New Nitron Developments

At the start of the year Nitron launched a new range of dampers with a larger diameter body, up from 40mm to 46mm, a correspondingly larger piston and a larger piston rod.  The idea behind this change is to firstly displace more oil during every stroke, which allows for better damping resolution and also to increase the oil capacity in the damper to improve the stability of the damper with temperature.  On the basis that a dampers primary role is to convert energy in the spring into heat these changes seem a sensible way to go.

Unfortunately work and family has conspired against my racing this year so I’ve taken a while to get my hands on a set of 46mm three way adjustable dampers but right now I’m progressing with optimising their valving on the Elise platform.  As ever Nitron have been incredibly supportive and Mark, who heads up their workshop team, has put a huge amount of his own time into getting a baseline configuration which looks just right on the dyno.  Unfortunately you cannot rely on dyno testing alone and often what looks right on the dyno doesn’t behave as you would expect on the race track.  In that vein we have spent one day testing already at the Blyton Park circuit and luckily, in this instance, the damper valving worked very well from the off and responded well to the changes we made.  Its likely that we will try some different shim stack configurations on the rebound side of the damper piston in the next test before signing off the dampers but for a first test we were very, very pleased.  What we liked the most was the improved low speed control and stability.

Chris and Mark Dyno testing at Nitron Racing

One of the shim builds we were testing on the dyno

Three dampers Piston, a 46mm high flow, a standard 46mm and a 40mm

Two of the dampers built up and ready to go

One of the dampers fitted to the car

46mm Nitron damper on the dyno

Testing at Blyton Park