If you’re wandering around the Daytona International Raceway track this weekend during the season-opening twice-around-the-clock endurance race, and you hear the garbled shouts of a Wookie locked in furious bowcaster battle, don’t fret. You have not been transported lightyears away to the multi-level wroshyr tree forests of Kashyyyk, you’re still in Florida. And that’s not a Wookie, it’s Acura’s championship-winning ARX-06 GTP racer going fast and making weird noises.
Since the car’s competition debut in 2023, it has been making curious sounds into, through, and out of every corner on the IMSA schedule. Nobody quite knew what was happening, but it was obviously something to do with the car’s hybrid system using a uniquely-developed combination of engine braking, regenerative electric braking, and keeping the gas engine on boil. If you can keep the engine churning higher RPMs, then the boost doesn’t fall off before the corner exit acceleration event. Some combination of all of that sounds reminiscent of Han Solo’s giant furry friend.
In a recent conversation with motorsport reporter Marshall Pruett, Honda Racing Corporation USA boss David Salters revealed—in a sufficiently cryptic way to avoid spilling competition secrets—why the car makes the screaming Wookie sound. As it turns out, there’s a little bit of engineering magic going on here.
Step 1 – Going into the corner, when the driver hits the brakes, the car’s motor generator unit goes into full regen, pumping electrons back into the battery. The combination of engine braking and the electric generator chunking away into the corner is “the start of the funny noises” as David says.
Step 2 – When the car is going through the corner, the hybrid unit starts to act like a jumping horse’s rider. I don’t jump horses, but apparently the MGU is programmed to “hold things back a bit.” I think this is where the turbo spooling becomes important. As the is going through a particularly slow corner, it will probably be at lower RPM and off boost, but it’ll need boost for the acceleration out of the corner.
Step 3 – Once you’ve negotiated the corner safely, the car needs to find a way to put down all 700-ish horsepower to the ground through just the rear wheels. The car’s advanced traction control helps the car maintain acceleration without breaking anything or losing grip.
Does any of this really explain the Chewbacca sound? Not really. At least not better than how we normies understood it before the video. So it’s definitely magic. Or at least The Force.
Salters attended Cardiff University beginning in 1986, which would mean he was born in approximately 1968, and would have been nine years old when Star Wars: A New Hope landed in theaters. It is highly unlikely that his is, himself, Peter Mayhew—the actor who played Chewbacca—in disguise. But I suppose that’s unrelated.