During the summer of 2007, I was fortunate enough to do an internship for Ferrari at its factory in Maranello, Italy. I worked in the "Cambio F1" department and studied the effect that fast gear shifts (<100ms) had on the human body. I studied several data acquisitions from different runs using an F430 and different combinations of seat-types, gear-shift strategies and gear ratios and developed tools in Matlab to visualize hundreds of megabytes of data.
I designed and simulated an ideal seat mechanism in Matlab that absorbed 100% of the effect of loss of acceleration during fast gear shifts. I fabricated the proposed mechanism and demonstrated it on a Recaro seat. We did several test drives on an F430 and measured the impact of fast gear shifts on the modified seat using accelerometers, while the second seat served as control in our experiment. The modified seat exhibited 50%-90% improvement on the deceleration of the seat during fast gear shifts.
I designed and simulated an ideal seat mechanism in Matlab that absorbed 100% of the effect of loss of acceleration during fast gear shifts. I fabricated the proposed mechanism and demonstrated it on a Recaro seat. We did several test drives on an F430 and measured the impact of fast gear shifts on the modified seat using accelerometers, while the second seat served as control in our experiment. The modified seat exhibited 50%-90% improvement on the deceleration of the seat during fast gear shifts.