Testimonial - E82 135i - B1 Dynamics Package (Quaife LSD, B3 Suspension, ARBs) - Dr R.F

Kevin,

 

I have yet to drive all of the roads I was avoiding but I am going to admit that I am impressed even now. The car felt a little more planted even trundling out of Iver. First real surprise was coming off the motorway an realising that my velocity on joining the road was threatening to be far too high. With the relative absence of roll I just hadn't realised how fast the car was still going. Those anti roll bars clearly work.

 

The same goes for the tyres. Combined with the suspension they have so far managed to reduce the number of cringeworthy discontinuities to zero and they also feel like they give better traction even driving in normal everyday traffic. I have never known a tyre change to make this much difference on a car (but I have on a bike).

 

As for the LSD the question was to what extent it would make for a noticeable improvement. It obviously makes a huge difference in cornering and even on somewhat larger curves. The surprising thing is that my impression is that it feels like it gives more traction in a straight line as well though this gets hard to judge in combination with the tyre change. Also fuel consumption appears to have gone down which would be consistent with less power being lost. From a customer point of view I think you must have a challenge in conveying what the LSD does via the Internet or print. It would seem to be one of those things you actually have to feel to understand it. Also there is lots of bad information on the various Internet forums. My homework reading up on this in the past month or two largely suggested it is a device for launching round the corner out of supermarket car parks or drifting on roundabouts but the impact seems more subtle and pervasive than that. Perhaps the answer to "when does it make its presence felt" should be "on every turn of the axle".

 

The net effect is that in the factory setup the engine seemed to be too much for the chassis. Now it seems to be a much better match. As you put it, it does make you wonder why they didn't set it up like this in the first place. 

 

I still owe you some accelerometer graphs. That requires a little work to get figures that actually mean something given that the sensors on smartphones are not as good as used on telemetry systems. Having said that they do reflect what is going on and eyeballing the raw data it is very easy to see which is 'before' and which is 'after'.

 

Best regards,

 

R

 

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