Why F1 Cars Use These Weird Springs 

Until it hits you in the head

Paul Walker 2014 ish: cars don’t fly

@@AlwaysEwok until they do

Except if you corner over Hamiltons car

Put it in quotes.

Yes, the whole video shows the spring rates in reverse. More coils=more flex. Softer.

came here to find this, you are correct.

You do realize spring metal hardness varies. 🤔

It is a bit hard to tell from a distance. All else being equal, more coils is a softer spring. But a 300mm long spring with 10 coils versus a 150mm spring with 10 coils, all else being equal, have the same spring rate. The wire diameter plays a huge role, as does the diameter of the coils as well. The type of metal, from the few I've seen, doesn't make a huge difference, mostly slight variations of steel / stainless steel, maybe +-20% but a few coils can halve or double a spring rate.

This is not the case in the example of 5:24

spring preload. if you have a coilover with a 500 lb/in spring on it, and compress the spring 1" with the nut for adjusting preload, the spring will not move until the force is greater than its preload. in this case, the first 500 lbs would produce no compression of the spring.

@@mustang351c4 No, reload is when you compress it before. If you applied 500 lbs to a spring rated at 500 lbs. Per inch. It would compress one inch. All things move with even the small amount a force. Even a cinder block wall moved when you throw a basketball it...

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@@mcduvall2000Your missing the point. You have a rigid barrier that keeps the spring from expanding past some height h. If that height is choosen so that the spring is exerting 500 Newtons of force at that height then the spring won't collapse below height h until you exceed 500 Newtons. Yes, if you have a force of 250 Newtons it has an effect on the overall system but it doesn't collapse the spring more. It's the same way that flicking a styrofoam peanut is always going to move the peanut but it only gets crushed if you hit if really hard. (tho obviously these are all macroscopic approximations...at an atomic level even sound waves move things).

Oh hello pedal and physics general obsesivity and randomness person

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@@alunesh12345 In SPEED we TRUST.

@@alunesh12345 Ok you've convinced me with that comment.

@@alunesh12345 Hail satan!

i don't think he said anything about the same g force though. softer springs enable faster speeds through slow corners, so more g force technically

@@SHRModding Hmm well the difference between soft and hard springs in a hairpin will be pretty small. I think Driver61, as he has done before, mistakes the car 'attitude' (roll or pitch) for weight transfer, thinking that stiffer magically means less transfer. A mistake often made btw, not just by Driver61.

@@NielsHeusinkveld fair enough 👍

Great explanation!

Even just a test.

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Ikr. I have them in my car and they weren't even expensive.

Yes, they are always used in motorcycles

Almost every spring is progressive. Having a linear spring is really hard, same with dampers. Which is why you shims stuff for rallying.

While it's true that progressive and/or dual-rate springs aren't that uncommon, it isn't true that 'almost every' spring is progressive. Both are used, linear can be cheaper, but you'll find a lot of high-end racing spings that are linear. Nothing wrong with either of them if set up correctly.

Eibach used them for 30 years progressive rats springs is an old item . With the benefits stated soft then hard when you need them . My experience is they road better than stock ones and then cornered much better.

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Not if the springs have different resistance. The softer spring will compress first, until the overall load on the system is enough to start moving the harder spring. Kyle Engineers has a much more in-depth video about this, where he also shows a 3D printed model of how it works. It's very well explained

Agreed. Either he doesn't know what he's talking about or he simplified the explanation for his target audience.

@@Excludos that’s not how springs work if you had a spring and hang 10kg off it it will stretch a certain amount. Then if you hang a soft spring off the stiff spring then hang the 10kg off that the stiff spring will still extend the same amount as it did before. I don’t wanna sound big headed but I did this stuff at university on an automotive engineering course. Springs in series don’t affect each other

@@Excludos You're confused (understandably) as Kyle describes a different system. George is right when two springs are just stacked in series, as Driver61 showed in this video.

@@georgeoliver8300 Think about it. If you have 2 springs. The thicker one takes 1300kg before it starts compressing and the other, much thinner one starts compressing at compressing at 700kg and designed to bottom out at 1300kg and you place them on top of each other, then the stiffer spring doesn't really move before the softer one starts bottoming out. Of course they'll have some overlap to make the transition smooth.

I think they already use multi tension torsion bars, but I think it wasn't in recent style of design as its not independent so only use as a baseline tune rather than springs which can do more finite tuning. I think it was used exclusively a few years go to save weight of springs? Now they sacrificed weight for more control (using springs)

Instead of a single rubber bumper there would be a second one halfway the torsion bar

I was thinking just the same

Not really, Kyle had a video about the collapsing spring system, which he cleverly demonstrated with some 3D printed parts. Driver61 showed two springs in series, which behave differently. If one spring has a rate of 100 and the other a rate of 50, in series that becomes an effective spring rate of 1/(1/50+1/100) = 33.3. If the softer spring bottoms out after say 25mm of travel, it no longer takes part and you only have the rate of 100 spring left. This can be used to really have two different rates of spring while driving, as might be the case in some race cars. Alternatively they are called 'helper springs', where they are really quite soft springs that already are fully compressed by the weight of the car. They are just there to keep the main spring seated and allow some more rebound travel without the big spring rattling loose. Most GT race cars use helper springs as without them, you only have ~10mm of rebound travel before the spring sits loose. Maybe more rebound travel is desired, so the helper spring pushes the suspension down a bit further when you go over a kerb and the tire is hanging in the air, so you have more damping and suspension travel when you hit the road again. That is one possible reason anyway.

@@NielsHeusinkveld yeah thanks for the clear cut comparison. honestly i judged a book by its cover as i only saw a part of the video before commenting so that is completely my fault. both videos were informative as well as your comment

No, you are talking about damping. Fast/slow refers to the speed that the damper compresses/rebounds, if you have long whoops the suspension might go trough a lot of travel at relatively low speed, but if you hit a sudden sharp edge in the road you will have a high velocity as the wheel travels up trough the stroke.

Slow/fast bump/rebound (In my mind) are settings that are adjustable through the shocks. The progressive springs are there to hold the car up and flat whether it's going nowhere and weighs 1000lbs or going flat out with an additional 2000 lbs of aero-downforce. (No I didn't check my values). Basically, I think your settings are more for how quickly the shock allows the tires to move while the springs make sure you can hit top speed without bottoming out.

Dampers contain orifices that allow the oil inside to move from one side of the piston to the other. This is how they dampen movement. The oil can only move through the orifices so quickly. They dampen the movement by the simple fact that the oil will only go through so quickly. Make the orifice bigger they will allow quicker movement. Make the orifice smaller and they will allow slower movement. A damper with just one fixed orifice has a fixed amount of damping that does not change regardless of input speed. And this setup would not allow you to have a different amount of damping for bump and for rebound. It would be the same amount of damping for both directions. Now, say you decide that you would want a different amount of damping for bump than you would for rebound. How could you accomplish that? You could stop using a simple orifice and in place of it you could use two one-way valves. If you want stiffer bump and softer rebound then you install a one-way valve for bump that is smaller and gives more restriction, and a one-way valve for rebound that is larger and gives less restriction. You can install larger or smaller valves of whatever size you like for either direction to give them the behaviour you want in that direction. Now you realize that not all bumps in the road are the same. And you think maybe you would like to have different damping behaviour for the different types of bumps in the road. How could you do that? Well, you take your one-way valve idea and go a step further. Now you have valves that can give different amounts of damping behaviour depending on how quickly the damper is moving through its stroke. You design them with a specific speed threshold which allows you to dial in the desired behaviour during slow movement and a different behaviour during fast movement. Slow movements are what you encounter when accelerating and braking, and other gradual changes like going up or down inclines in the road. Fast movements are what you encounter with actual bumps in the road, or hitting curbs at the apex or track out sections of the track. What I’m unsure of is how they mechanically get these changes in valve behaviour to occur. I’m kind of thinking they’re using two valves for each direction, with one of them always opening, and one of them opens or closes only when it passes that speed threshold. I’ve never actually looked into it, though. I wonder if anyone has shared how these things work. How the parts are designed. Perhaps I’ll Google that up today if I remember later.

no these are damper stiffnesses. the spring rate / wheel rate is what controls the springs

I don't understand porpoising to any great deal but don't forget the tires themselves are very bouncy undamped springs! So you might still get some form of oscillation even if the suspension wouldn't move! :-)

I guess the trade off from the ground effect in high speed it's not worth it, probably with a millimeter or two the downforce will not be enough to stick the car on the floor.

@@NielsHeusinkveld good quality tires shouldn't oscillate by themselves, they'll sure absorb some bumbs but that's another story.

if you lock the springs a few mm before bottoming out, you remove the part of the car that can handle bumps in the road etc, any small turn or bump would thus be transferred to the car and make it probably near impossible to handle

@@afoxwithahat7846 Well the nature of all tires is that they are very bouncy, as you can see when a tire gets disconnected from a car during a crash and it goes on a bouncy ride. So if some aero load fluctuations happen and you have no suspension, the tire will get squished periodically and it will be uncontrolled.

They have that option, and basically all ride height sensitive aero cars use this, by adding bump rubbers. These are progressively stiff rubbers that are hit when the damper is compressed beyond certain amount. They can play with the length and stiffness and even the natural damping of these rubber elements to further tweak the way the ride heights change with speed. For aero load setup, bump rubbers are probably more or at least an equal part than the springs.

Bluethoot grip

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All tire sets used to get thrown out including the wheel, nowadays they sell the used tires with the wheels or just the used wheels and perelli destroys the used and un unsed tires from each race weekend.

Probably because suspension technology wasn’t as advanced back then.

@@vazione5410 Suspension technology was plenty advanced to allow for stiff rebound damping.

Yes

You should check out a video called ‘life of a bolt’ from red bull. They’re titanium and custom made.