Ford Mk 7 ALMS GT

Angerole, Inc were responsible for engineering and suspension design work on Doran Designs' conversion of the road-going Ford GT into a Le Mans rules race car. The picture above shows this car during practice for its first race, the 2008 Sebring 12 Hours.

Taking this private venture project from idea to race track took about 18 months. A race car is nothing without decent structure so we began with a torsion test of the factory bodyshell. The picture below shows the method we devised to hold the front end of the chassis to the torsion rig. We would like to draw your attention to how the rig constrains the chassis in a way that closely resembles the real suspension. It's quite easy to slew chassis test results with inappropriate retention methods by effectively adding the rig's stiffness to the frame. Our methods guarantee representative results

Since this project had no official Ford backing, Angerole, Inc had to reverse engineer the suspension pickup locations. The reasons for this were, we had to homologate the base car and we had to make sure the suspension we designed would fit. Once we'd taken our measurements, we made check fixtures to verify our work. Here's the front suspension check fixture plate mounted on the car: the studs poking through the holes prove we had our measurements right.

This being a GT car, one of our design objectives was to minimise the value of spares a team needed to carry by making suspension parts wherever possible ambidextrous. In fact, we were able to make top and bottom wishbones, front and rear able to be flipped from side to side. Here are the first pair of front wishbones to come off the machining centre.

Angerole, Inc feels that ease of adjustment is a large race car virtue and would like to bring your attention to the photo below. It's the GT's rear suspension and shows how easy it is to reach the anti roll bar blade, the spring platform and the damper knobs.

If you would like the same quality of careful, pragmatic thought applied to the design of your next car, please feel free to Contact Us.

In its first race, at the Sebring 12 Hours, husband and wife team David and Andrea Robertson drove the Ford GT to a top ten finish. Please feel free to click on the slideshow below for some shots of this event.

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