MADI 0213

This is an almost word-for-word Russian translation of an article published in Racecar Engineering (April 2013, Vol. 23, No. 4), to which our group made an active contribution. We are now publishing it with the permission of Igor Vasilyevich Yermilin and welcome your questions on the subject.

The MADI–Moskvich Story

In the 1970s, three Russians embarked on a remarkable engineering project. Race results mattered less than putting their theories to the test.

The Moscow car factory traces its history to 1929. [Russian translator’s note: it was then known as the KIM Moscow Car Assembly Plant] During the Second World War it produced military equipment. After the war, an Opel production line was purchased from Brandenburg, Germany, and in 1947 the factory built the Moskvich 400, based on the Opel Kadett.

Igor Yermilin, a former Soviet racing driver and engineer, and at the time of publication vice-president of the Russian Automobile Federation, arrived at the Moscow Automobile and Road Institute, MADI, early in 1975. By then, Stanislav Borisovich Gess de Kalve was already considering a Group 2 Moskvich.

Yermilin was then a student at the Moscow Automotive Mechanical Institute, MAMI. He had decided to make his name as an engineer at MADI’s Sports Car Laboratory, known by its Russian initials, LSA.

He spent the first month of his placement finding his feet and working on a Soviet Formula 1 car resembling the Lotus 72. It was fitted with an experimental Volga V6 engine. Before long, however, he turned his attention to the newer Moskvich project.

The Group 2 car became a test bed for several ideas that would prove valuable later. Anatoly Dmitriev, who was responsible for the Moskvich 412 project, and Yermilin decided to adopt a new suspension arrangement. This was the final year of regulations that permitted extensive reconstruction, particularly if the designers read the rulebook carefully. Much depended on an engineer’s energy and knowledge - and, of course, on the scrutineers who inspected the car before the start, Yermilin recalls.

The Group 2 regulations stated: “The material and dimensions of the suspension springing elements are free. Additional springing elements may be fitted provided that the originals remain in their original positions.”

“That gave us a rather interesting piece of circular logic,” says Yermilin. “What did ‘provided that the originals remain in their original positions’ actually mean? Were these the originals after their material or dimensions had already been changed? So we made a spring of the original shape from a lightweight material. The main working spring was part of a racing coilover unit mounted much higher, above the upper suspension arm. It was very much an idea of its time: the same principle appeared in the rear suspension of the famous Cologne Ford Capri RS3100.”

The whole car was unusual for its class. Dmitriev recalls that it weighed just 680 kg, thanks to extensive use of aluminium body panels from Izh rally cars - the Izh factory produced the same basic car as Moskvich - and modifications to the forward section of the front frame. Brake components came from Estonia racing cars. The wheels were made from Il-18 aircraft wheels. Their width solved two problems at once. At the front, placing the wheel mounting face towards the outside gave the car negative scrub radius, a first in its class. At the rear, placing the mounting face inboard produced a wider track without spacers.

The car was particularly good under braking in the wet and had better rear-end grip through corners. Its engine remained close to standard: the project’s main purpose was to build a light car with suspension modified as extensively as Group 2 allowed. The largest engine change was the installation of two Weber carburettors, accompanied by minor camshaft modifications.

The country’s situation at the time was peculiar. People often had enough money but could not buy a car. The Lada 2101 was the only model supplied to works teams and racing clubs. MADI chose the Moskvich 412, which had been used in rallying but had enjoyed little success on circuits. The team’s car already had around 6,000 km on the clock - a useful amount of running-in for a standard engine.

“I enjoyed working with Gess at MADI because it was not conventional motor sport,” says Yermilin. “We were not chasing major sporting results. We enjoyed the engineering: coming up with ideas, developing interesting solutions and then testing them in races.

“In 1976 we covered almost 6,000 km in testing. Compare that with the 3,000 km covered by the legendary Edgar Lindgren, also at MADI, in all 13 races held that season. He did some testing too, but his engineering work was constrained by the rules.

“We had more freedom. Our motto was: ‘We have an idea - let’s test it.’ As for restoring the car [Russian translator’s note: the red Moskvich], I would rather say that we are setting the record straight. I had left the Marussia project and had some spare time to work through my old drawings and archives. While I was digitising those papers, the idea of doing something with the Moskvich suddenly came to me.

“Sometimes I read articles about the cars Gess and I built: cars described as interesting but not ‘successful’. A reader today might conclude that they simply were not good enough. In the 1970s, whenever our MADI-LSA team appeared at a circuit, we always caused a stir. Our lack of resources and the enormous enthusiasm of a very mixed team sometimes looked rather chaotic to spectators. Some even called us a travelling circus. But we were not pursuing the highest finishing positions. We were happy with the outright speed our cars demonstrated.

“The point of the project is to remind people that our laboratory built some genuinely interesting and unique cars, and brought together an exceptional team of engineers: Gess, Dmitriev and Lindgren.”

After the Moskvich programme ended following the 1976 rule changes, Yermilin became lead engineer at the Experimental Design Bureau and began a new project. It would become the starting point for a family of racing cars with highly unusual suspension. At the time, it was simply the MADI-0113: 01 denoted the bureau’s first car, and 13 its 1.3-litre engine capacity.

The car was built to the new Formula Vostok rules, using a 1.3-litre Lada engine. The class competed in the Friendship Cup of Socialist Countries. With both Group 2 and the Soviet Formula 1 class discontinued, MADI-LSA had time and resources available for a new car. The laboratory formed two groups.

Yermilin worked with Gess, while Dmitriev worked with engine specialist Mark Balezin. Projects normally began in November, when the team decided what to build. Gess handled the finances and welding; Yermilin was responsible for chassis construction. The MADI-0113 was based on the Estonia 18 chassis. Its front suspension remained largely unchanged, but gained negative scrub radius - an idea already proven on the Moskvich, on the track as well as on paper.

The spring installation angle was altered slightly to accommodate the narrower front track.

The MADI-0113/01 used motorcycle pneumatic springing elements in its front suspension, giving a degree of non-linearity. Its heavily modified Estonia tubular frame incorporated a bespoke rear subframe, allowing the engine and suspension to be changed quickly as a complete assembly: a useful feature during testing. The team also experimented with non-linear rear suspension characteristics by incorporating rubber springing elements into the upper-arm arrangement. The assembly became stiffer as load increased.

For most of its life, the car was based at a disused airfield in Tallinn, Estonia, where aerodynamic testing took place. At 380 kg, it was 40 kg lighter than its direct class rivals. Some of that advantage had to be surrendered after testing, however, when the rough airfield surface shook several components to failure.

The MADI-0113/2 of 1977 had a chassis divided into three modules to simplify experiments with the front suspension. It also introduced a prototype of the later cable-operated suspension, initially using motorcycle chain instead of cable. The chain attached to the upper arm, passed over a sprocket and into a housing containing the springing elements. Suspension load pulled on the chain, compressing the springing element.

The 1977 MADI-0113 was considerably quicker than its rivals, approaching the pace of Formula 3 cars with 1.6-litre engines. At the famous Nevskoye Koltso circuit, it was only two seconds slower than the leading F3 cars. That did not go unnoticed. Its speed aroused suspicion, followed by a peculiar disqualification.

The Estonia’s original gearbox was installed upside down, with its cover underneath the casing. The cover sat so close to the ground that servicing was difficult, so the team turned the gearbox over to put it on top. This required the engine to be inclined, leaving the carburettors unable to function properly. A small wedge-shaped spacer was therefore made to keep them level. Following a protest, the scrutineers classified the spacer as an engine modification, prohibited under Formula Vostok rules. Gess and Yermilin had to remove it, making the carburettor float level difficult to set. An oil leak then destroyed their most powerful engine. The team worked into the night before the race and was allowed a few test laps at dusk.

Express trains and beggars

The car started at the back of the grid but soon climbed to third. The late Vladislav Barkovsky recalled that the greatest difference appeared at the famous high-speed Bolshoy Radius corner. Barkovsky could accelerate through only the first quarter of the arc. Gess, despite running a less powerful standard engine for the test, was still building speed into the final quarter. “He went past me like an express train past a beggar,” Barkovsky recalled. The MADI was much more stable and faster through the corner than a conventional Formula Vostok or Formula 3 car.

Unfortunately, a driveshaft broke on the fourth lap and Gess retired. He was fortunate to escape injury. The 0113 still had its brake discs mounted inboard on the gearbox, then a common way of reducing unsprung mass. On conventional tyres there had been no problem. With slicks, however, the available braking torque far exceeded the engine torque, and the driveshafts had not been designed for those loads. Yermilin later moved the discs outboard: strengthening the shafts would have cancelled the advantages of the inboard-brake arrangement.

Destroyed in Riga

By then, the chassis had covered more than 12,000 km, much of it on the airfield’s imperfect surface. Gear-selection problems developed, one of which caused an accident during a race. Gess escaped injury thanks to the reinforced tubular frame and a specially contoured seat made at MADI.

The information gathered in testing and racing provided the basis for the next generation. The new 0213 used a hybrid structure of steel tubes and aluminium sheet joined with aircraft rivets. Torsional stiffness was approximately 2,500 Nm/degree. Wheels, hubs and brake discs were all made in-house, with extensive use of titanium and magnesium to keep weight down.

The central idea was to place the aerodynamic centre of pressure as close as possible to the centre of gravity. A large wing was mounted above the central air intake, in clean airflow.

The centre of gravity lay almost directly beneath the wing. There was no need for a large front wing, only small adjustable devices to trim the balance. During the first tests, Yermilin used a narrow aluminium strip, but it was damaged after a few laps and replaced with a stiff rubber element.

The project’s principal objective also led to an unusual suspension layout. Cables operated from all four upper suspension arms, with the springing elements grouped in a compact unit beneath the central roll hoop. This allowed very short transverse anti-roll bars and even two longitudinal anti-pitch bars to be incorporated into the unit. [Russian translator’s note: in a sense, a precursor to the FRIC interconnected suspension systems that appeared in Formula 1 in the 2000s] Each cable, manufactured at an aerospace plant, ran from an upper arm over a pulley to a rocker operating a spring-and-damper unit. The rockers had three positions for quick changes to the effective suspension rate. The longitudinal bars were necessary because the whole car was conceived around its aerodynamics: with soft suspension, pitch under acceleration and braking would have been a serious problem.

The MADI-0213 took just five months to build. Unfortunately, the team did not then have the means to make its aerodynamic characteristics sufficiently consistent. Yermilin eventually had to replace the single central wing with conventional front and rear wings.

“We achieved all our objectives with the 0213, but the outcome was, I would say, academic,” says Yermilin. “It was not practical. It was good for the theory, but too complicated for racing.”

The next car, the 0213/1, concentrated on ground effect. Skirts were added along the sides and across the front, generating low pressure towards the rear. The team called it the “box effect”, and the car acquired the nickname “The Iron”. It was tested in a wind tunnel, but problems appeared during its first track test in Kiev. The chassis was extremely nervous and the suspension appeared too stiff.

“You have to remember that this was 1978,” says Yermilin. “The ‘500 bhp kart’ came a little later.” [An ironic description of the first generation of ground-effect cars, with almost no suspension movement]

“At that point, we could not understand what was happening. We thought the suspension was too stiff to begin with, so we softened it. That made no difference. We had designed the suspension around an assumed aerodynamic load. So we went back to the workshop and found some flight recorders from jet aircraft—black boxes.

“After the first test at the Dmitrov proving ground, we discovered that the car was generating 350 kgf of downforce at 170 km/h. We had not expected anything like that. The entire car weighed 400 kg. We simply changed the springing elements, and the car was transformed. But it had an Achilles heel.

“Neither the circuits nor the proving ground were perfectly clean. Sand got into the pulleys over which the cables ran. The pulleys were made from duralumin, and particles became embedded in the material, wearing through the cables. We replaced the cables every race weekend, which was expensive and impractical.

“The results with cables were remarkable, but short-lived. We simply could not solve the cable-life problem. We had patents describing the next stage: electrohydraulic units in place of the longitudinal and transverse stabilising bars. It is all there in the patent. The intention was to stabilise the body’s attitude at any speed, to help the aerodynamics.”

At the time, inconsistent tyre contact with the road limited lateral acceleration to around 70 per cent of its theoretical value. The LSA-MADI team tested an Estonia and the 0213/2 on a dedicated circular test track. The conventional Estonia chassis achieved roughly 70 per cent of the theoretical lateral acceleration, while the MADI car, on the same tyres, reached about 95 per cent. The improvement came from its softer, progressive suspension following the road surface more effectively.

The MADI-0313, built in autumn 1979, had conventional Venturi ground-effect bodywork. Initially it had no wings, and on its first test it simply “took off” as a high-pressure region formed beneath the nose. Several wind-tunnel sessions at Moscow State University resolved the problem. The plan was to manufacture the car in Leningrad for the national team to use in the Friendship Cup of Socialist Countries.

Unfortunately, by the end of testing Gess had left MADI and the whole LSA-MADI organisation had changed. The next models, 04 and 05, were modified road cars. The last racing car Yermilin built at MADI was the two-litre 0620, a Formula 3 car with cable-operated suspension. It never reached even the testing stage.

“We did not copy other people’s ideas,” says Yermilin. “We set ourselves an objective and worked out how to achieve it. The testing was more interesting than the racing. It was a fascinating time: we had to design, weld, machine, mill and turn the parts ourselves, then move forward - test, rethink and achieve something new.”

• < Назад
• Вперёд >