By Rob
I was thinking of the toughest areas of the Ring and immediately came to the Karussel.
It’s called that for the obvious reason: it’s a constant radius turn just like what we’d call a “carousel” in English. The best word to describe it is “abusive.” You can see from this photo that it has a bit of banking to it, and the pavement is very uneven.
One of the main things that makes the Ring such a great test of a car is the extreme forces it places on the vehicle. In the Karussel, the lateral and vertical forces – what we call “loading” on the chassis -- are really high. If you’re going to have a failure (something breaking or fatiguing), this is likely where it will happen.
You can see in the photo that we’re not using production wheels on this car. During this test last year, the production wheels were still being styled. But of course we knew the engineering aspects of our production wheels (sizes, etc.) So here we’re using Fiske Wheels (how’s that for a plug?) We found that this set from Fiske was closest to what we will have in production, at least in terms of the size and basic construction.
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Comments
Why are you still using camouflage on your test vehicles?
Posted by: KB | May 21, 2007 10:46 PM
I like the info you have provided so far. But, do you have any videos of the car laping at nurerburg ring? I really want to see how the car handles and hear how the car sounds!
Posted by: KC | May 22, 2007 3:43 PM