and most of the time the answer is yes.

Beyond that one component, how do you see 3D printing fine-tuning the way you build race cars?

I keep coming back to the quality of our cars. Being able to make our own fixtures, templates, and whatever else we need means we can keep building the same high-quality car week in and week out. On top of that, we can prototype 3D printed car parts first instead of machining a big metal piece right away, check our dimensions and tolerances, and only commit to metal when we know it is right. That is where I see the sport heading, because new ideas come out of the shop every single day, and we are already doing things with 3D printing that I never would have thought were possible a few years ago.