Howto: Overcome Bumpy Roads

For every bump on the road, for every different road surface, one actually wants to have a different tuned suspension to achieve maximum performance. The problem with a conventional design of a suspension is that it's tuned before use, and then it is fixed. The final set of parameters for your suspension setting is actually a trade-off between all your demands and therefore imperfect for any specific situation.

Most people who have ever seen a Formula 1 race will remember the cars sometimes ‘bounces’ over the curbstones. This is because the suspension is tuned for the flat road surface of the circuit itself, and not so much for driving over the curbstones. This bouncing is killing for the grip of the wheels and also has a negative impact on the aerodynamics of the car. For aerodynamics you want the car to stay as leveled as possible. This is impossible with a conventional design of the suspension. The forces on the vehicle are constantly changing, depending on the vehicle speed, whether the vehicle is accelerating or braking, taking a turn or driving straight etc. So to maintain a perfectly leveled vehicle, you want to tune your suspension real-time.

That’s why the benefits of active suspension are so great, you can change the parameters of your suspension real-time to achieve the optimal solution for practically every situation. 'Then why won’t they try this in the Formula 1?', one might ask. Well, they did. Lotus was the first team to experiment with this system in the mid-1980s, but couldn't get the advantages of the system to overcome the disadvantages (extra weight and power consumption). They only had some success at very bumpy street circuits.

In 1992 Williams decided not to build a new car for the upcoming season, but put an active suspension on the car from the previous season and used that car instead. This car completely crushed the competition! Differences in lap times of 2 seconds were no exceptions (which is a huge gap in Formula 1).

However, the general trend in Formula 1 is, when a technological invention causes the differences between the cars becoming too large, that invention will be banned. This also happened to the active suspension system, which was sadly banned form Formula 1 in 1993.

Now is this also applicably for your road car? The suspension of your road car is mostly tuned for comfort, but also for this purpose you can use active suspension. This is illustrated in the following video:

You now probably agree that the active suspension system has already proven its benefits, so now it’s up to us to bring it back to the roads. 

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