Why is local car chassis tuning important?

Meat pies. VB. Pavlova. ‘The Castle’ on DVD. Too right, Australia does have a culture, and by strewth does it have a car culture.

Local chassis tuning is one of the last remnants of the Australian automotive industry, which no longer builds cars in Australia but is carving out an important niche for engineering new vehicles – for a global audience, in the case of Ford, or for local consumption, as seen by a variety of brands including Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, RAM and GWM/Haval.

It’s where Australian DNA makes its way into your Asian, European or American-built car.

As we are about to find out, some finetuning of the shock absorbers to suit local conditions can totally change the character of your car.

Does it make it an Aussie? Not quite. You can’t convert Cyril Despres into Toby Price just by changing his quad muscles, but it does give him a pretty good Aussie accent.

A former colleague had a word for it. Aussies like their cars to breathe. Breathing is when the car feels connected to the road’s surface but isn’t jarring over the bumps.

Sporty without being unpleasant, spirited without losing touch with the common man, like Merv Hughes.

Americans, on the other hand, typically like their cars to float. Floating is the disconnected feeling you get when you are lying on your back on an airbed in Lake Michigan. It isn’t sporty but is so soft that it makes you feel seasick on a lake.

Europeans, they don’t really want to feel any movement and they are willing to trade off on the occasional harsh bump if they can avoid it.

Luckily enough, the bumps in Europe really are that occasional. A tiny improvement in agility comes at a cost on pothole-strewn Australian roads.

Japanese and Koreans? With the odd exception, their cars feel like eating cardboard. Soul-less in a word. With steering that makes you feel… nothing.

Australia is one of the world’s best countries to live in.

Melbourne, pre-COVID, was ranked as one of the world’s most liveable cities. I lived near Box Hill for eight years and if there is one word that describes the experience, it’s liveable.

I was working for Prodrive (now Premcar) at the time. Most of our work was engineering the Ford Performance Vehicles line of muscle cars, but occasionally we would do some consulting work for an international brand.

On this particular occasion, instead of an FPV V8, I was driving a BMW 335i GT for a benchmarking exercise. Benchmarking is when you drive and test a competitor’s car to get an idea of its strengths and weaknesses.

Driving from Box Hill to Hawthorn one Tuesday night – it was steak night at the Geebung Polo Club (aka the Auburn Hotel) – the conditions were predictably wet. Somebody had decided to put some tram lines down the middle of the road. My German run-flat Continental ContiSportContact tyres weren’t having any of it.

If Melbourne was liveable, that car was the opposite. The steering wheel almost jumped out of my hands. It was undriveable. What was perfect on European roads turned into a monster on suburban Melbourne streets.

Nobody had mentioned tram tracks to the BMW engineers in Bavaria.

A car, like any machine, is the sum total of the efforts of a big group of people. I say sum total, but perhaps product or multiplication would be a better way to describe it.

Depending on how well the team gels around the vision of what the car can be, the excellence of the car that pops out at the end of the development process can be more than the total of the combined efforts.

Each of the people working on the car, whether they are designing the tail-lights, modelling the transmission mount or tuning the shock absorbers, put a bit of their heart and soul into the process.

Like an ancient Gothic cathedral, the workers and artisans put their efforts into the creation of something that is bigger than themselves, and hopefully will outlive them.

Now perhaps that is an over-exaggeration in the case of, say, my brother’s 2008 Kia Grand Carnival, which is now sitting in a wrecking yard, but the point still stands – whether it’s a Kia Grand Carnival or a Ferrari 250 GTO, the people involved in creating it are part of something bigger, and put a little bit of themselves into the end product.

Aristotle once said: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good… And … the works produced are by nature better things than the activities.”

The works produced are better than the activities. The Leon cathedral in Spain is better than the activity of making the stained-glass windows. Same goes for the Kia, the finished product is better than the act of designing the folding third row seat.

Aristotle also said: “The highest good is something complete.”

Damper (shock absorber) tuning makes your car feel complete. It’s hugely influential on how your car feels to drive.

Damper tuning makes your car feel like a car. I’ve seen first-hand how small tweaks to a damper can make a huge difference to a car.

It can go from feeling big and boaty to feeling small and compact. It can make the steering feel connected when before it was vague. It can make potholes feel rounded when before they were square-edged.

It’s something unmistakeable you can feel as soon as you drive out of the driveway.

That is why local damper tuning is important. It makes your car feel complete on the roads you drive on every day.

Australia is a country of bona fide car nuts. Cars have been part of the Australian collective subconscious since time immemorial.

Cobb & Co sprouted the Holden & Frost Saddlery which led to the Brock Commodore.

Isolated from the rest of the world, but with plentiful resources, Australians were famous for being inventive.

“There’s nothing you can’t fix with some fencing wire and a roll of wool” became ”there’s nothing you can’t fix with zippy ties and race tape”.

Engineered and manufactured locally, cars like the Ford Falcon GTHO and the Ford Territory were ahead of the curve.

In some cases, Aussies created the curve. The ute was Ford Australia’s reaction to a 1932 letter from the wife of a farmer asking for “a vehicle to go to church in on a Sunday and which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays”.

Local automotive engineering, church attendance and pig marketing have all taken a hit in the recent past, as has the Aussie car culture, but you can’t keep a good thing down.

The Aussie car culture isn’t dead yet. You can see it on any given Sunday in Bungendore. In between the lattes and pricey beers at the pub you will see shiny beasts glimmering in the sun.

Flowing from a love of tinkering in sheds, local damper tuning is an advanced industry that continues a long historical tradition.

Too bloody right we are.

Paddock bashing in our genes, Aussie kids grew up sitting in the back of cars. With the vast distances and bumpy roads, we’ve had plenty of time to soak in the way a car moves and absorbs bumps in between games of ‘I spy’.

Some Aussies took it to another level. Jack Brabham is the only person ever to win the Formula 1 (Grand Prix) world championship in a car he designed, engineered and built himself. He was an Aussie. An adopted Aussie, Ron Tauranac, was a big part of the Brabham team’s success.

A tip of the hat to our Kiwi brethren, Bruce McLaren didn’t do half bad with his own cars either.

At that time, with the World War II not such a distant memory, Aussies and Kiwis were the cream of the crop. Big-name teams and drivers like Brabham and McLaren were the front men but antipodeans were prominent throughout the sport.

The hands-on, have-a-go spirit made for some excellent engineers and mechanics.

Times have changed, and international car companies have become big concerns where politics plays a bigger part than know-how. Those men of yesteryear would have been ill-suited for the hierarchical nature of today’s race teams and car companies.

The Australian tall poppy chopping disrespect for outstanding talent and our larrikin attitude with authority stymies our success to this day.

A brilliant young up-and-coming kid who’s star isn’t allowed to shine isn’t necessarily all that likely to show respect to the authority figures who clipped his wings. But when the rubber hits the road tuning a car, Aussies are the match of anybody.

I have it on good word from my time at McLaren.

As a kid sitting in the back of a car, I didn’t give much thought to what kids in the rest of the world were doing. Working with engineers in China, one of the things that became apparent was how generational cars know-how is.

The engineers I was working with didn’t grow up with cars. Their families couldn’t afford them. A car in China was reserved for the rich, like a Model T Ford in 1920s Australia.

Our familiarity with cars is a few generations ahead of the developing nations that are now at the forefront of car production.

This plays out in damper development, where our familiarity with cars, combined with our technical know-how, means that foreign car companies are willing to invest in local expertise capable of making their new model feel like a local.

Not only is Aussie know-how different, but Aussie roads are different. I lived in Spain for seven years while working for McLaren. The roads there are incredible. Flat as a billiard table. Some of the Roman roads there were built so well that they are used to this day.

Aussie roads, on the other hand, can be patchy at best. Road building in Australia has always been a tough gig.

Famous characters like Len Beadell crossed the red centre in a grader building the Gunbarrel Highway. The material the road is built on makes a big difference.

Like the Gunbarrel highway, the roads around suburban Bondi are built on sand. The roads around the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain are built on granite. No prizes for guessing which roads will take more punishment.

Rainfall plays a part. When it rains in Australia it pours. If you look closely at a patch of broken road you can often see where bad drainage has caused the soil to swell after heavy rain. Enough to break the surface of the tarmac after a few trucks and cars have run over it.

Not such a problem in the dry Andalusian region of southern Spain.

Not all roads were created equal. Roads cost money, and not all areas get the same funding. Population density plays a part and European governments have more money to spend on roads per kilometre than Australian governments.

The Spanish roads benefited from EU funding, getting more investment than what the Spanish would have spent themselves. Expansionary monetary policy may have played a part, but let’s not go down that granite rabbit-hole.

Smooth, well-built roads make a difference to a car that had its suspension tuned on them. A car tuned in Europe has stiffer suspension to suit the smooth roads.

Local tuning is a simple and relatively inexpensive process that turns a car designed and tuned for foreign conditions into a master of Australian roads.

How? With local DNA, expertise and with dampers that are tuned to the conditions.

The good news is, local chassis tuning is something that won’t be going away.

Aussie roads aren’t going to become less Australian, and cars will need shock absorbers for some time to come, regardless of if they are fossil-fuel, electric or hydrogen powered.