Shocks to the system

OptimumG’s new series on springs and dampers begins with a look at why they’re needed and the role they play in the suspension

- CLAUDE ROUELLE

If you’ve been following OptimumG’s articles in Racecar you have learnt some of the metrics taught at our Data-Driven Performance Engineering seminars, which are used by our race engineers to analyse a car’s performance. For this year, we’ve decided to tackle another very important topic in racing: springs and dampers.

This is because one of the most common questions we are asked at OptimumG is: how do we determine suspension spring rates and damping for a vehicle?

It is a difficult question to answer since it depends on many factors, and it’s the engineer’s responsibility to understand what the goals are: minimise body control, or improve the transient response? Since this topic is non-trivial, we will break it down into several articles that will be published in the 2020 editions of Racecar Engineering. At the end of all these articles you should be able to understand why you need to have a suspension and a damping system; be able to calculate the required suspension stiffness values in a simplified method; calculate the coefficients required to dampen suspension movement, and provide the necessary equations to calculate the damping and stiffness.