Greetings Yokomo camp. Who's in for technical mumbo jumbo jargon?
You might not know that I like to reverse engineer suspension designs and learn the dynamics behind, this has been going for a few years but enough with the chit chat. Let's cut the chase, what brought me here is the BD7'16. Perfect example of what's going on with TC cars right now.
A suspension has two components, geometry (CG and roll centre heights, arm length and angle - roll stiffness) and mechanical (springs and roll bars* - ride frequency). A balance of the two is needed to have a well performing car. The problem is tires and the entire car like a certain ride frequency (lower frequencies equal softer suspension and vice versa). The lower CG height brought with this iteration of the BD7 raised roll stiffness a fair amount, while itself a good change people didn't know how to react to it. That's why people claim the '16 is bad, it isn't, quite the contrary! The change it needs is to rebalance both suspension components back to what the tires like. This will sound outlandish but I tested this theory over and over, our cars are too stiffly sprung because the roll stiffness is too low. What all cars benefit is softer springs and higher roll centres (or in the '16 case nothing as the CG height is lower). I see most are using pink-blue springs which have 260-280gr.cm which provide ride frequencies of around 2Hz having a big toll on the tires (the ring of death will be on the next episode), my experiments have produced better results the ride frequency is bellow 1.5Hz, which according to my calculations would be something around black springs being a necessity but worth it. Applicable in all grip levels and surface types.
TL: DR; the '16 is too stiff by geometry, use of softer springs is a necessity to have a car better than any of the predecessors.
BTW, this is applicable to all cars in the since the TRF415, Awesomatix included. I wanted the Yokomo camp to have an advantage because I have good friends here
