Team America : Blue Steel : The R32 GT-R Time Attack Project

Blue Steel, the VQ35 powered R32 GT-R

Blue steel is back in the second part of the series from MotoIQ. In this installment of Beyond the Dyno from Eric Hsu, Mike Kojima, the suspension guru goes over the changes to improve the front suspension of the R32 GT-R known as blue steel.   The front multi link suspension in the Nissan GT-R makes a lot of compromises.  Although it works, modifications make it better, lots better. 



This is awesome. I love what they have to say here.

Full Race R14 GT-R suspensioned  Inverted Motons. 

Read it and weep keyboard tuners and JDM fanbois. Contrary to popular belief and legends of awesomeness, the R32 GT-R has really shitty front suspension geometry.  Very short, highly angular links result in a stupidly poor camber curve, bad roll center location, seriously bad lateral instant center location, a lot of scrub and too much anti dive.  The result is serious understeer and torque steer with big tires. (Just ask Takumi in Initial D) and worst of all, jacking.  A lot of the problem is the upper link location as shown in this photo I borrowed from Geoff Raicer of Full Race.  The upper link is super short, angled forward and canted upward.  This photo is at full droop, imagine how bad the upper link angularity is at ride height.  I think some Jr. Nissan engineer was trying to design a suspension with more negative camber gain when the wheels were turned and he either didn't know or care about other things.  I want to kick this guy in the nuts.

Check out all the goodness going on here.  Now just switch the hubs and move the calipers to trailing.

 A quick look at the overall front suspension design.  The lower control arm is nice and long to avoid drastic angle changes and reduce side scrub. Besides reducing the motion ratio change over stroke, having the front damper attach to an outboard point on the lower control arm means that the stress on the lower arm is less and it can be built lighter. The upper control arm is 2/3's as long as the lowers to provide good camber gain for radial tires.  A Speedway engineering/Genesis Technologies antiswaybar is going to be used, again, mounted fairly outboard to reduce stress on the arms and so a lighter bar and hardware can be used.  A rotating blade adjuster is going to be used so we can make the bar driver adjustable.

 Head over to the full article on MotoIQ for some very detailed technical information on what they are doing, to make this old chassis work in Time Attack.

Source: MotoIQ