#12: Matt Becker,

Aston Martin vehicle attribute engineer

You’ll often hear racing drivers talk about working on car set-up, spending time fne-tuning their racing car for the upcoming attack on pole position and race. There are various settings you can change yourself on road cars but before cars are delivered to customers they need a perfectly honed baseline set-up. That’s my job.

The key to setting up a car is getting the basics right before you begin to tune in the magic. The dark art of vehicle dynamics is all about balance in the fnal changes we make to a car. The fundamentals deliver what we need for a ‘good’ car – stifness, how much it rolls and so on. But to transform a ‘good’ car into a ‘great’ car, we have to balance everything down to the last detail – how each axle reacts to a steering input, how much response, how much overshoot, etc. When balancing the front to the rear, the smallest of changes can make a huge diference to how a car feels, but you couldn’t objectively measure or model these diferences – you have to drive and feel the car.

At Aston Martin we have a hand-selected team of dynamics engineers who are the best in the business and who you trust and respect. Not only can these engineers drive, they can also engineer the cars at the same time. This means they understand every nuance of all the components and which levers they need to pull in order to solve any issues quickly. We also use specialists such as high-performance test driver Chris Goodwin – who’ll work primarily on the Valkyrie – and Aston Racing works driver and three-time Le Mans winner Darren Turner, who also supports us with road-car development.

Sometimes it can be tricky. You’ll get a car that doesn’t communicate via steering or the rear axle, or if the increase in steering efort is too fat or not perfectly aligned with how the yaw and lateral acceleration builds, the car can feel disconnected and unresponsive. Steering efort needs to build linearly, and provide resistance to push up against, from centre right to the limit, where the efort should reduce and give the driver the frst clue the limit is close. Nowhere is this more important than on a road car where the road conditions, grip and the corners coming up are changeable and unknown. A good steering tune is imperative to get the most out of a drive.

We have a strong presence at the Nürburgring and we test there for brake, ESP and high-speed stability, but we don’t compromise our cars just to work there. My experience is that vehicles set up specifcally to work around the ’Ring then become too compromised for almost every other road surface. That’s because the ’Ring requires a lot of damping control due to the elevation changes, which becomes too much for normal roads.

In terms of challenges for the future, electric and autonomous vehicles provide a new test of our craft. Electric vehicles will be a challenge in terms of road isolation, while maintaining good handling and steering performance. When you remove the engine you notice all the other noises you couldn’t hear before, so the NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) team become key at the concept stage of any new electric vehicle platform. Autonomy will be a massive shift for the industry and change the way carmakers set up cars. Remove driver involvement altogether, and ride quality and NVH performance move up the pecking order. Fingers crossed, I’ll still have a job when self-driving cars

become the new normal.

“Vehicles set up to work around the ’Ring become too compromised for every other road surface”