Thread: Happy landings: how to jump a rally car

What goes up must come down. So how do rally drivers tackle a jump and how do cars survive it? We find outBlame Bullitt and The Dukes of Hazzard, but most self-respecting petrolheads love to see a car flying through the air, all four wheels off the ground. For rally drivers, launching into a low-altitude orbit is as much part of their skill set as executing a perfect handbrake turn.
On jumps like Colins Crest on the snow-covered roads of Sweden, and Yellow House on the famous Ouninpohja stage in Finland, professional drivers really earn their crust, hitting the crests at 100mph, flying for more than 40 metres and somehow remaining in control as their car crashes back to earth.
But behind the madness there is method. Jumping a rally car is more than disengaging your imagination and flooring the throttle.
A jump is a very technical situation where not all rally drivers can really evaluate what is going to happen when they land, says Mario Fornaris, Skoda Rally Team Italia Rally operations director and technical support at Skoda UK Motorsport.
From a technical point of view, the first thing is to make sure the lower part of the car does not get destroyed when it is landing. The front underside of the car needs protection so that all the energy goes through specific reinforced points and then through the chassis, because that is really the strongest part of the car.
The teams engineers can also influence the Fabias attitude during flight and ensure that it lands smoothly by altering the set-up.
With damper settings, we can partly control the angle the car adopts when it takes off, says Fornaris. Probably the most important thing is to assess how much energy we need to absorb from the landing through the dampers. We can calculate this from the height of the jump and the mass of the car, and with some equations we can decide how hard the dampers must be and how progressive they must be to be able to absorb all the energy before reaching the bump stop, when all the damper stroke is used. Then in testing we can validate the calculations.
The driver can influence the jump angle too. By braking a little bit just before the jump or accelerating and lifting, he can partly choose if the car is going to land with all four wheels together or first on the front wheels or first on the rear wheels.
Cars built to Super 2000 specification tend to be quite capable over jumps because the technical regulations allow for plenty of suspension travel.
The Fabia itself is very good, says Fornaris. Due to its weight balance, the natural tendency of the car is to fly in a flat and even way, so it has not been difficult to tune it [for rally jumps].
Skoda UK driver Andreas Mikkelsen says jumps are one of the most challenging aspects of any event. I might not know if the crest is going to be a jump or not; I am just following the pacenotes, he says. And from the recce, we dont always know if a crest will mean a big jump, small jump or no jump. It can be hard to anticipate. In fact, that is one of the worst feelings in a rally car: when you take off where you werent expecting it. Something that looks small on the recce can kick up, and then you really know it is going to hurt.
With the Fabias seats set low in the car to optimise the centre of gravity, even six-footer Mikkelsen says jumps are a voyage into the unknown.
I sit so low that I cant see so much over crests, he explains. In fact, if you watch on-board video footage, youll often see me tilt my head up a little as I approach a crest, as if Im trying to look up and see over.
Even then, I am concentrating on getting the line right – not whats to come once I am in the air, but how to make sure we take off on exactly the right line. Its no good just hoping you hit a crest right, because if you get it wrong, youd better prepare for something crazy when you land.
Remarkably, Mikkelsens navigator, Ola Fløene, admits that he cant always tell whether the car has even left the ground because hes concentrating so hard on calling the pacenotes. Makes you wonder if that might be for the best…

Three of the longest rally jumps:
Sebastian Loeb - Rally of Turkey, April 2010: 85 metres
Evgeny Novikov - Rally of Finland, August 2009: 66 metres
Markko Märtin - Rally of Finland, August 2003: 57 metres