2016 MX-5 Racecar Tech Talk, Part 2

Glenn Long, principal of Mazda’s partner in developing the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Cup car, Long Road Racing, shares some of the technical highlights of the development process; in this video he discusses kinematics and compliance.

Mazda didn’t just take a 2016 MX-5 chassis and start throwing parts at it before putting it on track for testing; in this day and age, that would be ludicrous. Instead, the process of making the changes necessary to turn a great road car into a great racecar begins with a complete understanding of the chassis and how it works. By putting a road car chassis on a kinematics and compliance machine in addition to multi-post rigs, Mazda Motorsports and its development partner, Long Road Racing, have discovered valuable information about how little the chassis flexes, where the roll centers are and how the tires’ positions change as the suspension moves through its travel. In this video, Glenn Long discusses making those discoveries and applying that information to math models and eventually the prototype chassis themselves.