Car Tales - Paolo Lekai
Content featuring @piazzagranturismo
McLaren began the push to manufacture supercars in 2009 to compete against the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Pagani etc. Holding multiple F1 championship titles is certainly a confidence booster for a company making its first supercar (yes the McLaren F1 was their first but that was a hyper car with limited production) but they knew they needed to introduce tech that would separate themselves from their steep competition. Knowing the shock absorber is the unsung hero of any car’s suspension system they decided to feature a new, more efficient system for their road cars.
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Traditional shocks require ride and handling specialists to sweat untold hours to manipulate their friction-reducing seals, gas pressurization, electronic valving, and even magnetic fields. Their calibrated orifices restrict oil flow through a moving piston which produce damping effects that manage very complicated, even contradictory forces (Wheel impacts demand a soft response, while body roll demands a stiffer one). To do away with the usual trade-offs between ride and handling, an Australian named Chris Heyring developed a system of eight interconnecting chambers inside the four suspension units. The top chambers on one side of the vehicle are hydraulically linked to the opposite side’s bottom chambers, and vice versa; so when a one-wheel bump is encountered, the resulting suspension motion pumps oil into one chamber and out the other side of the piston at that corner of the car. Damping forces are produced as the oil passes through calibrated restrictions (orifices) built into the hydraulic hose attachments. When the car negotiates a corner, the outbound flow of oil from all four hydraulic units rushes into just one accumulator containing nitrogen that acts as a spring to resist that flow. As a result, there’s no need for anti-roll bars or stiff suspension coils to keep the body from listing excessively in a bend. By designing the bump and roll modes to act independently, the Kinetic system can be tuned to provide a controlled response over potholes, supple ride motions over dips, and firm resistance to body lean in sweeping bends on the race track. @car.tales
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#mclaren
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