Posts made in February, 2012

Get ready for more “spilling of the beans”! Part 1 of DB-6 Suspension Modifications is about suspension geometry mods. Part 2 will be about hardware modifications. If you don’t have a copy of Think Fast yet, now you have another reason to pick up a copy for yourself. I laid out everything that I consider to be important about race car suspension geometry in Chapter 14, Geometry Goals. If you read this along with the book, you will see that what I told the world in Think Fast is exactly the same as what I actually did with my own race car. Step 1 was measuring the suspension geometry. I did that before disassembling the car. In many cases, I had to use my precision “eyecrometer” to estimate the pivot point dimensions to within...

Last time, I told you that I was going to spill the beans on all of the mods I’m doing during the resurrection of my DB-6. Well, you might want to take a couple of steps back, because it’s about to get really messy in here. The Formula Ford rules restrict the frame design to a steel tube space frame, with very limited exceptions for safety. The reason for these restrictions is to keep cost down by preventing designers from making monocoque structures. The floor pan, major bulkheads, and the fuel cell container can be reinforced with sheet material, and the engine and gearbox castings can be part of the primary structure of the car. The rest can only be steel tubes. The Swift DB-6 frame is known to be really good, but not the best. Its designer, David...

Wow. What a question. My last racing adventure halted in 1996 when I saw the ad in AutoWeek that said Swift was hiring engineers for their start-up CART program. Working with David Bruns at Swift was the job that I always wanted to have, from the moment the company started. I kept sending them resumes from 1983 onward. My adventures in a DB-1 were going really well in ’96. So well in fact that I lapped the whole FF field both days during my final race weekend. Having just finished 4 years working for Jim Hall’s Indycar team, I was well aware that if I got the job at Swift, it would be full time. In professional racing, full time means that you work, and you sleep. Nothing else is on the schedule. I started very strong and rose to the top tier during...