Who better to improve your car than the man who helped developed it? Andrew Palmer goes to Germany in search of the perfect suspension setup.
What do you do when you’ve bought a fancy suspension kit for your car and don’t know what to do with it? It’s the situation I found myself in a few months ago when I decided the Mercedes C63 AMG I owned at the time wasn’t quite all it could be.
Whilst it rode nicely, it tended to generate a little too much body movement for my liking, but I didn’t want to go down the route of fitting a set of stiffer springs and ‘slamming’ it. No, the answer had to be something close to ‘original AMG’ yet something that would allow me to find the perfect fast-road biased setup for the car.
With AMG using the very highly regarded KW suspension systems in their Black Series models, I quickly realised that I’d found my solution; a set of suspension components that are factory-fitted to the very best cars AMG make, that are also available as an aftermarket solution for my car. This is when the problems started…
The KW V3 package had no less than 30 different settings for compression and rebound, plus infinitely variable ride height on each spring/damper unit. What settings would suit the car? How would I know if I had the best setting? Would I be constantly tweaking the settings in the never-ending pursuit of perfection? What, or more to the point who I needed, was someone who really knew the car - not exactly easy for an AMG owner in the UK.
By a sheer stroke of luck, a friend who happens to be an almost permanent Nürburgring resident suggested that he knew the very man to help me find my perfect suspension setup. ‘How about popping over to the ‘Ring and giving it to AMG’s development driver?’, he suggested. Say what? You know AMG’s development driver?! ‘That’s right, I’ll introduce you to Uli. He freelances for AMG as a development driver and did all the development miles in your car – it couldn’t be done by a better person!’. That conversation took place in mid-June, yet it felt like I’d just woken up on 25th December!
The development driver
Two weeks later, and with the KW’s fitted and set to their KW-recommended settings for my car (read: hard and very uncomfortable), I banged and bounced my way over to Germany. The drive there was horrendous and I really regretted having the suspension fitted, so atrocious was the ride quality. I was hoping for miracles from Uli, that’s for sure.
About 5 miles outside of Adenau, I pulled into a little industrial estate and there at his workshops, I met Uli Baumert for the first time, a regular, bearded and very casually dressed guy. He’s actually a BMW man at heart with his core profession being a race engineer building, setting up and maintaining race spec M3s (his speciality is E30s) and a few Porsches. He’s a driver too, and regularly takes part in races, most recently taking part in the 24h Dubai 2011 back in January.
Uli's team working on the car
His workshop is an Aladdin’s cave of tuning parts, spares and actual race cars, yet within minutes my car was up in the air with the wheels off and suspension being fettled. The first adjustments were made solely from experience and he clearly knew exactly what he was doing; a scant two hours later he was threading his way through traffic on the Nordschleife in my car to test the new setup!
A couple of things really stood out from my first encounter with Uli. Firstly, he knew the car extremely well; how everything fitted together, how it all worked and what would be best to do with it. Secondly, he really knew how to drive it! On the numerous times he took me around the ‘Ring, not a single car passed us and it’s fair to say he managed to outdrive far more track-biased exotica in what was still a heavy road car.
All of this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since his on-the-side job as a freelance development driver for AMG on the C63 project meant he used to drive these cars thousands of kilometres every day to basically try to break the car - firstly to ensure the components were up to scratch, and secondly to help define the service intervals. He rates the C63 AMG very highly, and despite being a BMW man and racing driver at heart, reckons it’s actually a better car than the E92 M3 - high praise indeed.
Finding more power
I spent a large proportion of my summer weekends with Uli, who invested a lot of time setting my car up on the roads around the Nürburgring. However, it didn’t end there. He had so much more to offer me as an AMG driver, in particular with ways to rectify the main artificial restriction engineered into the C63: the exhaust.
Old and new manifolds
He explained that this was one of his biggest development nightmares, since AMG just couldn’t get an exhaust system to work on the C63 – the car just wasn’t long enough to cope with the varying lengths the exhaust would cycle through from the heat generated by the huge 6.2 litre engine. However, Uli knew the right people to find a way of getting a wider-diameter Black Series-spec front section fitted to my car.
They had to engineer a tight manifold and a couple of expansion joints in the mid-section, but this allowed the engine to develop the power it could in other applications. This, combined with a bit of engine management tweaking by another one of his contacts, meant that the car had no problem registering a solid 540ps on a German (and therefore regulated and much more accurate) dyno.
The whole experience was a priceless opportunity to meet someone involved in the development of the car I drove, and to draw on their expertise to help improve my car in areas that were affected by the design and cost limitations of mass production.
Goodness knows what he’s going to try and encourage me to do with my Porsche when he sees that for the first time, but when he does suggst some upgrades I will resist. The Porsche needs no fettling…right?