We often hear damper engineering talked up as a bit of a dark art, and there’s plenty of truth to that.
This is one corner of the car industry that demands not just mathematical rigour but also world-class seat-of-pants feel from its practitioners – something of a synaptic je ne sais quoi to weave into all the objective, properly measurable stuff.
Perhaps the only area that exceeds damping in terms of intricacy is tyre development, which remains a wild west.
As road testers, it’s good practice to worm our way into conversation with damping engineers whenever the chance presents. Their ultra-nuanced work is never less than fascinating.
I remember a chat with Polestar suspension whisperer Joakim Rydholm when the 2 was still in the works. He was in the midst of 120 gruelling iterations for the Öhlins dampers, each one of them requiring a merry dance.
Car up on lift, wheels off, dampers off, dampers cleaned, opened up, internals removed, piston out, discs changed, rebuilt and remeasured before going back on the car.
All this for each damper, and all in situ at the remote Hällered proving ground in the forests east of Gothenburg. It was 20 weeks of graft to get the dynamic identity of the car right. He assured me there were no shortcuts: “The human is sensitive and you can’t calculate that.”
Five years later, Rydholm is still correct about the human element but, as with everything else, it seems, the world has moved on when it comes to the speed of process.
Manufacturers now rely more on driver-in-loop simulators and less on hard proving ground yards, expediting development.
Instead of messing around with fiddly shims as the sun is going down, a new bit of code can be programmed and, hey presto, the chap in the rig, surrounded by screens, should now be detecting 2% more low-speed rebound damping force on the front axle or somesuch.
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