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News & Articles
News - 31-3-2008
Electric Race Cars – The Future?
Well they may not be the future of Motorsport but they are teaching our future engineers. Freestyle Motorsport have been lending their knowledge and facilities to Catford High School to aid the construction of their Greenpower electric race vehicle. Despite requests for neon’s and a sound system (it does at least have 20” rims!) it has been constructed in traditional race car fashion with a TIG welded chassis and stressed aluminium skin.
Power comes from two large 12volt batteries running in series and they are hoping to achieve 35mph for over an hour!
For more information on what is becoming a hugely popular series of championships with over 200 Schools involved nationally, go to the Greenpower website www.greenpower.co.uk
News - 24-3-2008
Caterham Gearboxes Go Sequential
The Freestyle Motorsport Race Team are looking forward to running the superb new Quaife Engineering 6 speed sequential gearbox in their trio of C400 / Superlights this season
After huge efforts by Caterham Cars to ready a Superlight and CSR for the early part of this year, our three drivers, Steve Frost, David Knox and Peter Ratcliff all had the opportunity to try out this amazing new sequential shift ‘box from Quaife Engineering. They all adapted quickly and easily to the inline gearshift and were hugely impressed with the speed and ease of gear change, the bespoke unit allowing clutchless changes both up and down the ratios
After extensive testing the gearboxes were inspected and showed almost zero wear which bodes well for a reliable and exciting season with expectation of new lap records!
(Freestyle Motorsport can supply the whole range of Quaife products – see Products)
News – 11-02-2008
Freestyle Philosophy
Our evolution of the Caterham Seven has taken four years, empirical calculation and many years of combined experience, but perhaps most importantly, a clearly defined product goal.
It was vital for us to know where we wanted to go with the car, to be in control of the project rather than it controlling us and, with the appliance of science mixed with some ‘seat of the pants’ objectivity, we can now look back and say that we are where we wanted to be.
Some of what we have done is obvious, other things less so. But one of the biggest changes – the pushrod suspension conversion – has provoked the greatest number of questions; this will hopefully provide some answers.
Why Pushrod?
A few years ago the factory put a Seven in the full sized wind tunnel at MIRA. Whilst testing undertrays and wings etc. they also replaced the springs and dampers with small rods. There was a noticeable and perhaps surprising reduction in lift at the front of the car. It would appear that, in a similar fashion to the current narrow track Formula One cars, airflow between wheel and chassis is very sensitive – restrictions due to components in this area causing turbulence and high pressure, forcing air under the car. Whatever the process, smoothing airflow in this region reduces lift and drag. How much? Well when combined with other aerodynamic management devices there is a noticeable improvement in stability and top speed, but in isolation, not much.
But if the aerodynamic effect is hard to feel, the reduction in steering effort certainly isn’t! During the design process we knew that the antiroll bar would be actuating inside the nosecone. So removing the requirement of the top wishbone to apply a vertical load on the upright meant we could use a small spherical joint instead. The intention was to make camber adjustment easy – which it does as it is just a matter of undoing a nut and bolt – but an additional benefit was a large reduction in parasitic friction of the steering system. So not only lighter steering but also greater feel because the messages from the road are less corrupted on their way to your fingertips.
However, as beneficial as these features may be, probably the most exciting advances a pushrod system offers is the freedom to alter the wheel / damper motion ratio (well it excites me anyway!).
Firstly with the traditional outboard angled damper design the damper moves considerably less than the wheel. One inch of wheel travel can typically produce as little as 0.6 inches of damper movement. The problem? Dampers require movement to work. The faster they move the more fluid they pump and the easier it is for them to control the relationship between wheel/tyre and chassis. When a car is cornering the tyre is constantly losing grip/regaining grip many times a second and this causes tiny high frequency deflections which a damper finds hard to react to but are vital for control of the contact patch. The rocker mechanism in a pushrod system however allows the damper to move as fast, even faster than the wheel – a big plus. The graph fig 1 shows the damper movement relative to wheel travel in our current Freestyle system. The blip in the middle and the fact that we only approach 1:1 towards the end of the travel is a result of our packaging restrictions. Packaging was a nightmare but, given a clean sheet of paper we would have pursued this area further.
Greater damper movement does of course lead to less available wheel travel but the ability to adjust ride height independently of damper travel – by lengthening/shortening the pushrods – not only opens up further possibilities but also means we have not had any problems in this area even with the more compliant road versions.
And so we get to ‘Rising Rate’.
Firstly the standard, outboard spring/damper system IS rising rate although the rate of change is very slow and difficult to alter whereas inboard mechanisms are much easier to tune for different characteristics. Though a rising rate does have its own issues – consider what is happening to the inside wheel whilst cornering….But perhaps I shouldn’t go any further any lest I get a visit from the suspension inquisition for talking about too much cool stuff.
However, whilst we expected these developments to be the logical conclusion for our evolution of the Seven, the reality is that our explorations over the past few years have opened up even more possibilities. There is more to come.
Gary May
Freestyle Motorsport Solutions Ltd
