MPH: Mark Hughes on...
...A genius idea, and why Mclaren hasn't tried to stop others using it
Malcolm Smith is a Cambridge don who came to McLaren with an idea in 2003. He was fascinated with parallels between electric circuitry and suspension systems, reasoned that a suspension system was just a big circuit. With an electrical circuit you have a resistor, inductor and capacitor.
With a suspension, the equivalent of the resistor is the damper, the inductor is the spring. But there was no suspension equivalent of a capacitor - and Smith was bugged by this. It was from here that he came up with the idea of the inerter, aka the j-damper in F1 parlance.
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In the magazine: Wheldon the Lionheart
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
MPH: Mark Hughes on...
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