Setting up a car for the rigours of the Nürburgring 24 hours is one of motor racing?s great challenges. Suspension company, KW Automotive, worked hard to develop a five-way damper to give teams such as Porsche and BMW set-up options previously unavailable on their GT3 cars. Although the 24-hour race was shortened by rain and fog this year, car set-up was crucial for the sprint to the flag and performed well enough on Olaf Manthey?s 25th anniversary at the ?Ring for him to take the victory.
?We just launched a new specification for the Manthey car, and that will be a future GT3 damper, which will also be on the BMW M4 GT3,? confirmed Thomas Rechenberg, head of motorsport at KW Automotive. ?We have built from a single adjustment to a five-way adjustment and developed it on the seven-post rig with the Manthey car. The damper has a cartridge system, so basically, we are benchmarking against Öhlins and Multimatic, looking at what they are doing now, seeing how we can put strength into our modern system.? The damper is an update to the company?s four-way damper that was introduced in 2017 and campaigned successfully at the ?Ring in the VLN series (now called the NLS). From the extensions seen over brows of hills to the compressions in dips, plus aggressive kerbs and changes in track surface, the Nürburgring is a uniquely demanding circuit, and suspension development is key to good lap times and traffic management. ?What we learned from our four-way damper is to have a...