From the June 2017 issue
Over a 26-year career at Lotus, Matt Becker has had a hand in the chassis tuning of approximately 50 vehicles, although he can talk publicly about only a handful of them. The various automakers that contracted Lotus through the years typically paid for both Becker’s expertise and his discretion. The cars he can take credit for—such as the nimble and docile second-gen Lotus Elise and the 2010 Evora—speak to why his talents were in such demand. Becker left Lotus in 2015 for Aston Martin, where he is now the chief of vehicle attribute engineering.
C/D: Is it ever a challenge to determine the tuning philosophy for a particular vehicle?
MB: That’s where some of the art comes in. In my head, I know how I want a car to feel. You need to understand what compromises you are going to make, because ultimately you are going to have to make some compromises. My philosophy is cars don’t need to be uncomfortable to steer and handle well. The other thing for me is the linearity of the response of the car is critical. The first thing I look for is to make sure the rear axle has the right level of connection. Rear-axle stiffness laterally has a massive influence on how a car feels and steers. There’s an old saying, “If you think it’s the front, it’s the rear. If you think it’s the rear, it’s the rear,” because everything reacts around the rear axle, so it’s absolutely critical to get rear-axle feel correct. Once you’ve got that, the rest of the car will sort of come together.
C/D: You followed your father’s footsteps into chassis tuning. Do you remember how old you were when you began to understand his job?
MB: My parents split up when I was about seven years old, so I used to see my father every weekend and he’d always have a different Lotus and he lived about half an hour from where my mother lived. He’d always be flicking the car around, doing lane changes, and looking for different behavior in the car. I used to ask him, “Can you explain to me what you’re doing?” and he said: “I’m looking for the phasing of the response of the car front to rear. I’m looking for the vertical motions of the car. Do they feel balanced front to rear?” All this sort of stuff was imparted to me when I was really young.
C/D: How has the job changed with the advent of electronically adjustable suspension technology?
MB: You can’t get away from the fact that chassis electronics massively enhance performance. It gives you another layer of tuning and opportunities for things you can do with a chassis. I do wonder whether passive-suspension cars have a bit of a limited shelf life now. As long as the electronics are done correctly—and this comes back to the artistic side—they add performance. They add capability. The Elise is still one of the best driver’s cars out there, in a passive sense, but it’s a very niche marketplace now.
C/D: Does it disappoint you to see those very analog cars replaced by today’s computerized machines?
MB: That’s just evolution, isn’t it? Pure passive cars are very communicative, but I actually like the challenge of working with more systems on a car, because it still comes down to this artwork of how you make a car feel connected and engaging. That’s the challenge for the engineer, unless he’s doing an S-class.
C/D: What’s the most difficult part of a chassis engineer’s job?
MB: Damper tuning. Tire development is actually quite easy, because when you get different constructions and compounds in tires, it’s very easy to pick up subjective results in them. To know how to tune the shims within the damper is absolute artwork. That’s where you can really either cock it up or deliver really good results.
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