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.