Silverstone Testing 30/3/12

After the frenzy of rebuilding the suspension up, and the unkown effects of the new front wishbone design we booked in for the full days testing at silverstone the day before the race. Initially the car handled like dog muck!! It had suddenly gone from a pretty neutral and predictable handling car with a touch of high speed understeer to a snappy, evil cornering handful of bolts!! The turn in was great, but then the car would suddenly snap the rear out. On returning to the pits it was obvious the front was way too soft (we had suspected this would be the case due to the shorter inner wishbones), the nose was dragging on the road under braking and cornering, and was undoubtedly the cause of the nasty snappy rear end. We bumped the front springs upto 275lbs and went back out, the car instantly felt better so i started to push on, but then at a high speed moment round Copse the back end bit me again and off i went into the kitty litter, closing the session (sorry everyone). Lesson number 1 learnt, build up steadily after major changes, lol!!! Getting the car back in the garage showed the front end was still bottoming out, and we suspected the 275lb springs were too soft still. We hadn't any stiffer springs with us so i started to hunt round the paddock. We calculated we needed 325lbs to be back where we were before, but the closest we could get were 350lbs. We fitted these as had nothing to lose and went back out on track.

The cars terrible rear end was now gone, but turn in was sacrificed slightly and we had a bit of understeer, but it felt like we were getting close. We have always run the car relatively soft so decided to try and even up the balance of the car by putting some 225lb springs on the rear, which would also give us the same sort of front/rear stiffness ratio difference that was on the car before. So in the final session the stronger springs were fitted and car felt much better balance. Initial thoughts were that the car seemed to have more grip after the apex of the fast long corners than the original wishbone design, but only time will tell as we had no dry lap times to compare to from the previous year, plus the new surface was obviously making the circuit faster than last year anyway.