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One of the hidden aspects of the past Formula One season was the use of indoor road simulators as a mean of speeding up the springing and damping set-up over the race weekend. According to the rumours some teams can perform an indoor set-up optimization overnight by reproducing freshly acquired road profile data. The optimized set-up is then communicated back to the team and tested on-track the day after. The optimization is carried out on a so-called hydraulic four-post rig (or seven-post rig), where a car is shaken at such frequencies and amplitudes to reproduce the same inputs and forces encountered during a typical circuit lap. The Vehicle Dynamics Group of the University of Brescia has recently acquired a four-post rig by Servotest England. The paper aims to describe this facility while future papers will describe the first results obtained in research.

Quite a lot has been written on active suspension, the topic being suitable for theoretical studies. Unfortunately only a few applications has seen the road and even less went into production; by now very few road cars equipped with a real active suspension system are available on the market, and the interest to this kind of application seems to be reduced, perhaps because of high costs and restrictive regulations applied to the race car world. For this reason this paper presents the results of a study conducted on the vertical dynamics of a two wheel car model with a semi active suspension system, a possible alternative way to a fully active system to considerably improve suspension performance. Here the damping force of each suspension is obtained by modulating its damping factor according to opportune functions of the system state variables. This allows to reach several of the objectives achievable with a fully active suspension, without the need of a big amount of energy.