Gordon Murray Automotive has just shared a video proving that it will go to any length to ensure its T.50 supercar gets the ideal suspension.
Piloting the GMA T.50 is none other than Dario Franchitti, a former racing star and current test pilot and advisor for GMA. According to him, suspension stress tests are essential for two different purposes. First, they enable tweaking the suspension in such a manner as to maximize the wheel-road contact at all times and under all circumstances. Second, they come in handy when testing safety aids.
Some of the harshest tests shown in the video include driving over a huge pile of gravel and jumping off a wooden ramp. The $3,000,000 supercar climbed the former at 30 km/h (18.6 miles per hour) and ended up hanging out its nose. The ramp test was a success at 70 km/h (43.5 miles per hour).
Fine-tuning safety features is important in order to prevent airbags from triggering whenever the car encounters a non-standard, but non-life-threatening situation. At the kind of speeds the GMA T.50 is capable of attaining, hitting a small pothole with one wheel is sometimes enough to set off the airbags. In addition to this, the engineering crew was looking into ways to make the chassis and suspension more resistant to such incidents.