It all started somewhere back in the year 1989 when I started into the final part of my studies in mechanical engineering at the RWTH University in Aachen (Germany). I had set my stakes on becoming a future expert in vehicle dynamics. Ever since I had a driving license I wanted to know how to go around corners fast and because I also thought it would be good fun to make a living out of this passion it all seemed like a good plan... and today, many years later, I can say that it was a good plan! After having spent more than 25 years in a nowadays heavily cost controlled automotive engineering environment, I keep on loving "this" part of the automotive business .... and I still do like to make things go around corners faster. As someone said "I love it when a plan comes together".
But what about DYNATUNE? Where did that come from? Why a tabular based simulation tool? Well in order to understand this we need to go back in time to the end of the 80s. Well known for fantastic music, less well known for even more fantastic developments of automotive suspensions and the art of vehicle dynamics.
It all started for me a long long time ago back in 1986 when CPU time was more costly than IT Stock and "personal" computers were more expensive than the most famous sports cars. My tutor at the RWTH University Automotive Institute gave me a few days course on how to simulate vehicle dynamics on a VAX computer and I do remember well, how often he reminded me on what such a simulation would actually cost and how careful I had plan ahead about what I would like to investigate in order to avoid costly no-results runs. A rather dull matter and certainly not the real thing for a young and eager Petrol Head, who wanted to experiment as much as possible, but it taught me to think thoroughly in advance about what I was expecting from my actions. Nowadays in the digital time a quality well lost as we more and more seem to trust any CAE calculations blindly or just run simulations for the sake of it. There is just no risk anymore of being reprimanded for excessive use of CPU time without providing results (like it anyway happened to me).
Then, out of nowhere, in the year 1986 a program called Lotus 123 became very popular and I remember well hacking the equations for a bicycle model into a .WK1 sheet. It was actually a huge step going from a VAX computer to a Lotus 123 sheet on an IBM 6 MHz PC with EGA Graphics Card. I retro perspective, that was actually the time when DYNATUNE - "avant la lettre" - was born, I just did not know it at that point in time and neither did I have any idea how it would evolve over all the years along with my career. After Lotus became MS EXCEL 2.05 for MS WINDOWS around 1989 really popular and all of my 2 Lotus worksheets were transferred into EXCEL 2.0. I keep this as the official Birthday Year for DYNATUNE.
Then, I graduated at the end of 1991 and started directly my PhD University Career at the RWTH Aachen in the department of Vehicle Dynamics introducing a new software called ADAMS. With that Multi-Body-Analysis Software (version 4.2.1...) we had to do a simulation project for an OEM of heavy trucks and consequently we had to develop many special subroutines tailor made to ADAMS in order to be able to simulate what we actually wanted to investigate on an 18 wheels vehicle. Those were the days of ADAMS/VIEW 1.0 and ADAMS/TIRE 1.0. This new tool permitted obviously a tremendous progress in simulation capabilities but unfortunately it also came at a tremendous price for software licensing fees and most of all it cost a tremendous amount of time to learn, use & enhance the software. Again, that was not what I (being a Petrol Head) really desired to do, but nevertheless I became very skilled in ADAMS and that was - luckily - one of the main reason for an OEM nearby Aachen to headhunt me away from my probably dull university career. So I became an ADAMS expert ......
I started my "real life" industrial career in 1994 in the Advanced Vehicle Concept Department at FORD Motor Company in Cologne in the section of Chassis & Dynamics and learned all about the principles of designing a car from scratch on a white piece of paper (or more correct a black screen). My first project there was the lay-out of the current Ford Transit, which initially did (again) not seem to be the right project for a Petrol Head, but as it turned out, it was actually a very interesting vehicle, especially from a dynamics point of view, with more than 400 variants to be tested. Of course, we did use only ADAMS there - being the best of the best top nodge software at that moment - and needles to say that, when you are at a concept stage creating detailed ADAMS models is very time consuming and not the most efficient way to perform superficial trade-off studies. In fact, in those days one could see the uprising of many new software for parametric models and Design of Experiments. Remarkably the results were all to some extend ported back to MS EXCEL for data presentation or further post-processing/analysis.
This was actually one of my first "Hang On Here" and "What If ?" moments .... Can't we do some of this in EXCEL anyway?. Wouldn't it be more efficient creating directly a parametric model in EXCEL than creating a simplified parametric model in hugely complex software like ADAMS and than port it back into EXCEL?. So I looked up my old sheets and started (secretly) using them, kept enhancing and adding features to them for quick initial trade-off studies. This was in particular helpful for setting initial program targets. At the beginning of an engineering program many data are not detailed available and made software like ADAMS inaccurate. Obviously a development stage like that favored a more simple tool - which we did not really have - leaving many times a well educated engineering guess to be the best solution. Nevertheless as the engineering program work progressed, data became more detailed and the proper deep dive analysis was thoroughly executed in ADAMS. As I recall Ford did create some pretty good drivers cars back then as a result of all that virtual power. But also MS EXCEL did improve itself .... more functions, more possibilities .....and my sheets kept on growing alongside.
Now having worked for a few years at Ford, in 1996 I could make come through a life-long dream of buying what I personally think is the best sports-car on the world, a Donkervoort D8 Zetec Sport. A short retro perspective is here probably on it's place. In 1990 when I was about to graduate, the German Wall had just fallen meaning that all the money in the German Educational System and to some major extend also companies had gone to the ex-GDR, meaning for me that there were not really exciting topics to select for a thesis. Determined as I was I did absolutely want to do a thesis on a sports car so I wrote a letter to Mr. Joop Donkervoort. In that letter I explained to him my idea for a thesis and asked him whether he could lend me a car for 6 months and some financial funding to pay for all the test rigs that I wanted to construct and use in order to measure his car. I was invited for an interview in order to explain on where, how and what and luckily I was able to convince him, so that at the end I did get a car and funding, allowing me to both graduate and make some suggestions for improvements to the factory. Eventually, a few years later I was finally able to buy my car and all of my recommended improvements had to be in my personal car. Once having the car, I obviously wanted to improve the car even further ... so my tools improved further. Most of the "user-tools" in DYNATUNE find their origin in those days. But more important, since the university in 1990 did not have any no access to a K&C rig or a sophisticated kinematics program, I even did write a in 1990/1991 a Suspension Kinematics Program in Fortran and Turbo Pascal which could calculate all possible geometries and I am sure you can figure out what happened with that tool .......
And then - in 1997, I made my Petrol Head dream come through becoming a resident engineer for Chassis & Dynamics at the Stewart Ford F1 team in Milton Keynes (GB) where I was responsible of all virtual and real world developments in the Chassis & Dynamics Department. Because I I had become a known specialist in ADAMS, FORD thought that it would be a good idea to send someone with my experience into F1 and since SGP was one of the first F1 teams to invest heavily in virtual analysis, I got the lottery ticket and would obviously introduce state of the art Multi-Body-Analysis tools in the Design Office in Milton Keynes. But in F1 there was (also) an urge for extremely fast tools, development time was precious and never available. The actual time available for doing concept studies was like 4-6 weeks and at track side events time for theoretical analysis was even more limited. Bear in mind that in those days ADAMS did not run yet on PC's or let alone laptops.....So we created back at the factory and within FORD enormous Design of Experiment Studies (DOE's) and exported them to EXCEL for trackside use ....Those DOE EXCEL sheets (containing results of thousands of ADAMS calculations) were being "married" with sheets that I already had. So my DYNATUNE sheets became increasingly more complex and refined, with new suspension types, aerodynamic tables, slick tires permitting me to select quickly some very good from some very bad idea's. I never told anybody though ....about "my" sheets, that is! Nevertheless, in those days we certainly raised the bar in F1 with all our analytical tools and I am pretty sure that Stewart Grand Prix would not have made such a good figure without them. Other than that I am especially thankful to tremendous step forward of EXCEL '97, no need to say.
After more than 4 years full-time in F1, my parent company decided that they needed me to come back into the real world and I got promoted to be a "Technical Specialist" for Vehicle Dynamics. One of my first assignments was to be responsible for the Handling of the Mrk I Focus RS. Being a car that came at the end of the product cycle of the CW170 platform there was a wealth of data available. Data of many measurements and I began developing/defining key metrics that would describe the behavior of the car in an objective manner. As a Technical Specialist I did have to do that more or less on all cars, but needless to say that being a Petrol Head did favor the analysis of the RS slightly. Besides that, the RS had to set new standards for a front wheel driven car and perform similar to a 4WD Subaru STi or Mitsubishi Evo, which certainly raised the bar and kept us engineers focused. In those days we also made the first prototypes of the patented "RevoKnuckle" Front Suspension of the Focus RS Mrk II but that is yet another long story.
Since many data logging systems did and still do rightfully use MATLAB for their post-processing but since I am not a MATLAB kinda guy, there was another "Hang On Here" and "What If" moment causing another increment of various sheets. Sheets that could be validated against real world data. At the same time many development engineers needed a tool that would support their thinking and ideas. Most development engineers are not software engineers so they cannot or do not want to run ADAMS or MATLAB as an engineering tool. However EXCEL is their preferred tool and probably because of that my series of development sheets was eagerly looked at. Needles to say, that I handed out a pair of sheets to the development engineer of the Focus RS Mrk I for free .....
In parallel there was quite an endeavor to participate in WRC Rallying and German Touring Cars, nice areas to enhance one's knowledge indeed and as I moved on becoming a supervisor in Ford's Advanced Racing Department and later on in Ford's Advanced Chassis Research the vehicle dynamics knowledge accumulated steadily and so did all my sheets.
But then, finally in 2004 I became a "Manager". I was headhunted away from Ford Motor Company to Ferrari for a "Vehicle Integration Manager" position. A complete new role. That meant obviously a significant reduction of time that could be dedicated to Vehicle Dynamics which was at that time OK, I had anyway seen it all from a 40 ton truck to an F1 car and there were yet so many other new things to learn. So my collection of vehicle dynamics sheets became a collection of dusted vehicle dynamics sheets, that was it I thought, no more EXCEL for me. The collection of sheets remained dusted on a hard disk for a long time.
Then after several years, when I had become an "Even Bigger Manager" for Vehicle Engineering in Maserati I did have the opportunity of creating a small department of virtual analysis with some very young and eager but not so experienced dynamics engineers. These engineers had to deliver as quickly as possible the best possible handling car in limited time with very limited resources and there it was again..."Hang On Here", "What If" and I remembered about my dusted sheets somewhere on a forgotten hard drive ..... sheets from a distant past that probably by now only myself would understand. So I loaded them back on my computer, decided to have a look at them and see in which way one could make something out of all that knowledge in such a way that young and eager but not so experienced engineers would be able to understand, appreciate and most of all would apply during their job. I started to look at every sheet, one at a time and evaluated thoroughly on how to make them a) more understandable to a novice and b) how to unite all of my sheets into one workbook only.
Then, luckily for DYNATUNE, in 2009 I became a "Really Big Manager" in Fiat - Vehicle Validation Manager for all FGA produced European Cars - with more than 300 headcounts, which kept me quite busy during the day, but since I was living during the week in a hotel in Turin I had plenty of time that could be spent either on watching Italian TV or do something else with my time ... like creating DYNATUNE as we now know it. As a pure personal hobby, I have spent the better part of 3 years on trying to make DYNATUNE an easy to use tool, always under the strict limitation of staying on an EXCEL platform and keep things limited to essentials. There has never been the presumption of creating a substitute for all those other available tools with each of them possessing its own detailed right of existence. There was however always the ambition to come as close as possible with as little as possible, efficiency in engineering true to every Petrol Head's mindset. Simplify and than add lightness as the famous Colin Chapman always used to say.
Besides the fact that going back to ones roots is always like a trip down to memory lane - I kept finding old sheets that I didn't even remotely recalled having them - the actual work put into the creation of DYNATUNE did help my work as a manager a lot. As DYNATUNE is being focused on providing a maximum of results with a minimum of data it has proved to be an excellent tracking tool for me to keep up with various development steps of many ongoing car-programs. It allowed me to quickly intervene whenever I saw that there was a risk of taking a wrong direction or whenever I had some doubts on the actions to be taken. Besides that DYNATUNE has proven to be an excellent base for discussing fundamentals most of all because DYNATUNE is accessible to both engineers as to managers.
DYNATUNE has always been - in various stages - a part of my professional and personal life now for more than 25 years. The constant drive for keeping things essential and related to basics has made DYNATUNE to what it is today. A very sophisticated - full of know-how - but yet still elementary RIDE & HANDLING setup tool, which will make sure that the basics of the driving experience of your car will be right, whether you have designed it to drive it on normal roads, whether you go rallying or whether you race it on a circuit. So much for the R&H tool.
Some time ago, my mother insisted - quite rightly since I was out of the elderly house for more than 30 years - on cleaning up my "old" room and I found again my 16Mhz AT386SX desk top computer. When I saw it, I just had to see whether I could turn the thing on and started installing all the hardware to make things happen. And it fired up without any problems (in windows 2.1) and I started again a virtual trip down memory lane and besides finding many old games I also stumbled into the original Fortran and Turbo Pascal source code of my more than 20 year old Suspension Program. This immediately brought up my thought again: "What if this tool would be available in Excel ?" So I decided to download the code onto some 3,5" Floppy Disks and take it home with me. Now, as I had some spare time at my hands, I started working on creating the DYNATUNE SUSPENSION DESIGN MODEL and once the "calculation engine" was ready I added some features, that I had always missed on the many sophisticated tools that I had worked with up to now. DYNATUNE SDM for Excel was born and was focused to be a universal suspension tool for all kind of people, engineers, amateur racers, tuning companies and professional formula teams. After the BASE version came quickly the RACE Version with Push-Rod & Rocker geometries. I wanted to call it a day at that point, but decided to take on the final challenge and incorporate a "simple" procedure to calculate suspension compliance characteristics - making the tool as complete as one could only wish for with almost the same possibilities as truly complex and expensive multi-body-analysis tools - I decided to go for it and created a "PRO" and "EXPERT" Version of the Suspension Design Module in early 2015 which went on sale in March 2015. This closed the development loop I had in mind for the tool at 360° ... and all that I wanted to achieve in EXCEL had been completed. Now new challenges will have to be found .......
Coming to the end of this 25 year long voyage, I would really like to not forget and to thank all my (ex-)colleagues, friends & peers, who have been so kind to provide me during all these years with comments, critics, use-full hints, tricks, idea's, inspirations, pieces of software code and suggestions on how to improve, speed-up or resolve specific software issues. My special thanks go also out to the various beta testers who have offered their precious time to test the software and their comments and suggestions have made the tools of DYNATUNE-XL so intuitive and robust. I would like to dedicate this work to my beloved mother.
Thank You !
Paul Fickers
Experience is the sum of all mistakes, Expertise is the sum of all successes !
http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulfickers
But what about DYNATUNE? Where did that come from? Why a tabular based simulation tool? Well in order to understand this we need to go back in time to the end of the 80s. Well known for fantastic music, less well known for even more fantastic developments of automotive suspensions and the art of vehicle dynamics.
It all started for me a long long time ago back in 1986 when CPU time was more costly than IT Stock and "personal" computers were more expensive than the most famous sports cars. My tutor at the RWTH University Automotive Institute gave me a few days course on how to simulate vehicle dynamics on a VAX computer and I do remember well, how often he reminded me on what such a simulation would actually cost and how careful I had plan ahead about what I would like to investigate in order to avoid costly no-results runs. A rather dull matter and certainly not the real thing for a young and eager Petrol Head, who wanted to experiment as much as possible, but it taught me to think thoroughly in advance about what I was expecting from my actions. Nowadays in the digital time a quality well lost as we more and more seem to trust any CAE calculations blindly or just run simulations for the sake of it. There is just no risk anymore of being reprimanded for excessive use of CPU time without providing results (like it anyway happened to me).
Then, out of nowhere, in the year 1986 a program called Lotus 123 became very popular and I remember well hacking the equations for a bicycle model into a .WK1 sheet. It was actually a huge step going from a VAX computer to a Lotus 123 sheet on an IBM 6 MHz PC with EGA Graphics Card. I retro perspective, that was actually the time when DYNATUNE - "avant la lettre" - was born, I just did not know it at that point in time and neither did I have any idea how it would evolve over all the years along with my career. After Lotus became MS EXCEL 2.05 for MS WINDOWS around 1989 really popular and all of my 2 Lotus worksheets were transferred into EXCEL 2.0. I keep this as the official Birthday Year for DYNATUNE.
Then, I graduated at the end of 1991 and started directly my PhD University Career at the RWTH Aachen in the department of Vehicle Dynamics introducing a new software called ADAMS. With that Multi-Body-Analysis Software (version 4.2.1...) we had to do a simulation project for an OEM of heavy trucks and consequently we had to develop many special subroutines tailor made to ADAMS in order to be able to simulate what we actually wanted to investigate on an 18 wheels vehicle. Those were the days of ADAMS/VIEW 1.0 and ADAMS/TIRE 1.0. This new tool permitted obviously a tremendous progress in simulation capabilities but unfortunately it also came at a tremendous price for software licensing fees and most of all it cost a tremendous amount of time to learn, use & enhance the software. Again, that was not what I (being a Petrol Head) really desired to do, but nevertheless I became very skilled in ADAMS and that was - luckily - one of the main reason for an OEM nearby Aachen to headhunt me away from my probably dull university career. So I became an ADAMS expert ......
I started my "real life" industrial career in 1994 in the Advanced Vehicle Concept Department at FORD Motor Company in Cologne in the section of Chassis & Dynamics and learned all about the principles of designing a car from scratch on a white piece of paper (or more correct a black screen). My first project there was the lay-out of the current Ford Transit, which initially did (again) not seem to be the right project for a Petrol Head, but as it turned out, it was actually a very interesting vehicle, especially from a dynamics point of view, with more than 400 variants to be tested. Of course, we did use only ADAMS there - being the best of the best top nodge software at that moment - and needles to say that, when you are at a concept stage creating detailed ADAMS models is very time consuming and not the most efficient way to perform superficial trade-off studies. In fact, in those days one could see the uprising of many new software for parametric models and Design of Experiments. Remarkably the results were all to some extend ported back to MS EXCEL for data presentation or further post-processing/analysis.
This was actually one of my first "Hang On Here" and "What If ?" moments .... Can't we do some of this in EXCEL anyway?. Wouldn't it be more efficient creating directly a parametric model in EXCEL than creating a simplified parametric model in hugely complex software like ADAMS and than port it back into EXCEL?. So I looked up my old sheets and started (secretly) using them, kept enhancing and adding features to them for quick initial trade-off studies. This was in particular helpful for setting initial program targets. At the beginning of an engineering program many data are not detailed available and made software like ADAMS inaccurate. Obviously a development stage like that favored a more simple tool - which we did not really have - leaving many times a well educated engineering guess to be the best solution. Nevertheless as the engineering program work progressed, data became more detailed and the proper deep dive analysis was thoroughly executed in ADAMS. As I recall Ford did create some pretty good drivers cars back then as a result of all that virtual power. But also MS EXCEL did improve itself .... more functions, more possibilities .....and my sheets kept on growing alongside.
Now having worked for a few years at Ford, in 1996 I could make come through a life-long dream of buying what I personally think is the best sports-car on the world, a Donkervoort D8 Zetec Sport. A short retro perspective is here probably on it's place. In 1990 when I was about to graduate, the German Wall had just fallen meaning that all the money in the German Educational System and to some major extend also companies had gone to the ex-GDR, meaning for me that there were not really exciting topics to select for a thesis. Determined as I was I did absolutely want to do a thesis on a sports car so I wrote a letter to Mr. Joop Donkervoort. In that letter I explained to him my idea for a thesis and asked him whether he could lend me a car for 6 months and some financial funding to pay for all the test rigs that I wanted to construct and use in order to measure his car. I was invited for an interview in order to explain on where, how and what and luckily I was able to convince him, so that at the end I did get a car and funding, allowing me to both graduate and make some suggestions for improvements to the factory. Eventually, a few years later I was finally able to buy my car and all of my recommended improvements had to be in my personal car. Once having the car, I obviously wanted to improve the car even further ... so my tools improved further. Most of the "user-tools" in DYNATUNE find their origin in those days. But more important, since the university in 1990 did not have any no access to a K&C rig or a sophisticated kinematics program, I even did write a in 1990/1991 a Suspension Kinematics Program in Fortran and Turbo Pascal which could calculate all possible geometries and I am sure you can figure out what happened with that tool .......
And then - in 1997, I made my Petrol Head dream come through becoming a resident engineer for Chassis & Dynamics at the Stewart Ford F1 team in Milton Keynes (GB) where I was responsible of all virtual and real world developments in the Chassis & Dynamics Department. Because I I had become a known specialist in ADAMS, FORD thought that it would be a good idea to send someone with my experience into F1 and since SGP was one of the first F1 teams to invest heavily in virtual analysis, I got the lottery ticket and would obviously introduce state of the art Multi-Body-Analysis tools in the Design Office in Milton Keynes. But in F1 there was (also) an urge for extremely fast tools, development time was precious and never available. The actual time available for doing concept studies was like 4-6 weeks and at track side events time for theoretical analysis was even more limited. Bear in mind that in those days ADAMS did not run yet on PC's or let alone laptops.....So we created back at the factory and within FORD enormous Design of Experiment Studies (DOE's) and exported them to EXCEL for trackside use ....Those DOE EXCEL sheets (containing results of thousands of ADAMS calculations) were being "married" with sheets that I already had. So my DYNATUNE sheets became increasingly more complex and refined, with new suspension types, aerodynamic tables, slick tires permitting me to select quickly some very good from some very bad idea's. I never told anybody though ....about "my" sheets, that is! Nevertheless, in those days we certainly raised the bar in F1 with all our analytical tools and I am pretty sure that Stewart Grand Prix would not have made such a good figure without them. Other than that I am especially thankful to tremendous step forward of EXCEL '97, no need to say.
After more than 4 years full-time in F1, my parent company decided that they needed me to come back into the real world and I got promoted to be a "Technical Specialist" for Vehicle Dynamics. One of my first assignments was to be responsible for the Handling of the Mrk I Focus RS. Being a car that came at the end of the product cycle of the CW170 platform there was a wealth of data available. Data of many measurements and I began developing/defining key metrics that would describe the behavior of the car in an objective manner. As a Technical Specialist I did have to do that more or less on all cars, but needless to say that being a Petrol Head did favor the analysis of the RS slightly. Besides that, the RS had to set new standards for a front wheel driven car and perform similar to a 4WD Subaru STi or Mitsubishi Evo, which certainly raised the bar and kept us engineers focused. In those days we also made the first prototypes of the patented "RevoKnuckle" Front Suspension of the Focus RS Mrk II but that is yet another long story.
Since many data logging systems did and still do rightfully use MATLAB for their post-processing but since I am not a MATLAB kinda guy, there was another "Hang On Here" and "What If" moment causing another increment of various sheets. Sheets that could be validated against real world data. At the same time many development engineers needed a tool that would support their thinking and ideas. Most development engineers are not software engineers so they cannot or do not want to run ADAMS or MATLAB as an engineering tool. However EXCEL is their preferred tool and probably because of that my series of development sheets was eagerly looked at. Needles to say, that I handed out a pair of sheets to the development engineer of the Focus RS Mrk I for free .....
In parallel there was quite an endeavor to participate in WRC Rallying and German Touring Cars, nice areas to enhance one's knowledge indeed and as I moved on becoming a supervisor in Ford's Advanced Racing Department and later on in Ford's Advanced Chassis Research the vehicle dynamics knowledge accumulated steadily and so did all my sheets.
But then, finally in 2004 I became a "Manager". I was headhunted away from Ford Motor Company to Ferrari for a "Vehicle Integration Manager" position. A complete new role. That meant obviously a significant reduction of time that could be dedicated to Vehicle Dynamics which was at that time OK, I had anyway seen it all from a 40 ton truck to an F1 car and there were yet so many other new things to learn. So my collection of vehicle dynamics sheets became a collection of dusted vehicle dynamics sheets, that was it I thought, no more EXCEL for me. The collection of sheets remained dusted on a hard disk for a long time.
Then after several years, when I had become an "Even Bigger Manager" for Vehicle Engineering in Maserati I did have the opportunity of creating a small department of virtual analysis with some very young and eager but not so experienced dynamics engineers. These engineers had to deliver as quickly as possible the best possible handling car in limited time with very limited resources and there it was again..."Hang On Here", "What If" and I remembered about my dusted sheets somewhere on a forgotten hard drive ..... sheets from a distant past that probably by now only myself would understand. So I loaded them back on my computer, decided to have a look at them and see in which way one could make something out of all that knowledge in such a way that young and eager but not so experienced engineers would be able to understand, appreciate and most of all would apply during their job. I started to look at every sheet, one at a time and evaluated thoroughly on how to make them a) more understandable to a novice and b) how to unite all of my sheets into one workbook only.
Then, luckily for DYNATUNE, in 2009 I became a "Really Big Manager" in Fiat - Vehicle Validation Manager for all FGA produced European Cars - with more than 300 headcounts, which kept me quite busy during the day, but since I was living during the week in a hotel in Turin I had plenty of time that could be spent either on watching Italian TV or do something else with my time ... like creating DYNATUNE as we now know it. As a pure personal hobby, I have spent the better part of 3 years on trying to make DYNATUNE an easy to use tool, always under the strict limitation of staying on an EXCEL platform and keep things limited to essentials. There has never been the presumption of creating a substitute for all those other available tools with each of them possessing its own detailed right of existence. There was however always the ambition to come as close as possible with as little as possible, efficiency in engineering true to every Petrol Head's mindset. Simplify and than add lightness as the famous Colin Chapman always used to say.
Besides the fact that going back to ones roots is always like a trip down to memory lane - I kept finding old sheets that I didn't even remotely recalled having them - the actual work put into the creation of DYNATUNE did help my work as a manager a lot. As DYNATUNE is being focused on providing a maximum of results with a minimum of data it has proved to be an excellent tracking tool for me to keep up with various development steps of many ongoing car-programs. It allowed me to quickly intervene whenever I saw that there was a risk of taking a wrong direction or whenever I had some doubts on the actions to be taken. Besides that DYNATUNE has proven to be an excellent base for discussing fundamentals most of all because DYNATUNE is accessible to both engineers as to managers.
DYNATUNE has always been - in various stages - a part of my professional and personal life now for more than 25 years. The constant drive for keeping things essential and related to basics has made DYNATUNE to what it is today. A very sophisticated - full of know-how - but yet still elementary RIDE & HANDLING setup tool, which will make sure that the basics of the driving experience of your car will be right, whether you have designed it to drive it on normal roads, whether you go rallying or whether you race it on a circuit. So much for the R&H tool.
Some time ago, my mother insisted - quite rightly since I was out of the elderly house for more than 30 years - on cleaning up my "old" room and I found again my 16Mhz AT386SX desk top computer. When I saw it, I just had to see whether I could turn the thing on and started installing all the hardware to make things happen. And it fired up without any problems (in windows 2.1) and I started again a virtual trip down memory lane and besides finding many old games I also stumbled into the original Fortran and Turbo Pascal source code of my more than 20 year old Suspension Program. This immediately brought up my thought again: "What if this tool would be available in Excel ?" So I decided to download the code onto some 3,5" Floppy Disks and take it home with me. Now, as I had some spare time at my hands, I started working on creating the DYNATUNE SUSPENSION DESIGN MODEL and once the "calculation engine" was ready I added some features, that I had always missed on the many sophisticated tools that I had worked with up to now. DYNATUNE SDM for Excel was born and was focused to be a universal suspension tool for all kind of people, engineers, amateur racers, tuning companies and professional formula teams. After the BASE version came quickly the RACE Version with Push-Rod & Rocker geometries. I wanted to call it a day at that point, but decided to take on the final challenge and incorporate a "simple" procedure to calculate suspension compliance characteristics - making the tool as complete as one could only wish for with almost the same possibilities as truly complex and expensive multi-body-analysis tools - I decided to go for it and created a "PRO" and "EXPERT" Version of the Suspension Design Module in early 2015 which went on sale in March 2015. This closed the development loop I had in mind for the tool at 360° ... and all that I wanted to achieve in EXCEL had been completed. Now new challenges will have to be found .......
Coming to the end of this 25 year long voyage, I would really like to not forget and to thank all my (ex-)colleagues, friends & peers, who have been so kind to provide me during all these years with comments, critics, use-full hints, tricks, idea's, inspirations, pieces of software code and suggestions on how to improve, speed-up or resolve specific software issues. My special thanks go also out to the various beta testers who have offered their precious time to test the software and their comments and suggestions have made the tools of DYNATUNE-XL so intuitive and robust. I would like to dedicate this work to my beloved mother.
Thank You !
Paul Fickers
Experience is the sum of all mistakes, Expertise is the sum of all successes !
http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulfickers
