What is the difference between ride and handling?

On the surface of it, ride and handling is a pretty basic concept. Ride is how comfortable your car is over bad roads, and handling is how fun and predictable your car is to drive through the twisties.

Ride is passenger comfort, handling is driver enjoyment. Ride is detachment from unpleasant realities, handling is engagement with fun realities.

The balance struck between the two will often depend on the personality of the car – and the driver! – but finding the sweet spot is no easy task.

So let’s discuss the fine art of chassis tuning and find out how to get there…

To get a sense of ride and handling it’s worth picturing different types of roads. Anyone who has ever taken a drive on the roads around Picton, south of Sydney, will know a thing or two about ride.

Perfect for a proving ground, horrendous for your teeth fillings, the Wollondilly Shire Council has made an art form of giving your kidneys a bruising whenever you take a drive.

Between quaint historic villages and rolling hills you will encounter potholes, chopped-up road surfaces and huge bumps that threaten to turn your wheels into 50 cent pieces and bring up your breakfast.

Handling is more like what you experience having survived Wollondilly and made it to Kangaroo Valley.

The feeling of snaking through the bends and being connected to the car, of it being an extension of your body, of being at one with a machine as it adjusts to your every input.

You picture where you want it to be and how you want it to get you there and it just happens. It’s like a dance, and you are leading.

It’s all of the words like dynamic and joyful on the BMW ads. It’s what inspires half-cooked philosophy while the driver happily retells the tale written on a nice piece of road.

There is always a compromise to be found between the ride and handling.

Even on a billiard-table-smooth road in EU-funded Spain, feeling every single bump is never a good thing.

Likewise, total detachment from the forces that your car is encountering is never a satisfying experience.

Think of ride and handling as two circles, and the best set-up lying in the overlap – like a Venn diagram. Within the overlap there is room to move in how you set up the car – from a sports handling-focused model to a comfortable daily driver.

If you err outside the overlap and solely focus on either ride or handling, things can go pear-shaped pretty quickly.

It’s one of those strange paradoxes. You would think that going as soft as possible would be the most comfortable and going as stiff as possible would give you the best handling.

But as Aristotle pointed out to his friend Plato, the world is far from an ideal place.

Clearly Aristotle had pictured driving his chariot on Aussie roads. Having a bit of both is a must, no matter what end of the spectrum you end up on.

Like personalities, ride and handling comes down to soft or hard. Soft is good for ride. Hard is good for handling.

Going back to basics, soft comfy springs don’t provide much of a reaction force when you bounce off a bump. They also don’t need a lot of damper force from the shock to control the spring, so you end up with a softer, more vintage Rolls-Royce wedding car type of ride.

But try dodging a wombat in your old Rolls on the way to the reception. The problem is, the springs and damping are so soft that the body platform takes forever to follow instructions, so the body still thinks it’s turning right when the steering has been turning left for what feels like an eternity.

Not ideal having narrowly missed a wombat only to be faced with an oncoming Mack truck.

To solve this dilemma we need some stiffer springs in our vintage Rolls. This means we bounce harder off the bumps, and we need more damping force which makes things even less comfortable.

But when we need the chassis to quickly follow instructions, stiff suspension is the answer.

The real art of chassis tuning is finding the sweet spot for the particular model you are tuning.

Once you have nailed down your springs and bushes, the dampers (shocks) are often tweaked, re-tweaked and tweaked some more to find the place between ride and handling that best suits the car.

Like kids, every model is different. Often it’s a mix of pushing it in the direction that you want, but ultimately, finding the place the chassis is happiest, somewhere on the ride-handling spectrum.

It’s less of a science and more of an art in the final analysis.

I once had the enviable task of damper tuning a minivan in Hainan, China. Someone else was meant to do the job but had pulled out at the last minute right before Christmas.

So at late notice I was flown into a pineapple and coconut tree-filled island off the coast of southern China with no background on the project.

I tried tuning the dampers to get an acceptable ride but wasn’t getting anywhere because the local engineers had specced a really stiff rear spring so that the cab-chassis version would be able to carry the load.

Apart from a horrible ride, the really stiff rear spring meant I had to run a really hard front spring in order to avoid a snap oversteer – never a lot of fun in a high-centre-of-gravity, short-wheelbase minivan.

I tried pleading with them to soften the rear spring but they were having none of it, so I thought an experiment was in order.

I put some plasticine on the rear bump stops and got the full crew to jump into the van with me so it was fully loaded. We drove out to the dynamic platform where I showcased the van’s ability to drive on two wheels as a natural consequence of the aforementioned oversteer.

We then proceeded to the 30 per cent grade hill where I launched the van into the air off the steep drop. Think ‘The Man from the Snowy River’ crossed with the mineshaft at Rally Canberra.

After a heavy landing and some panic-induced laughter from the Chinese engineers we jumped out and looked at the plasticine. It hadn’t been touched. The spring was so stiff it hadn’t even bottomed out. They took my point and agreed to soften the rear spring.

I worked with a guy at McLaren who had been responsible for the Ford Focus RS in a past life as director of Ford Performance Europe.

I asked him why he made it so stiff. He said, because it felt good on European racetracks. I think he meant it felt good on European racetracks if you kept off the kerbs (ripple strips). The suspension was bone-jarring, and that was in Normal mode.

I always thought that was a perfect example of losing everything in ride for a small gain in handling.

It comes down to statistics. When you think about it, how often will you really be using your car on a racetrack?

If you give up 98 per cent of your ride quality that you feel all the time for a 10 per cent improvement in steering response time for the 10 minutes you actually spend turning into a corner on a racetrack over the life of the car, it somehow doesn’t seem like a very good deal.

If you think that instead of losing 98 per cent of your ride quality, you could have lost only 50 per cent of the ride quality, and your steering response would have been only 0.02 seconds slower when your turned-in on those infrequent track days, assuming you turn-in 5000 times in the life of the car you’ve traded off horrible ride quality all the time for the grand total of 100 seconds of your life.

The Pareto principle would advise against buying a Focus RS. Mr Pareto would have bought a Ford Falcon and towed a Radical SR3 on a trailer to the racetrack behind it. Come to think of it, the ride quality in a Radical SR3 is probably better than the Focus RS.

The lesson here is not to dress mutton up as lamb.

Speaking of mutton, a wise Porsche race driving friend of mine once told me that cars are faster when they absorb bumps instead of bounce off them. It stacks up. He was on his way to winning Targa Tasmania Classic seven times until I neglected to tell him “five left”.

My neck has never been the same since.

Ride tuning is difficult. Handling tends to be pretty understandable using quasi static modelling. Ride is way more complicated.

In fact, effective tools to simulate ride comfort don’t exist. This is for a multitude of reasons that include the fact that you are trying to damp out the natural frequencies of a range of parts and systems that boggle computer simulation, let alone the mind.

Ride is made up of primary ride and secondary ride.

Without getting too complicated, primary ride is how fast the car bounces up and down, secondary ride is everything faster than that.

Secondary ride is affected by things like the weight of the brake package (natural frequency of unsprung mass) and even the stiffness of rubber in the subframe bushes.

When you factor in temperature and age degradation effects, in effect it’s infinitely complex, or infinitely difficult, to find the optimal combination. So pretty difficult.

Case in point, when we copied and pasted the McLaren Senna’s damper control strategy into the McLaren GT prototype things didn’t go well.

Taking the software out of a super-stiff car designed to resist aero downforce, or better, a car designed to eat up racetracks and stay well clear of Wollondilly Shire roads, and transplanting it into a car that was destined to have the ignominious title of the most comfortable McLaren ever, didn’t lead to great sleep.

Ride and handling. Both are necessary, but depending on the personality of the car you can stretch the envelope more to the ride side or the handling side.

Ultimately, when finetuning, the car will tell you what it wants.

When you work with the car and the complex physics that underpin it, you can happen upon a sweet spot that gives it a secret sauce that you feel as soon as you take it out of the driveway and around a corner.

It’s where ride and handling are working together in paradoxical unison, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.