ACBC spinning in his grave...

[Ian7]

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/07/28/spanish-supercar-company-working-on-infinitely-adjustable-vehicl/

 

I imagine Colin would be most offended by this "technology"; talk about overkill.

[athens7]

This sounds like a great way to hopelessly f%#k up a car carefully set up by people who know much more about such things than the ultimate owner. Most who aspire to fiddle with set up should stick to Gran Tourismo, IMO.

[slngsht]

ACBC spinning in his grave...

 

I had a feeling it was gonna be a picture of my car in this post.

[TheDingo8MyBaby]

This sounds like a great way to hopelessly f%#k up a car carefully set up by people who know much more about such things than the ultimate owner. Most who aspire to fiddle with set up should stick to Gran Tourismo, IMO.

 

I think this statement is a bit close minded. There's nothing wrong with fiddling with set-up, especially with this technology. People have different driving styles and most manufacturers tend to compromise performance for comfort. If this thing has GPS, you should be able to pull up laps and go through your data to figure out what helped and what didn't in different sections of the race track. Maybe it's just the engineer in me, but I think that's pretty cool.

 

It would be really cool if they offered some simple tutorials on how to set up the car. If you want to race, you have to learn how to set up a car. I think this gives you some great tools to do that.

[MoPho]

^I think it is just the engineer in you

 

 

"Make the suspension adjustable and they will adjust

it wrong -- look what they can do to a Weber carburetor in just a few moments of stupidity with a screwdriver."

- Colin Chapman

 

 

 

 

.

[TheDingo8MyBaby]

Yeah, I have no doubt chapman is spinning in his grave. Chapman built road cars so he could afford to go racing. He wasn't real keen on seeing his road cars raced. I think that's how that quote applies

 

I guess I just feel that the target market for this car will enjoy playing around with things and tinkering. It's a different time now that we have all sorts of data acquisiton to give feedback on the tuning. We no longer have to rely on just seat of the pants measurements and lap times. Not only that, but changing things such as damper settings with a push of a button can't make the adjustments any easier. You can do 1 lap at one setting, adjust on the straight and do the next lap at the next.

[Mondo]

I wouldn't worry much about it... most people will likely make things worse than better with all that fiddling. Or they'll use a reference setting... which is what a lot of us do now;)

 

Also, I wonder if it's always changing (auto-mode) how do you learn to drive it that way?

[Ian7]

I guess to clarify my original post, my thought was that I have infinitely adjustable, data-overloaded race cars to tinker with;

my Seven exists to offset all that and equalize the ... kharma? entropy?

[athens7]

Maybe it's just the engineer in me

 

Yup. That's why the F1 engineers make upwards of $700,000 per year. If one has a proficiency for such things, great. I'm simply stating a belief that the average performance car driver could easily do more harm than good with this much influence over set up. After all, it could be easily argued that one of the big differences between McLaren last year and this year is the lack of Alonso's ability to set up the car (not to mention Schumacher vs. Raikonnen at Ferrari).

[Kitcat]

I added double adjustable Koni's on my Miata back in my auto-x days. I quickly learned that it gave 2x as many chances to screw things up. I am sure a good engineer could have established a baseline and gone from there, but I was clueless.

 

When I ordered my '08 BMW M3 I passed on the driver adjustable suspension for that reason. I assumed the standard shock settings set at the factory were superior to anything I could have come up with on my own.

 

Mike