Carl Meek & James Lovett - Build Diary for Westfield
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Suspension Setup


 

October 13 2007 - Suspension Setup
We arrived at the race car doctor's barn at 9am and got cracking. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but i felt something would probably be grossly wrong!

Firstly we corner weighted it, see the photo - turns out the car weighs 512 kilos, a bit more than we expected, and then we added ballast to represent the driver. Dave made loads of adjustments to even the weights up.

We then got around to doing the camber/caster and after much looking & thinking Dave noticed that our front top wishbones were on the wrong way, which was playing havoc with handling and causing a lack of self-centering on the steering whilst cornering. Correcting this took about 4 hours as we had to mess about with the front Anti-Roll bar loads.

Eventually done, 7 hours work and i have a fully corner weighted setup. His recommendations are that i swap the front tyres from 205/60 to 185/60 which will give the car less of a tendency to oversteer and give it a gentle understeer. I'm going to do this monday.

With a track day at Snetterton booked for 2 weeks time, he recommended that i drive the car and see how it goes, but he feels the rear springs are too soft and may cause the damper to 'bottom out' and hit the stops which could cause a spin. If this happens, or i detect the bottoming out, i should fit stiffer springs, perhaps 300 rate springs.

In summary, i'd recommend any Westfield owner gets it done, after spending so much on a car its an irrelevant cost and can pick up on anything you've done wrong!