How the suspension system was designed?

(1) The design of the suspension system started with deciding the wheelbase and front and rear tracks. The suspension team would have liked to have a wheelbase as small possible (1525mm as per rulebook) to have a car that handles great. But discussions with roll cage team revealed that this was not possible as it would have resulted in a cramped cockpit. (2) Educated guesses were made about the weight, centre of gravity, sprung and unsprung mass of the vehicle (as the design was still in its initial stage) and complete vehicle simulations were run on CarSim. The vehicle was required to execute a very sharp turn at 60kph. After a number of iterations, it was found that front and rear tracks of 1200mm and 1000mm respectively and a wheelbase of 1750mm would result in a car that handles good and would also have adequate room for the driver to move about in the cockpit. The difference between front and rear tracks is likely to result in slight oversteer in very tight corners thus helping the driver to negotiate the turn fast. (3) It is important to have lowest possible unsprung mass (and hence lowest possible inertia) for the wheels to be able to follow the road surface smoothly. This demands the use of small and light wheels and tires. But small wheels have packaging issues. The knuckle, disc, hub and calliper cannot be packed into a small wheel. So a compromise was struck between weight and size and it was decided to use R13 wheels with a tire with aspect ratio ---- and---mm tread width. (4) Once the wheel and tire sizes were known, front suspension and steering and rear suspension geometry was set up on Suspension Analyzer software. (5) Front suspension and steering systems were designed together to be fully compatible with each other to minimize toe variance with wheel travel. This eliminates unwanted effects like bump and roll steer. (6) Care was also taken to minimize camber variance with wheel travel so as to maintain a maximum possible contact patch between the road and the tire. (7) Roll centres of both the front suspension were kept near the roll centre to minimize the roll moment during corners. This would help the car to corner flat. (8) Ball joint and tie rod locations for knuckles that satisfy the above conditions were obtained and a knuckle was designed using them by the steering team. (9) Wishbone lengths and angles were also obtained from simulations on Suspension Analyzer. (10) Once the kinematic design of the suspension was ready, work on suspension kinetics was started. (11) It was decided to use a Honda Unicorn Monoshock (rear shock absorber). This shock absorber has a spring rate of 23.5N/mm which is high enough for racing applications. A minimum travel of 3inch is required in the suspension system is required as per rule book. It was decided to use 6inch of wheel travel to allow the wheels to able to absorb the undulations on the road smoothly. The shock absorber has a maximum travel of 120mm. This gave a motion ratio of 0.743. The effective wheel rate at front thus became 13N/mm. Since the front suspension is required to be at least 30% soft than the rear suspension as per Maurice Olley criteria, the rear wheel rate was calculated to be 18.5N/mm. This gave a motion ratio of .887 and a total wheel travel of 135mm. It should be noted that both the motion ratios are close to 1 which is required for the bumps to absorbed by the shock

absorber. A low motion ratio transfers the bump loads into the chassis instead of the shock absorber.