Matt Prior
TESTER’S NOTES
❝ In among all of the cold, hard, secret detail, there are still some nuggets for the childish ❞
Either they don’t understand the question or they’re pretending not to. I’m asking two Ferrari engineers which company made the simulator they’ve just shown in a video and told me lots about, having used it so much during development of the Purosangue (you can read my review next month), but they’re being coy.
Eventually it becomes clear they would rather not say. And besides, they tell me, “at least half” of the simulator is Ferrari’s own work.
I asked because simulation is an area shrouded in more mystery and secrecy than almost any other part of the car business, bar the advanced design studio stuff. The latest ‘driverin-loop’ simulators give companies a competitive edge and offer millions in cost savings. And, as it happens, it’s an area in which the UK is world-leading.
This is, I think, the first time that Ferrari has talked to me at any length about how it uses simulators in road car development.
In the Purosangue’s case, I can see why it’s so crucial: this is a terrifically complex car. Not only does it have a height and a purpose like no other Ferrari before it but also a huge raft of technology is required to make it real: a dual-clutch transaxle with an electronically controlled limited-slip differential, a two-speed gearbox at the front with two clutches, electric steering, braking by wire, stability control, traction control, multiple other functions and possibly the most baffling Multimatic suspension I’ve ever encountered – active, of course. Without a simulator, I don’t know where you would start tuning it all.
There are two things about telling these stories, though.
First, there’s that confidentiality issue. I recently visited Norfolk to try Ansible Motion’s latest and greatest simulator, the Delta Series 3, which fills an entire room, another hosting its brain. Obviously it’s mega, although for eejits like me it’s easy to worry too little about pure technical accuracy, which is what engineers want and need, and too much about immersion, which is what you want for gaming but which engineers quickly grow tired of when spending all day thinking about low-speed steering responses. Anyway, Ansible would obviously like to tell the world, but most of its clients (which newly include Continental and Honda Racing) wouldn’t.
The second thing is that a big, quiet warehouse-size room with a projector in it isn’t that sexy compared with imagining a driver drifting around mountain hairpins on a test track.
“Our Delta full-size dynamic simulators have measured latencies of less than 10 milliseconds for all six primary motion axes,” says Ansible, which isn’t quite as cool as “mate, did you feel the way the back went light through Schwedenkreuz?” but is probably of quite a lot more relevance.
As cars get more and more complex, the use of simulators only gets more and more important. But in among all of the cold, hard, secret detail, there are still some nuggets for the childish.
Honda Racing’s chief engineer, Kazuharu Kidera, says that “the two main improvements with the new [Ansible] simulator are that drivers can feel the rear end more accurately and it’s easier for them to catch the car when it does start to oversteer”.
So there’s still time to focus on the things that make us smile when the actual cars arrive.