Are great engineers fast drivers?

The first, selfish answer is ‘I bloody hope not’, as I myself got short-changed at the ticket desk where they hand out the vision, reflexes, synapse-speed, hand-eye coordination and courage that we call driving talent. I’ve had enough wheel time, driver training and (especially) passenger seat time sitting next to genuinely talented drivers to know my place, which is firmly to the left of the ‘averagely talented’ part of the bell curve. But then again, I am not and never was a proper chassis engineer – I’m a sparky, and that trade requires just a healthy fear of electrons when shoved along by high voltages, rather than any great talent behind the wheel.

But before we delve into the question with more analysis and less regard for my ego, let’s define the job of ‘chassis engineer’ in more detail. To massively over-simplify a very complex occupation, I think we can split the role into three broad phases. Phase one is the true ‘design engineering’ job – imagining a chassis system’s kinematics in the mind’s eye, drafting it into suspension hardpoints, selecting the types of front and rear axles, and working with the vehicle layout engineers and body structures specialists to figure out how to integrate the chassis linkages into the car.

Modern chassis designers don’t rely just on drawing boards and hardcore trigonometry to design their setups. They are aided by very sophisticated CAD/CAE systems, and various dynamics simulation packages, the best known being ADAMS or ‘Automated Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems’, a name dry enough to prove once again that software engineers have no poetry in their souls. Some would argue that this is the most important part of the job – if the basic geometric arrangement of the car’s underpinnings is ‘right’, the car is likely to accurately ‘execute the driver’s instructions’, to pinch Andrew Frankel’s beautifully succinct description of what comprises good handling.

Phase two is what I would call ‘product engineering’. This is the somewhat less glamorous side of the job – the task of drafting detailed drawings and other technical specification documents, working with the procurement teams to find suitable suppliers, negotiating costs and lead-times, and doing the endless testing and paperwork required to prove that every component of the chassis, from those fancy brand-name dampers to the most prosaic rubber bush and humble bolt, does its job safely, reliably and affordably, and will continue to do so for at least a decade of hard use. Lots of meetings, lots of boring spreadsheets, lots of travel to cheap hotels in industrial parks on the outskirts of grimy-fingernail towns.

Phase three is the bit we all dream about – let’s call it ‘set-up’. This is the part of the job that Dan’s recent piece, Secrets of car setup, focused on – where engineers get to don the Ray-Bans and do their Top Gun bit, hooning prototypes around every imaginable surface from shining blue ice in Northern climes, to grippy sun-baked tarmac in various southern sun traps. This is where the engineers and technicians from the OEMs and their key suppliers will carry out seemingly endless loops of iterating on spring rates, damper valving, anti-roll-bar diameters, tyre construction, bush stiffnesses…and, of course, the complex calibration of modern stability and traction control software; these days, the bits and bytes dance hand-and-hand with the oily parts. And although there are more long days, budget travel and crusty hotels involved, don’t listen when they tell you it’s a tough job. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.

I lay out these three phases of the job just to underline that the work of a true chassis engineer is not just the final part – the ‘tuning’ or ‘set-up’ part of the job. That’s just the top chunk of a very large iceberg.

Right – brass tacks time. Do you have to be a great driver to be good at all this? In short, no, you don’t. What you do need is access to great development or ‘set-up’ drivers who can accurately describe how the car is behaving. Then you need that rare ability to listen, and the even rarer talent to translate the drivers’ feedback into the correct changes in the car. To be honest, the conclusion is somewhat banal: we can clearly see this for ourselves in top-level motorsport – the best teams are not the ones where the engineers are the fastest drivers. They are the ones where the drivers can articulate clearly what the car is doing, and the engineers can correctly interpret their feedback.

And that, dear reader, was my neat, tie-it-up-in-a bow conclusion for this piece. A great chassis engineer just needs a good set of ears and clear communication with his or her development drivers. Job done. End of article.

Except. Except. My personal experience does not bear out my neat little thesis. Because annoyingly – no, maddeningly – the two best chassis engineers I ever had the pleasure to work with are also excellent drivers. Thierry and Damian (I won’t give away their full names, as they are both as modest as they are talented) blow my logic away. Both of them excel at all three phases above – being capable of doing the hard maths of the design phase, the hard graft of the product delivery phase and then – drat ’em! – being able to get in the driver’s seat and set the car up themselves. Not only that, they were then capable of demonstrating what the car could do to top-level execs, investors, journalists or anyone else lucky enough to get the opportunity to ride alongside them. Which is all lovely – except it blows my carefully crafted arguments into the weeds…

So here’s my (revised) conclusion, folks: good chassis engineers don’t need to be fast drivers. But the really great ones are.