Hey all, just for inspiration.

They had a stripped down Carrera GT tub at the Detroit auto show. Grabbed some photos of suspension details and tossed them into my photo archive.

The carbon fiber construction is fairly interesting -- looks like it's moulded in three pieces, front pass compartment, and a top and bottom rear clamshell, all bolted together.

Cheers, Ted

[Edited on 9/1/04 by andkilde]

nice.

I love the way they've done the ARBs, very neat.

Nice one Ted...I appreciate the research and sharing it....

Yeah the antiroll bar fittings are nifty -- seen similar setups on some formula SAE cars.

Thing looks to be a right bastard to work one once the bodywork is fitted -- good thing the owners will have cash, changing out the alternator looks like a life's work

Browsing the forum is bad for me -- I originally just wanted to do a "normal" locost, then I saw the BEC forum and thought that was the ticket, now the middy bug has caught -- never keen on the looks of the seven, Mclaren M8(ish) looking, scaled down with a midmounted bike engine?

Cheers, Ted

BEAUTIFUL!

Thanks andkilde.

rt

That's what our GTM Libra wants to be when it grows up.

Note the rear toe adjustment on the top wishbone. Very neat. And those two bolt mounting spherical bearing are fab.

I think a fair amount of shameless plagiarism is going to be involved if I eventually do a GRP monocoque middy.

Tip-top-toppermost photos. Well done and thank you.

Mark.

Thanks Ted - great pics.
This is a great car. It's chassis construction and suspension layout is very conventional.... but it's conventional in another world! You'll see veriation of this on most sport prototypes as well as porshes oun racers but you woudn't see it on any production cars. Look at Merc rear axle - WAY less sophisticated.
My suspension packaging is similar - pushrod with horisontal dampers and T-shape ARB's. It just happened that suspension loads are fed in most stiff points of allready massively stiff carbon fibre with nomex honeycomb semymonocoque chassis. I must say that using push/pull rods is may be a plagiarism but than so did just everybody sinse all time great Gordon Murray showed how to do it right

Ted
BTW - it seems like unusual caster gometry on GT's rear - or am I missing something?

Ted

Not sure about the castor geometry at rear -- could be point of view of the camera giving your eye fits -- b*stards had a glass wall butting quite close to the chassis so I had to do some gymnastics to get decent photos.

Err, had a second look at the photos -- to my eye it appears the lower triangular wishbone is centralized on the hub, and the top two links on the upper Z-wishbone are equidistant from the center or the hub so effective Castor should be zero -- it does look like adjusting the rear tracking will have some minor negative effects on camber though.

Added some Mercedes SLR and Formula BMW (neat little car, roughly FF or FA sized, powered by 1300cc BMW bike engine -- looks like a bespoke transaxle though, $$$)

BTW, have six megapixel images of everything -- if you'd like to see bigger stuff, e-mail me.

Cheers, Ted

[Edited on 9/1/04 by andkilde]

Good stuff again Ted...

I'm not sure how long the alternator would last on a road car though..

Yeah, the alternator is hanging way out in harms way on the formula car -- access couldn't be much better though

Just discovered that an engineer aquaintance of mine is pretty heavily involved in formula SAE, scrutineering and advising the student teams near Detroit. Will try to gather up some images of the students' cars in the near future.

Cheers, Ted

Was the side/rear body panel removed on the beemer?? Theres a nice big flat under tray, but no bodywork above it!

errm, that alternator - unless i've got it wrong, it doesn't run when the car is stationary! Interesting approach, which i'd never considered for a race car.

its an old race trick to run the alternator off the driveshaft rather than the engine.