Fast Road Setup – Stage 1

Description

Vanquish Fast Road Setup – Stage 1

The suspension design employed by the Aston Martin Vanquish is quite complex and very carefully thought out in order to help it produce the almost compromise free ride quality and chassis control that we have come to expect from modern high-end sport cars.

The system is designed to vary it’s chassis geometry dynamically as you are driving the car so that the chassis seamlessly shifts it’s predominant traits such as “attentiveness” around the centre line across to “stability” during braking and acceleration moments. This kinematic suspension operation is achieved using carefully designed multi-link suspension arm designs both at the front and the rear of the car, this is then combined with pre-loaded and deliberately deformable suspension bushings. What has become clear to us is that whilst these systems work extremely well in the beautifully controlled environment of the manufacturers testing grounds they sometimes fail to deliver the intended results when out in the real world and this is often caused by poor calibration of the static wheel geometry, this is to say that if the starting positions for this complex suspension system are not completely accurate and correct to begin with then the dynamic aspect of the operation does not work at all as well as it should.

Here at Torque Developments we have spent a great deal of time studying the operation of the Aston Martin suspension system and testing various set-up trends, now we have arrived at what we believe are the perfect starting positions for the chassis geometry when used for a road car application and armed with our top of the line optical chassis alignment system from Snap-on we are perfectly equipped to apply these settings to your car down to an accuracy of 1/100th of a mm, we work to far finer tolerances than are suggested by the Aston Martin factory but these tight tolerances we have found to be absolutely necessary in order to achieve optimal results from these cars.

*Please note that our Vanquish Fast Road Setup is a “works only” service that can only performed at our premises at Lakeside – Essex*

As far as we know we’re the first Chassis Dynamics specialist to turn our attention to the Aston Martin marque. We started with the V8 Vantage, then continued with the V12 Vantage, DB9 and of course the Vanquish, and are pleased to have received 100% positive feedback from the users.

As we see it there are two fundamental issues when the vehicles leave the factory. Firstly the recommended geometry settings are far from ideal, and secondly the cars seldom have the recommended settings applied. The second issue is easy enough to rectify by visiting an alignment specialist (caveat – avoid the usual “quick-fit” type places or anywhere that relies on the red and green light systems because they aren’t accurate enough). We don’t know what the original geometry calibration design brief was, or whether insufficient development was allowed, but we do know that the DB9 handling is far from ideal! We find that the chassis is quite numb, offering under-steer, over-sensitive traction control, and lack of transient linearity, which are all quite disappointing in a Sports Tourer!

There’s a couple of white papers we prepared that you may find helpful here and here,  but in short our Chassis Dynamics Technicians are able to optimise the geometry to even out the front/rear grip balance and to fully exploit the tyre contact patch, which gives more rear grip to reduce the traction control interference, and to linearise the chassis responses to command/control inputs. In a nutshell this provides the driver with a much greater level of confidence to use the car to it’s full potential at pace.

For information on our Aston Martin Vanquish Fast Road Setup – Stage 1 please go here.

For information on our full range of goods and services please go here.

Just some of the Chassis Dynamics services we offer;

Chassis modelling – We can build mathematical models of existing chassis to better understand the nuances of a given design

Complete chassis and suspension system design

Redesigning of front or rear suspension sub-systems to suit a pre-existing chassis

Spring rate advice and selections

Anti roll bar rate advice and design optimisations

Suspension arm/link design, optimisation and modelling

Suspension geometry settings both static and kinematic

Limited slip differential advice and optimisation

Tyre advice, size and shape, construction and compounds

Roll cage and other chassis reinforcements, design and advice

Chassis Dynamics equipment and facilities

Whole Chassis design modelling and evaluation software

Tyre simulation and modelling software

Corner weight measuring equipment with flat patch

Vehicle dynamic performance measuring equipment

Snap-on 3D Arago optical chassis alignment jig