While the new ~400bhp engine is still waiting for a couple of parts and waiting for me to find time to port the head I am looking at improving the handling further.
On Saturday I travelled up to Yorkshire to leave my car with a company called "Cornering Force" who are working with Spitfire Engineering to develop a blade style antirollbar and possibly a rear antirollbar as well.
All Cornering Force do is advise on suspension setup, mainly for race teams. Their premises aren't really a garage in the conventional sense, there are more laptops and computers there than tools!
One of the benefits of a blade ARB is that it can be adjusted easily using a nob or similar to give very small increments of adjustment, similar to how most adjustable shocks work. It can even be engineered so that the stiffness can be adjusted from the cabin whilst driving.
As part of this exercise the car is going to have pretty extensive datalogging and benchmarking to determine the absolute optimal springweights on the latest spec Nitrons, the ideal valving and of course the optimal range of operation for the ARB. This will involve extensive track testing which I'll get to try once it's all done.
Their inclination at the moment is that my car is too heavily sprung and that a stiffer ARB will allow for softer springs with no compromise in performance.
As a result of the testing I'll get a report on the ideal rideheight, geo, spring weights, ARB stiffness, damping, tyre pressures etc. Pretty much going to town on the entire ride and handling setup. The intention is to produce a handling pack as a result, which will only work as a complete unit given a specified set of wheels, tyres and alignment.
No one else has gone through this degree of testing on the Elise that I know of, and certainly not the VX as it doesn't come cheap. By monitoring the real time temperature across the width of the tyre it's possible to see how hard the tyres are being worked and to make the most effective use of the contact patch. For instance on saturday they showed me graphs of tyre temperature through a corner and from entry to exit the surface temperature changes from 50 degrees to 120 degrees, and back down again by the time you have exited the corner.
To be honest a lot of the principles they were trying to explain to me were way over my head, but Simon who runs the company is fanatical about suspension and the physics and engineering behind it.
The car is going to be there for about 3 weeks. First it's going to have some datalogging, involving tyre temperature monitoring and damper movement (with these cool little devices that track minute movement of the damper rod). Then it's off to the testrack for on track testing with a qualified racing driver.
All of this data is then used for calculations to work out the ideal settings which are applied and it's back to the test track again with the same driver for further testing, laptiming, datalogging and driver feedback. A few more tweaks and then I'll collect the car and have a session on the private test track with the racing driver to see what I think and also to get some tuition.
On Saturday I travelled up to Yorkshire to leave my car with a company called "Cornering Force" who are working with Spitfire Engineering to develop a blade style antirollbar and possibly a rear antirollbar as well.
All Cornering Force do is advise on suspension setup, mainly for race teams. Their premises aren't really a garage in the conventional sense, there are more laptops and computers there than tools!
One of the benefits of a blade ARB is that it can be adjusted easily using a nob or similar to give very small increments of adjustment, similar to how most adjustable shocks work. It can even be engineered so that the stiffness can be adjusted from the cabin whilst driving.
As part of this exercise the car is going to have pretty extensive datalogging and benchmarking to determine the absolute optimal springweights on the latest spec Nitrons, the ideal valving and of course the optimal range of operation for the ARB. This will involve extensive track testing which I'll get to try once it's all done.
Their inclination at the moment is that my car is too heavily sprung and that a stiffer ARB will allow for softer springs with no compromise in performance.
As a result of the testing I'll get a report on the ideal rideheight, geo, spring weights, ARB stiffness, damping, tyre pressures etc. Pretty much going to town on the entire ride and handling setup. The intention is to produce a handling pack as a result, which will only work as a complete unit given a specified set of wheels, tyres and alignment.
No one else has gone through this degree of testing on the Elise that I know of, and certainly not the VX as it doesn't come cheap. By monitoring the real time temperature across the width of the tyre it's possible to see how hard the tyres are being worked and to make the most effective use of the contact patch. For instance on saturday they showed me graphs of tyre temperature through a corner and from entry to exit the surface temperature changes from 50 degrees to 120 degrees, and back down again by the time you have exited the corner.
To be honest a lot of the principles they were trying to explain to me were way over my head, but Simon who runs the company is fanatical about suspension and the physics and engineering behind it.
The car is going to be there for about 3 weeks. First it's going to have some datalogging, involving tyre temperature monitoring and damper movement (with these cool little devices that track minute movement of the damper rod). Then it's off to the testrack for on track testing with a qualified racing driver.
All of this data is then used for calculations to work out the ideal settings which are applied and it's back to the test track again with the same driver for further testing, laptiming, datalogging and driver feedback. A few more tweaks and then I'll collect the car and have a session on the private test track with the racing driver to see what I think and also to get some tuition.
