Suspension System Testing and Tuning with the Use of a Four-Post Rig

One of the hidden aspects of the past Formula One season was the use of indoor road simulators as a mean of speeding up the springing and damping set-up over the race weekend. According to the rumours some teams can perform an indoor set-up optimization overnight by reproducing freshly acquired road profile data. The optimized set-up is then communicated back to the team and tested on-track the day after. The optimization is carried out on a so-called hydraulic four-post rig (or seven-post rig), where a car is shaken at such frequencies and amplitudes to reproduce the same inputs and forces encountered during a typical circuit lap. The Vehicle Dynamics Group of the University of Brescia has recently acquired a four-post rig by Servotest England. The paper aims to describe this facility while future papers will describe the first results obtained in research.