suspension

[dave5]

can anyone lend me some help with information re: doing my suspension for the track? i would like to do my homework before i spend the dough. any help on recommended books, websites, forums, etc. would be great. any general tips would be good too. i'm a total technical beginner - i know nothing about suspension other than a better one will lower the lap times. car is 328i E36. budget is prob. 2000-5000

thx!

dave

[Marsh]

Originally posted by dave5
can anyone lend me some help with information re: doing my suspension for the track? i would like to do my homework before i spend the dough. any help on recommended books, websites, forums, etc. would be great. any general tips would be good too. i'm a total technical beginner - i know nothing about suspension other than a better one will lower the lap times. car is 328i E36. budget is prob. 2000-5000

thx!

dave

For technical, but still comprihensable I would recommend Carol Smith's Tune to Win. It's fairly out of date, but so is anything good, since the pros never share the good bits of info. It is never the less, cover a lot of bases and is very easy to follow.

For REALLY technical Milliken and Milliken's "Race Car Vehicle Dynamics". Probably not worth your money unless you have some education in dynamics, preferrably from an engineering background. I refer to it as "the gospel according to Milliken". If you want to get into the higher tech stuff, but find Milliken a little too thick, I would reccomend Gillespie's "Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics". It won't give you many equations you can use, but it does explain things better than Milliken without dumbing it down too much. Both books can be purchased through SAE publications. The latter is usually available in university libraries.

I've never read a good "lay mans book" other than Smith and I'm now of the opinion that no such book does or ever will exist. Every car is too different. Without grasping the physics behind the suspension you can't apply general principles and expect to get excellent results every time. Your going to have to use a lot of trial and error, or simply ask someone that is VERY experienced with a car just like yours.

[GR8 Ride]

Originally posted by dave5
can anyone lend me some help with information re: doing my suspension for the track? i would like to do my homework before i spend the dough. any help on recommended books, websites, forums, etc. would be great. any general tips would be good too. i'm a total technical beginner - i know nothing about suspension other than a better one will lower the lap times. car is 328i E36. budget is prob. 2000-5000

thx!

dave

Dave,

I can probably give you a bit of a hand with that as well, as I've built my own E36 race car. What I've done is probably to the extreme of what you're after, but we have several cars in the BMW Club with varying levels of suspension tuning done to them.

Feel free to e-mail me / PM me and we can share a few ideas.

Then again, I have a funny feeling I have an e-mail in my Inbox already from you that I haven't had a chance to respond to.... :)


Pat

[dave5]

LOL!!

i'd totally forgot about that!

no worries. i'll figure out how to do this sooner or later. time to hit the track soon though so i want to figure out what i'm going to do...no point doing it half way through the year...

i'll send you pm/email with a couple basic questions which'll start me in the right direction.