Hello from Antony Warmbold

[ProRally]

I heard the story once, how this drawing came about.... and where it was drawn....

[dimviii]

spill the beans Pro!

[Sulland]

Will you be driving rallies in 2012 Herr Warmbold ?

If so what is the program?

[Antony Warmbold]

Just did a new post. I hope you guys will like it.

[Barreis]

New page...
WRC behind the stages: Videos

[br21]

Just did a new post. I hope you guys will like it.

Very interesting, nothing new, but really nice!

[janvanvurpa]

Very interesting, nothing new, but really nice!

Maybe nothing new for you, but a whole lot of numbers , nice specific numbers of spring rates for given set ups..

The one thing I'd say to Anthony is in comparing Maz-dog, then WRC Toyota then the Focus is that gravel suspension travel has gotten longer as time goes on. With longer travel you CAN and do run softer springs becuase if you have enough travel then you can "trade travel for grip"..

Kinda oronic i just sent Mirek a question if he knew exact spring rates for gravel on the Skodas.

I manufacture gravel rally suspension and have had to explain the whole idea of springs to many guys. Anthony did pretty good job.
And yes dual spring set ups are on all the cars now.

[Rallyper]

An easy way to explain long travel suspension on rallycars is to compare to Motocross bikes. They "invented" the longtravel springs many years before rallycars adapted it. And it made a huge improvement to the motocross bikes. That´s when Ohlins came in to the market.

[tfp]

Good blog post Antony, was interesting to see how the "helper" spring worked!

Good picture at the top of the page aswel, where was that taken?

P.s Did you see your old mate Toni on Top Gear last night?

[janvanvurpa]

An easy way to explain long travel suspension on rallycars is to compare to Motocross bikes. They "invented" the longtravel springs many years before rallycars adapted it. And it made a huge improvement to the motocross bikes. That´s when Ohlins came in to the market.

Yeah that's what I say to folks since that what was going on in the whole period I was active in moto-cross and living i Stor-Stockholm.. och till o med i Upplands-Väsby.
Firman where I worked---Sollentuna Svets o Smide got the sub-contract to build the automatic TiG-svets machine which welded the bottom forging onto Kentas shock body when they were setting up for production. My boss Peter Stranh )numera i Fallköping traken tror jag) built the machine so any fool go do a proper job and while he was training Kentas normal mechanics I worked in the shop doing their work...Of course in the evening when work was done and the beer was opened, I learned a lot about the internals and these days a big part of my income is from manufacturing rally suspension using Bilstein internal parts and shocks...for example yesterday evening once my wife was home i was down at the shop making the mounting “ears“ on the struts and milling the upper hols into ovals, the cars I am right now building suspension for are 1 Suzuki, 2 Subarus, a 240 Volvo, a 240 Nissan (rwd), RX7, Sierra gravel and a Sierra for ban racing. While typing this supsension arrive for repar and mods for an escort Cosworth and a Audi Quattro..
Surprisingly enough, the suspension I make by all reports is very good and everybody says "I can't belive how nice these are on landing after jumps"

That's why seeing Anthony's numbers was interesting...

The whole design really is like in moto-cross around 1977 when we finally reached around 315mm travel rear and 300mm in the front even in details like placing the legs in front of the axle (or on bikes, the axle in front of the tube) rather in direct line with the spindle...Everything similar except cars weigh 1200kg and our bikes weighed 100kg...thats why I'm curious what the gravel rates on modern long travel cars are because that tells us a good guess on valving..

In regards Anothy's talk of springs, oh dear what we all spent a lot of time changing springs. Linear springs, progressive would with straight diameter wire for progressive effect, true progressive where the wire was linear wound but the wire tapered, normal looking coils, verty widely spaced coils (nice for fabriks drivers but fatigue failures occurred) and then finally dual springs..

Sure would be nice to know some numbers....

Now, time to weld some ears on struts!