I was responsible for designing and building the suspension for the MIT Motorsports MY26 racecar. I had a ton of fun learning about vehicle dynamics and approaching a very different kind of engineering problem than I had faced before. Placing suspension points even a few millimeters in the wrong direction could make your car undrivable, and tuning the springs, damper settings, and kinematics to be optimal can make a car 30% faster without any change in mass, power, or appearance.
I’ll eventually write up a post walking through the design process, but for now here’s a video of the roll-heave decoupled suspension in action.
MY25 was the first MIT car in 6 years to finish endurance, the final 22 km race of the Formula SAE competition, and we placed 9th, a big improvement from 24th in 2024 and 43rd in 2023 when I joined the team after it had been unable to compete for several years.
Thanks to everyone who poured their blood sweat and tears into this dream. Because racecar.