Vehicle concept
Rule interpretation, targets, package and overall layout — from the regulations to a verified installation space.
- LMP1
- LMH / LMDh
- GT
- Rallye-Raid
Motorsport vehicle development and vehicle dynamics
Dominic Liebl leads development programmes for high-performance vehicles. Before that, chief designer of an LMP1 in the FIA WEC and performance engineer in a DTM manufacturer programme.
Development leadership
From 2023 to 2026 I technically led and coordinated the development of two hypercar programmes, as an external mandate through LME. Project and budget planning were my responsibility, as were product structure, bill of materials and procurement.
A vehicle programme rarely fails over a calculation. It fails because nobody keeps track of thousands of parts — design status, order status, lead time — so decisions arrive too late.
My answer is unspectacular and effective: schedule, cost and bill of materials all hang off the same source. The BOM is derived from the CAD structure rather than maintained by hand, delay is calculated rather than reported, and every budget line states its basis — quoted price, reference price or estimate.
Set targets, interpret the regulations, validate the concept against both.
Work packages, durations and milestones with RACI assignment across all development partners. Delay is calculated: plan against plan, deviation in days.
Budgets per work package, planned against actual, cash flow per calendar week, reported against plan at regular intervals.
The BOM as the leading document, derived from the CAD structure: supplier, quote comparison, part and setup cost, lead time and order status per item.
A process stage per part, release states frozen and traceable, order status visible in the model itself.
Reconciliation against the production partner's quality master. Offered as a service: QMS concept work plus FMEA facilitation and risk assessment.
My core task in the last programme was not the individual part but what connects them: CAD, bill of materials, procurement, project planning and quality status exchange their data automatically and in both directions. A change in the model reaches the BOM, the order status reaches the model, maturity reaches the schedule.
The purpose is not elegance but headcount. What takes five departments and as many systems in a large organisation can be kept in view by a handful of people — and kept current daily rather than weekly.
For clarity: FMEA facilitation, risk assessment and QMS concept work are offered as services. Standards are my frame of reference, not a seal — bills of material, drawing states and release documentation are delivered so that a quality system run to ISO 9001 or IATF 16949 can absorb them without rework. I hold no certification of my own.
Services
Concept, design, simulation and track work sit with the same person. Each of these disciplines is also available as a standalone engagement.
Rule interpretation, targets, package and overall layout — from the regulations to a verified installation space.
Bodywork, monocoque, suspension and drivetrain in CATIA V5 and 3DEXPERIENCE, including composite and tooling design.
An in-house OpenFOAM chain: meshing, solver runs, force coefficients and variant comparison, evaluated in ParaView.
Kinematics layout and hardpoint optimisation, lap time simulation and driver-in-the-loop operation.
Trackside work: setup, test programmes, data analysis and competitor analysis.
Project data and documents in a self-operated cloud system on machines at the company's own address, including an in-house office suite. A separate area per project with advanced user permissions; workstations and cloud storage are also available to rent.
Complete applications and tools in MATLAB, in use in motorsport: data analysis, reporting, calculation chains and design tools. Alongside that, two own Android applications developed and distributed through the Google Play Store, and freelance teaching in MATLAB.
Rent workstations
Three in-house Linux workstations, bookable by the hour for your own runs — CFD with OpenFOAM, for instance, but equally FEA or any other compute-heavy work. You get your own user account and set up your computing environment inside it. Billing follows the machine's running time.
Bookings are per workstation. The machines are linked by a 10-gigabit network with shared project storage; a run coupled across several workstations is agreed beforehand. Independently of that, project storage in the in-house cloud system can be rented — your own area, advanced user permissions, mandatory two-factor sign-in.
Memory is the real point here. 881 GB on a single node is exactly what gets disproportionately expensive at the large providers: big meshes, transient runs and cases that would otherwise have to be split up all run on one machine. CFD and FEA alike decompose onto physical cores, not threads — which is why it says 116 and not 232.
Prices and availability on request.
You describe what needs computing. No open registration.
Access is created personally and released for the compute workstations.
Solvers, tooling and any licences are yours to bring.
Pick a slot, the machine powers up by itself. Remote access, browser terminal or SSH — tied to the booking.
Usage record as a PDF, ready to attach to an invoice.
Anyone sending design data out of house wants to know where it sits and who can see it.
your own user account and working directory — nothing shared.
HTTPS with its own certificate, SSH over VPN, remote access through a relay server that sits here.
either an authenticator app or a hardware security key.
removed when the booking ends; every account is set up by hand.
only if you allow it in the portal. No tick, no access.
machines at the company's own address, no third-party cloud, nothing passed on.
The booking portal and sign-in run on a server I operate myself, inside the EU. The workstations do not run around the clock — outside your booking they are switched off. What is rented is the compute power, not a ready-made environment.
Rent cloud storage
The file service runs on Nextcloud on hardware I own, at the company's own address in Germany, with access through a server of my own inside the EU — no large cloud provider is involved. It is built for documents, drawings and reports; data sets in the tens of gigabytes do not belong on the line but stay where the computing happens.
Every customer area is set up along the same numbered scheme: chassis, powertrain, aerodynamics, electronics, procedures, regulations, imagery. The top level carries the same numbers and names everywhere, and the second level follows the same pattern.
It sounds like a detail and is not one once a programme is running: anyone looking for a drawing looks in the same place in every project — and anyone filing one does not have to decide where it goes.
Access is not granted for a whole area at once but folder by folder. Whatever is not explicitly released to a named person stays closed, including newly created folders.
Which person sees which folder is recorded per customer in an access matrix. The server re-reads it every five minutes and sets permissions accordingly — nothing is maintained by hand.
Each customer works in their own project area. Other customers' areas do not appear in their file list.
Creating, changing, moving and deleting are recorded with time and account in the service's history, going back over the past year.
Deleted files stay in the recycle bin for 30 days, and earlier versions of edited files are kept. That covers accidental deletion and overwriting.
Every personal account requires a second factor in addition to the password — authenticator app, security key or one-time code.
Documents can be edited in the browser, collaboratively, on a document server of my own. Large simulation data sets stay where the computing happens: the compute workstations are attached to a shared project store at ten gigabit, while results and reports go through the cloud.
LMP1 in the WEC
From March 2014 to September 2015 at Kodewa / ByKolles Racing on the LMP1 programme in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Less than ten months passed between joining as system and data engineer and taking responsibility for the complete car as chief designer.
Entry point in vehicle electronics: programming the electronic components, looking after the entire sensor system, data analysis with race engineers and drivers. Layout of the wiring loom with the company that built it.
Alongside that, design of mechanical parts — cooling ducts, brake ducting, wing attachments, pedal box, housings for control units and sensors. For the 2014 crash test campaign, planning of the tests to FIA procedure, design of the test fixtures, coordination with the test house and the report the next steps were decided on. For the August wind tunnel run, drawings of measurement rig parts.
Trackside attendance at tests and race meetings. At the WEC finale in São Paulo in November 2014, first outing as race engineer on the car.
From early 2015, chief designer and head of the engineering group. For the 2015 season, responsibility for the design of the complete car: carbon bodywork, the tooling to produce it, and the mechanical parts. Layout of the new race gearbox together with the gearbox and engine manufacturers, and involvement in the layout and design of the new suspension.
The car carried the same type designation in both years: CLM P1/01. What went racing in 2015 was a developed version of the same car, not a new one.
Hypercars at Apollo
From 2015 to 2023, involved in four hypercar projects as an external mandate through LME Germany — sometimes on a single component, sometimes on the suspension and gearbox of a whole car, latterly on the trackside test programme.
Vehicle specification, design of the rear clamshell and full vehicle dynamics simulation in in-house software. Trackside aerodynamic measurements and suspension set-up, plus the gearbox software together with its manufacturer.
Vehicle specification and design of the bodywork. Suspension from simulation through specification to design, gearbox in simulation and specification; full vehicle dynamics in in-house software.
Test programme 2022 and 2023, cooling optimisation, specification of the racing interior.
Leadership of the test programme, specification and optimisation of the cooling package, specification of the active aerodynamics, layout of the active ride height control together with a damper manufacturer.
Hypercars at De Tomaso
Development leadership for two vehicle programmes as an external mandate through LME Germany. The work covered the layout of suspension and kinematics and of the bodywork components, CFD calculations and vehicle dynamics on hardware and software of my own, coordination with component suppliers and support in procurement. See the overview of leadership tasks.
Responsible as Independent Head of Development during the concept phase. Drafting of the technical specification to the client's requirements.
Leadership as Independent Head of Development across the programme. Layout of suspension and kinematics and of the bodywork components, CFD calculations and vehicle dynamics on hardware and software of my own, coordination with component suppliers and support in procurement. Every assembly designed through and delivered as a release-ready drawing set.
Own work
The work in this section was created without a client: self-initiated, self-funded, pushed over years.
Begun as the LME17 concept study and developed into the LME18 — the car for the 2018 season. A complete LMP1 prototype to the FIA regulations, started without a client and taken as far as an investor commitment. It ended when Audi and Porsche withdrew from the category.
The LME18 spawned a one-fifth-scale car that is not remote-controlled but drives itself. It maps the circuit for the simulator, measures track roughness and transmits everything in real time. A driver can steer it from the simulator — while the control system learns from those inputs.
Instead of off-the-shelf software, a self-built chain: scripted meshing and solver control, evaluation in numbered report series. Every iteration is reproducible — same sections, same scales. Validated against the Ahmed body reference case.
The tooling base behind it: a binding product structure, an in-house material catalogue, a standard-part library and self-written CATVBA tools for bills of material, mass and centre of gravity. Regulatory articles sit in the model as check volumes.
Three moves save the most time. Streamlines from ParaView are brought back into the CATIA model, so aerodynamics is discussed on the part itself rather than in an image viewer. Procurement status is visible in colour inside the assembly. And the structure follows the vehicle's real build sequence, linked to delivery dates — open the assembly and you see whether the next assembly step has even been delivered.
The LME23, a prototype study within the LMDh framework: bodywork, underfloor, front splitter, cooling ducts and rear end as a surface model, regulatory geometry as check volumes, the spec gearbox as an installation constraint.
App development
Concept, implementation, maintenance and distribution in-house — from data storage through the interface to billing in the store.
Electronic driver's logbook for Android — from single use to a fleet with several drivers and vehicles. Multilingual, syncing through a cloud account of your own rather than a third-party service.
Flashcard-based vocabulary trainer for Android. Your own card sets, testing in both directions, progress tracked per card.
Profile
Trained coachbuilder, then mechanical engineering with a vehicle-technology focus through to M.Sc. In motorsport since 2006 — from data engineer in karting through LMP1 to leading development of high-performance vehicles.
In 2015, chief designer of the LMP1 car CLM P1/01 in the FIA World Endurance Championship: continuing its design and development, and building the electronics, aerodynamics and design groups from scratch.
From 2017 to 2020, performance engineer in the BMW DTM programme, based at BMW Motorsport in Munich: lap time simulation, competitor analysis and technical interface to the three DTM crews. For the 2020 season, liaison and performance engineer trackside with the privately entered BMW DTM customer team, responsible for Robert Kubica's car.
Two technical books on race car dynamics and lap time optimisation. Lecturer for CATIA V5 and MATLAB.
Contact
Two kinds of conversation interest me most: one about a development leadership role that needs filling, permanent or interim, and one about a specific technical problem that is stuck.
Three details help: which vehicle or programme, what needs to be achieved, and by when. Working languages are German and English.
Provider identification under § 5 DDG. Legal form, liability notices, image credits and the consumer dispute resolution statement are in the full legal notice.