GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

1930s car dynamics maestro Maurice Olley

‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ Famously ad-libbed by actress Julia Lang in 1950 at the beginning of the BBC’s Listen

With Mother radio programme, the invitation would have been equally appropriate for a lecture by Maurice Olley. The work of the British pioneer suspension engineer and theorist at General Motors in the 1930s defined the parameters of vehicle dynamics and had a deep effect on the entire automotive industry.

He is credited with introducing the circular skid pad, and with coining the terms ‘understeer’ and ‘oversteer’ to describe a vehicle’s handling characteristics. He also helped plan the Motor Industry Research Association’s testing facility.

Olley was hardly the first engineer to study vehicle dynamics, but few before him had so methodically analysed and recorded the many factors that influence the handling of the motor car. He was an engineer’s engineer, unknown to the public but deeply admired by his peers.

Olley was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, in 1889 but grew up in North Wales. He was educated at the Birmingham Technical College and Manchester University before joining a Birmingham company as a tool designer. In 1912 Sir Henry Royce chose him for his personal staff, involving him in the development of the first Rolls-Royce aero engines. In 1917 he was dispatched to the United States to supervise aero engine production there, eventually becoming chief engineer of the company’s Springfield, Massachusetts, subsidiary.

Rolls closed that operation in 1930, so Olley moved to General Motors’ Cadillac division as a chassis engineer. His first task was to improve the ride of GM’s top-of-the-range luxury car. Ride being a subjective quality, he converted a Cadillac saloon into a mobile test bed by cantilevering adjustable weights outboard of the body front and rear, then studying the pitching movement. He also introduced a ‘bump rig’, as developed at R-R, consisting of large-diameter revolving drums on which a vehicle was perched to explore the cause of wheel shimmy and tramp – both of which plagued the solid front axles fitted to virtually all cars of the day. He also persuaded Goodyear to undertake rolling-drum tyre tests for the first time in America.

His experiments demonstrated that a substantial reduction in the front spring rate visà-vis the rear would eliminate the pitching, but the weaker springs resulted in violent tramp from the solid axle. The natural progression was independent suspension, already making its appearance in Europe, so Olley and his engineers devised the SLA – short/long arm – system of unequal-length double wishbones

and coil springs that gave the front wheels twice the movement of the rears. The result was a new and most welcome phenomenon: the ‘flat ride’.

Introduced on the 1934 Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs and Buicks, it was later adopted by Pontiac and Chevrolet and spread through the rest of the industry, effectively spelling the end of the beam axle in passenger cars. Curiously, GM had also licensed the use of the more complicated system developed by Frenchman André Dubonnet. It, too, was introduced in 1934, described by GM as ‘Knee Action’. Its cost and regular servicing demands soon saw it abandoned, but not before Olley returned to the UK in 1937 to supervise its royalty-avoiding modification for Vauxhall’s 10-4 family car.

In early 1938 Olley delivered a lecture to the Institute of Automotive Engineers entitled National Influences on American Passenger Car

Design. He outlined the automobile’s evolution in America and presented a discourse on ‘Riding, Rolling, Handling and Motions of the Unsprung Masses’. In it, he observed: ‘Aircraft engineers got busy from the very start to find out how their vehicles actually operated, but the automobile industry went on for 35 years with no real conception of the complete vehicle.’

He also highlighted the different attitude to ‘ride’ across the Atlantic: ‘There is as much prejudice in the States against a car that rolls too little as there is here against too much roll.’ Despite his employment by GM, the tone of his lecture appeared to gently mock the American car and, in particular, the stylists’ obsession with planned obsolescence and the annual ‘facelift’.

By the 1950s Olley was head of research and development at Chevrolet. One of his last jobs was to design the chassis to slip under the sleek glassfibre shell of GM’s new secret car, the Corvette (codenamed project Opel). He retired in 1955, but this witty and amusing man never wrote his autobiography.

In the 1960s he completed a series of detailed monographs outlining his career and the technicalities of chassis design, but it coincided with litigation over the handling issues of the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair and GM’s lawyers stopped its publication. Unintentionally, Olley became another victim of Ralph Nader’s zeal. It was another 30 years before GM finally allowed his work to be published posthumously.

‘despite his employment by General motors, the tone of olley’s lecture appeared to Gently mock the american car’