Adapted from Renault F1 Team
The Research and Development department of every Formula 1 team, or any serious race team, houses one of our most complex bits of kit, the chassis dynamics rig, also known as the shaker rig. The team uses the chassis rig to develop new suspension settings for the car and research new suspension ideas before it gets to the track. Here's a video from the Sauber team that shows the rig in action. The chassis is bolted on seventeen servo-hydraulic actuators, which replicate the forces the car undergoes on the racetrack. There are fourteen actuators underneath the wheels, which apply vertical and horizontal forces, and another three under the floor to replicate the aerodynamic forces.
But before engineers can put the car on the rig, they have to create a track profile so that the correct forces can be simulated on the car. To do this, they take the data recorded on the car at last year's races and feed that into the computers to create virtual representations of all the circuits that can be simulated on the rig. As soon as the Formula 1 cars were back from China, teams put one of them on their rig to begin their busy programme of rig testing, looking at some set-up options for the upcoming races in Spain, Monaco and Turkey.
Usually the race engineers will have a list of settings they want to evaluate and will send over the job list to the rig engineers. For example, for Monaco they might look at the benefit of running the car softer than usual or experiment with different dampers to see if they can find some more performance from the car. Once they've done a simulation on the rig, the computers produce all sorts of stats for us to pore over. But what engineers really want to know is whether the set-up makes the car quicker or slower and the most telling figure is always the lap time, which is a parameter everyone can understand. Recent Articles
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