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My uneducated two cents here:
IMO, from an engineering standpoint, this is not an accurate test case. First of all, the plank on the highway is not laid out such that it is horizontal to the on-coming tire. Also the actual highway was not flat like the test site.
The actual plank was haphazardly placed in such a way that it is actually about 60 degrees incident to the on-coming traffic. Additionally, there is a slight bank to the turn, the Z06 would have been leaning slightly on the coils / suspension. As such, the front wheel of the Z06 would have ran over it at 30 MPH in a slightly banking turn. The front wheel would have contacted a corner of the actual plank (not directly against the lengthwise side of the plank in the test) and travelled across a distance diagonally along the plank (not just the 6 inch distance straight across the plank).
My point is, the forces subjected to a car / suspension travelling at 30 MPH while turning is vastly different from a straight on impact against the plank on flat ground. We may not even know whether the driver of the Z06 slightly panicked and turned the steering wheel away from the plank in a last ditch effort to swerve, subjecting the car to yet another set of lateral forces.
Just my two cents. I run testcases for electronic devices as a job, but would think that an accurate scenario is needed to fully replicate the failure the Z06 went through. If a part is subject to external forces, no matter how sudden or massive, if done correctly, the part will remain functional as these stresses are within the part's design specs. Yes, these may contribute to a mean time to failure, but it will not cause a dramatic failure the Z06 experienced.
For well engineered parts, all the right circumstances have to happen at exactly that moment for it to fail in a spectacular way. People don't drive Z06's over boulders and rough terrain and this car must be very well kept (mechanically); all it took was one incident for the actual Z06 coil-over to fail. As such, I think running over the plank 6 times will not re-create the exact same failure the Z06 experienced. Yes, something will fail in some manner from that kind of repeated stresses but not the type the Z06 went through.
Last edited by CenturionAVRE : 06-11-2008 at 01:20 PM.
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