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Kiwi's mating call "Baaaaaaaa..."

When I was working at Space Telescope inst. this guy comes in for an interview. Turns out I was helping with the interview. Anyway scruffy looking guy in jeans with a very jovial disposition. Sounded like he was from NZ. so I ask him.. He says.. "Yep! where men are men, women are men and sheep are nervous". Laughed so hard I nearly peed myself. Great guy, ended up working there for a couple of years.

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Volvo 240/P1800 Based Locost
2004 Aprilia Mille Factory
1988 Volvo 240 5 Speed ( For Sale)
2002 Toyota Tacoma
1999 BMW M3

There has been some comparison to the Lotus 58 double beam F2 car elsewhere which I refute. The Lotus system has excatly what is wrong with most beams and is opposite to what my system offers.

Whereas the Lotus offers caster loss in dive and bump as well as side to side caster being locked into acting in unison, my system offers caster gain in dive and bump as well as total side to side independent caster operation.

Interesting reading ...

Road&Track interview with Colin Chapman on the double-beam Lotus 58 ..

Bulmer: It is fairly well-known that you have been experimenting for some time with a car with quite different suspension-in fact with beam or the equivalent at both front and back. Can you say how this is shaping

Chapman: Well, it's still very experimental-we've been running it on and off when we've had the time this year. In places it behaves incredibly well but we rather clouded the issue by deciding to build a Formula 2 car initially simply because we had Formula 2 engines to spare. The initial response was tremendous-we went out and ran so much quicker than we'd ever run before the first time out that it was unbelievable but then we tried it on faster circuits and found that really the car was a bit too big-we were gaining on the turns but losing on maximum speed and this clouded the issue for a bit.

Bulmer: Was it a consequence of the type of suspension?

Chapman: No, it's a very big car because we'd designed it to be capable of taking the Formula 1 engine and also it has the wedge shape. But we had such a frantic season building and rebuilding team cars that we've only just got back to normal development on the beam axle car. We've now put a Formula 1 engine in it and we're doing a test program on that but we've only just started so I can't tell any more really.

Bulmer: Have you tried it on a really bumpy surface?

Chapman: Oh yes, well we've run it at Snetterton which is as bumpy as most and it behaved very well.

Bulmer: No steering problems?

Chapman: No. The thing that I was really worried about was the steering problem and it just hasn't appeared at all. The biggest problem is roll because we've got very low roll centers -we tried to run it without anti-roll bars but the roll was enough to use up too much of the suspension travel. We've only got about 6 in. of suspension travel at the front-we made a mistake there. And when Firestone changed all their tire diameters we lost another inch because of ground clearance.

Bulmer: You've got the old beam axle problem of an effective spring base which is much narrower than the track.

Chapman: Yes, and we've also got a very high pitch oscillation on it, very high; even though we're running fairly high spring rates, we're still getting far too much pitch.

Bulmer: Have you got the springing harder at the front than at the back?

Chapman: No, we're running at frequencies of about 100/105 laden or something like that which is different from a year ago -we had it all very soft then but we've still got too much roll and so we're just putting anti-roll bars on now.

Bulmer: I can't see any disadvantage in that really.

Chapman: No, well we were trying to get away without them. So then we tried to cut the roll down by raising the roll center and that definitely reduced the cornering power so we've now gone back to the low roll center with roll bars. It sounds easy but in fact with the particular configuration of the car it's not very easy to put them on-it's the old, old story: we should have designed them in in the first place. So we're cobbling some on at the moment and then we'll see how it goes.