This process isn't entirely new territory for me. Before journalism, the work that put food on my table was evaluating and tweaking the suspensions of prototypes in development at proving grounds, racetracks, and even public roads when routine driving character was under scrutiny. But my focus was always on tuning the hardware—springs, dampers, anti-roll bars, tires, bushings, etc.—because none of the suspensions I worked on had a line of software code associated with them.
Author Edmunds, a former chassis engineer, is also a dad. Here he shows the Lucid crew the ideal burping technique.They seem gratified to corroborate my feedback with their own, which is important because it's crucial to differentiate between what the car is doing and what a driver is doing. This is the first time the Sapphire has tackled VIR's Grand Course, and a test crew must achieve a certain level of track familiarity before driver tuning can give way to vehicle tuning.
Lickfold and company have also settled on a base mechanical valving for the electronically controlled Bilstein dampers, which largely function without any electronic valve adjustment in the base Smooth driving mode. Software-controlled rebound and compression-damping valves add supplemental damping during extreme events in this mode, but they come into their own, automatically adapting with extra damping in Swift mode, then kick that up another notch in Sprint.