Russel Padon ,a University of Hertfordshire graduate who works for Dave Williams at Multimatic Thetford came to the 750 Club to talk about theer rig test and damper work and made a lot of interesting points.
- They put accelerometers onto various parts of the chassis to check its torsional rigidity along its length. Apparently many a "super stiff" base structure has suspension mounting areas which flex a lot.
- To our surprise when they tested a F1 chassis for stiffness it wasn't that good. The small cross-section of the engine and akward load path changes don't help.
- The rigs can be described as " Lotus active suspension upside down" and a few of the old active control parts can still be used on a rig.
- They feel road cars have definite " damper DNA" and a few sweeps will tell you if it is German or not.
- Also on road cars their criteria for their index is overall mechanical grip across a range of ipnut frequencies. On that basis most road cars do best on the soft damper setting. The " sport" hard setting is just to get journalists raving about " iron body control "etc.
Edited by mariner, 14 February 2016 - 09:41.