How well is your suspension working?

[Tim Walsh]

I ran across this video of a camera pointed at the wheel of an Aussie supercar. Very interesting to see what the suspension is really doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozdejs5GOxA

[924RACR]

Cool... I may actually try doing some of this this season on my car... with the cheap quad processors out there (which I now have), velcro on a little bullet cam and you can stick these things anywhere. I've already used them for under-car video during testing, it's amazing how easy it is...

[cstreit]

Did you hear... 6- 6.5 degrees of negative camber on the front...

[9elf]

For those not in the know. That is the '06 Bathurst 1000 winning car.

This is the ultimate race ('The Great Race') on the Australian racing calender.

I feel like I could watch the whole 7 hours all over again.

In fact I'm off to YouTube now.

[jluetjen]

Originally posted by cstreit
Did you hear... 6- 6.5 degrees of negative camber on the front...

Keep in mind that these are front engined, live rear axle cars with MacPhereson strut front suspensions. The same suspension in our 911 works well from a performance standpoint because the load on the front is pretty low, and the car's rear weight bias means that we tend to run the front end stiff in roll. The result is that we get some camber loss, but it's manageable by cranking in 2-3 degrees of negative camber.

Now a V8 Supercar has significantly more weight in the front, fairly wide slick tires and what I suspect is a relatively soft rear suspension in order to allow the rear tires to hook up under the V8's output. The result is that they tend to load up, and lay over on the outside front tire a lot more then our Porsches due, but they are limited by the strut's geometry when compared to -- let's say -- a NASCAR Cup car with it's double-A-arm front suspension. So the only thing that they can do to keep the tire upright is crank in even more front camber. A close analogy to a V8 Supercar's suspension, but widely seen in the US is an SCCA American Sedan Mustang. The "Fox Bodied" cars seem to be running comparable levels of front camber to a V8 Supercar, and even then they don't seem to handle as well as the Camero/Firebirds with their double-A-arm front suspension.

[Chuck Moreland]

Interesting to see how much the tire deflects under load. A lot. I would be curious to know the tie pressure.