Lock, stock unravel

From time to time you get a job that you think is going to go in one direction but it actually winds up going in a totally different direction. For example, recently a friend of mine asked me to conduct some simulation work to see whether it was worthwhile putting a limited slip differential (LSD) into a road course stock car punching out around 600bhp.

We both reckoned that this should be a no brainer. But now I can see that we were massively wrong, for when I ran the numbers and put the simulations through ChassisSim it turned out that a locked diff was actually the way to go. We’ll be exploring why here.

Key to the lock

But before we get into the simulation results it would be worth going over what a locked diff actually is. As I stated in my book , the locked diff makes sure that the inside and (where is forward speed, is track and is yaw rate).