Race Car Vehicle Dynamics (R146) review:5 stars (Too good...) - This book is beyond review.. Its in a league of its own. The content is thorough, indepth and is easy to comprehend by anyone. I found the book enjoyable, not just informative. The graphs in the book reiterate what the text says in an easy and understandable way.
I would highly recommend the book to anyone who would want to master vehicle dynamics, as well as engineers seeking to have topics such as aerodynamics and mechanics explained better, and in a more specified field. As well as topics such as vehicle design and race engineering from a management point of view.
The book was written by the best in the business and you do get what you pay for.5 stars (The mother of all books about race cars) - This is the mother of all books about race cars. If you were missing deep theoretical background on tuning your sports car or street car, this volume is for you. It is impossible to describe in detail what this textbook is about, in a single review.
What I liked most is the chapter on dampers (shock absorbers). It gave me the answers to lots of questions that I had before reading this published work, for example how to choose "ride/handling compromise" when adjusting damping ratio? Why stiffer dampers are more comfortable on large-amplitude bumps, while softer dampers provide smoother ride on small-amplitude bumps? "In an automobile, a suspension is used to reduce the discomfort induced by unevenness in the highway. As measure of discomfort is the vertical acceleration that the passenger is subjected while sitting in the vehicle". The book demonstrates the model where the passenger is linked to the road via three springs in a sequence: tire, coil and the seat, and one damper (shock absorber). There is a graph showing passenger vertical acceleration depending on the amplitude (frequency) of road irregularities, for distinct shock absorbers with various damping ratios. For a stiff shock absorber this diagram shows relatively flat curve, where the vertical acceleration is almost independent of frequency of bumps. For the soft shock absorber, there is a very high peak (several times higher comparing to a stiff damper) of vertical acceleration for the low-frequency bumps, and this acceleration curve quickly decays as the frequency increases. There is another graph, "transient load transfer analysis", which shows that with soft dampers, the suspension load in a turn fluctuates. This is another answer to the question why stiffer dampers (to a certain extent) provide better handling.
The order of the chapters is somewhat sporadic. The books is a mixture of sections of engineering information (formulas), historical background, sketches (e.g. torque arm rear axle suspension), recipes (KONI's published instructions for damper adjustment), and sample data (e.g. Goodyear tire data). Nevertheless, the work is so deep that in a couple of years after it's publication, it had been started being used as a university textbook. Based on comments from faculty, SAE have requested the authors to prepare a supplementary book of problems, to help the universities to examine the students.
I also recommend "Theory of Ground Vehicles", by J. Y. Wong, in addition to this book.5 stars (Epic) - If Puhn's "How to make your car handle" is practical and straightforward then RCVD is marvellously comprehensive and thorough. Casually flipping through it you might be deterred by the intensity of some of the mathematical passages in this book but this is just the "textbook" side of things. The Millikens also give very clear explanations, diagrams and concise well-structured advice. My one gripe was that the index, while long enough, tends to hide information under unexpected headings, with successive indents snaking from page to page until you quite lose the thread of where you are in the suspension alphabet. Still, it is probably the best currently published work on suspension theory, leavened by some very funny quotations in the chapter headings.
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