Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gives a complete statement of race car dynamics, April 26, 1999
By A Customer
This book is a necessity for anyone who is seriously interested in understanding what happens concerning all aspects of the car. Whether mechanic, engineer, or general fan this book says it all. If you really want to understand the book completely, I would recommend at least a brush up in Calculus, and some trig.
|
|
|
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The mother of all books about race cars, April 3, 2005
This is the mother of all books about race cars. If you were missing deep theoretical background on tuning your sports car or street car, this volume is for you. It is impossible to describe in detail what this textbook is about, in a single review.
What I liked most is the chapter on dampers (shock absorbers). It gave me the answers to lots of questions that I had before reading this published work, for example how to choose "ride/handling compromise" when adjusting damping ratio? Why stiffer dampers are more comfortable on large-amplitude bumps, while softer dampers provide smoother ride on small-amplitude bumps? "In an automobile, a suspension is used to reduce the discomfort induced by unevenness in the highway. As measure of discomfort is the vertical acceleration that the passenger is subjected while sitting in the vehicle". The book demonstrates the model where the passenger is linked to the road via three springs in a sequence: tire, coil and the seat, and one damper (shock absorber). There is a graph showing passenger vertical acceleration depending on the amplitude (frequency) of road irregularities, for distinct shock absorbers with various damping ratios. For a stiff shock absorber this diagram shows relatively flat curve, where the vertical acceleration is almost independent of frequency of bumps. For the soft shock absorber, there is a very high peak (several times higher comparing to a stiff damper) of vertical acceleration for the low-frequency bumps, and this acceleration curve quickly decays as the frequency increases. There is another graph, "transient load transfer analysis", which shows that with soft dampers, the suspension load in a turn fluctuates. This is another answer to the question why stiffer dampers (to a certain extent) provide better handling.
The order of the chapters is somewhat sporadic. The books is a mixture of sections of engineering information (formulas), historical background, sketches (e.g. torque arm rear axle suspension), recipes (KONI's published instructions for damper adjustment), and sample data (e.g. Goodyear tire data). Nevertheless, the work is so deep that in a couple of years after it's publication, it had been started being used as a university textbook. Based on comments from faculty, SAE have requested the authors to prepare a supplementary book of problems, to help the universities to examine the students.
I also recommend "Theory of Ground Vehicles", by J. Y. Wong, in addition to this book.
|
|
|
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The DEFINITIVE Guide to Vehicle Dynamics, January 2, 2001
Tired of reading articles by so called 'experts' that have probably never driven a rae car in their lives and wouldn't know the difference between oversteer and understeer if it hit them in the face. This book has all the answers, and that's as simple as I can make it. It has all the math, all the theory, and some of the best stories I have ever read. Everything about this book extrudes excellence, go on and buy it, just don't show it to your friends.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Allan Staniforth
by Herb Adams
by Carroll Smith
by Carroll Smith
