Lamborghini’s NEW Active Alignment is Revolutionary!

Lamborghini has unveiled a prototype of technology that can shave 5 seconds per lap by

active

ly changing the car's

alignment

and it's not a completely new idea in 2020. Mercedes tested an adaptive

alignment

system in Formula 1, but it only worked for a couple of car shops. campaign, so what? It makes the lambo version so much better and how long until you can have it in your car, let's get into it. Lamborghini's Active Wheel Mount or AWC eliminates a compromise that every high-performance car faces to understand how deep we are going to have to go into some car. things that aren't as sexy as horsepower or aerodynamics, wheel alignment, which is one of the most important elements in making a car go fast, good alignment can be the difference between finishing first and crashing in a race, alignment is just a geometric relationship between the wheels and the car and there are two settings that are important to understand the

active

wheel carrier and the first is the toe angle if viewing a car from above.

Toe-in measures how much the wheels lean toward or away from the centerline of road cars often. have zero toe because that produces the best tire life if a car has toe in, the tires will be at a slight angle when the car is going perfectly straight, that angle creates friction and rubs the tires creating more tread wear and shortening its useful life. On a race track, a car spends most of its time turning, accelerating and braking, not traveling in a straight line, the end goal is usually lap time, not tire life, and a little towing can help a car turn faster in a corner, so Formula 1 cars, like many racing cars generally have some tow, but toe-out can also make a car less stable at high speed, for so too much convergence can be a disadvantage.

Compromise is a recurring thing when talking about lineups because no setup is perfect for everything the cars in the lineup do. It is also set while the car is stationary and the settings change as the car accelerates, brakes and turns whenever the wheels move due to steering or weight transfers from the car activating the suspension, the alignment can change. A good alignment must take into account the expected variation that occurs. when a car is in motion because settings like toe cannot be changed mid-turn unless of course your engineers are very smart like those at the Mercedes F1 team in 2020 Mercedes implemented dual AIS steering or Das, this will give you allows the driver to change the front toe angle by pushing or pulling the steering wheel Das only came with two settings to choose from;

It was initially thought that one configuration might be for green flag racing conditions and another for yellow flags such as formation laps or a safety car; that second option would simply take advantage of rubbing using friction to warm up the tires in preparation for maximum racing speed; However, having two different toe settings available during a race could actually do a lot more than make it possible to reduce high-speed drag with one setting and increase cornering grip with the other, at least in theory, the technical director of Racing Point, claimed that depending on the track, Das could be worth up to a few tens of seconds per lap, naturally, other F1 teams lodged protests arguing that Das was a type of active suspension that violated F1 rules.

According to the rules, the D system they are using in their car with steering system falls into a very gray area. The FAA decided that since it was part of the steering system, it didn't count as a suspension, but decided to ban Das anyway. Fortunately, next season. for us and Lamborghini we do not have to follow the FIA ​​rules. Lamborghini's active wheel mount takes das's basic idea of ​​changing alignment settings on the fly and scales that way. The AWC is a specifically designed electronically controlled wheel hub that uses data from the vehicle's sensors to adapt the alignment up to 60 times per second.

The AWC system can produce up to 6.6 degrees of toe in either direction, meaning the toe can change depending on whether the vehicle is turning or going straight. No more commitments. It can have high speed stability and precision. Turin, an added benefit is that the rear-wheel-mounted AWCs provide four-wheel steering. It also has two big benefits over Das: there are a lot more than two toe settings and you can adjust Cber and that's our second alignment setting. Cber is the angle of the wheel's curvature relative to Ground Zero would mean that the wheel is perfectly straight up and down, providing maximum contact with the road.

Positive camber is when the top of the wheel is tilted away from the car and negative camber is when the wheel is tilted inward. Zero camber with its maximum binding contact sounds ideal, well, not that simple alignments usually include some camber angle because of the way a car's weight shifts and the suspension moves when the car is moving. Road cars are often aligned with a small amount of negative camber. which helps maintain grip when cornering. Under normal driving conditions, racing cars take much harder corners so they tend to have much more negative camber and that maximizes grip at high speed.

A car maneuvers by leaning as it turns, transferring weight to the outside wheels and making the outside tires. Work harder so that weight transfer also reduces negative camber if the wheel starts with some negative camber. That weight transfer pushes the outside tire more upright in ideal conditions. That motion will approach approximately zero and produce maximum traction for the hard-working outside tires. Unfortunately, the CA setup Like the rest of an alignment, there is always a compromise when turning gently, a tire may not lift all the way, leaving some negative camber and less than maximum grip. Spin much harder and the tire can go from zero to positive camber again, producing less.

For maximum grip, a second camber compromise is the balance between the left and right side wheels. If the wheels on both sides of the car have been set to negative camber, the outside tires will grip just as well when turning in either direction, but that results in less than maximum grip for the inside tires (those that are not being pushed forward). up for weight transfer the inside tires do less work during cornering but they are still doing some work it would be much better if all four tires could just have whatever The alignment adjustment provides maximum traction all the time and that is why Lamborghini created the active wheel mount.

The AWC consists of two gear-driven flanges rotated by 48V electric motors. One flange is for the toe angle and the other is for the axle. These flanges are not. perfectly cylindrical, so that as they rotate they change the alignment of the wheel attached to the AWC, the AWC can mark up to 2.5 of positive camber and 5.5 of negative camber. Turn the car gently and the AWC produces a bit of negative camber as the outside wheels spin hard and the hub can adjust the maximum camber to ensure the outside tires stay glued to the track, not only can it create camber. completely different for the inside wheels to maximize traction on both sides of the car, the results are Great journalists invited to test the AWC recorded laps that were 4.8 seconds faster once the system was activated.

Lamborghini's own test drivers were 2.8 seconds faster in AWC-equipped cars. The AWC does not have a particularly complicated physical mechanism, but it is based on an incredibly complex one. control system and a multitude of sensors that can detect lateral G-forces, Ur speed of the vehicle, etc., fortunately, those sensors already exist in most modern cars, so maybe this technology is not far away, of course , there are a couple of problems, first, the active wheel carriers. have only been tested on the rear wheels, the addition of a normal steering system like the one found at the front of every car makes active wheel support more difficult to integrate, meaning that any benefit on the rear wheels front wheels like the one you would get from Das es It's all still theoretical.

Another problem is durability. The AWC may not have an incredibly complex physical design, but it should be incredibly precise, allowing for very small movements. Wheel hubs are one of the few car parts that do not benefit from suspension shock absorption. The only thing that dampens the physical forces that the hubs are subjected to are high-performance car tires, which tend to be extremely stiff. Precision parts and small electric motors don't last long in conditions like that unless they are made extremely well, which brings us to the final cost of the problem, there's no telling if a version could be durable enough to withstand real-world abuse at a reasonable price, but the same can be said for almost all technologies when they first appear, so we'll see an active lineup in road cars.

Anytime let me know what you think in the comments below and thanks for watching.