After 4+ years of design and building, it lives!
 

Not sure if any of you have followed the design and building of the DP1 or not. Dennis drove it for the first time after starting the project Over 4 years ago!

For those who did not, the DP01 is a sports racer style street car that Dennis took from an idea in his head to a reality. 5 axis CNC cut patterns for the carbon body, many CNC machined and laser cut parts. Many, many hours of design time.

You can follow the links below to see it unfold. When you get to the site you use the numbers at the top right starting with number 1

The design stage can be found here:
http://www.dpcars.net/dp1/index.htm

The build stage can be found here:
http://www.dpcars.net/dp1bld/index.htm


Allot of neat information and such if you are into design and manufacturing.

Oh, that's HOT! Love the Panozesque body.

Damn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS. Although I'd really like to drive it. I DO NOT want to drive it in, around, or anywhere near Atlanta at any time of day. Even seeing a semi on the street would make me stain my undies.

I like what he's done. I have a question about the suspension arms though. It appears the upper and lower arms are the same length. In a roll this will give no additional negative camber. Does his design rest on very little roll rate, simliar to an F1 car or is it oversight on his part ? (I doubt the latter as he appears to have thought this out quite well)

just curious,

-Trent

A carefully designed, well constructed car doesn't mean it's well designed. He's certainly put a lot of work into it and has paid attention to the details, but a suspension is one of the trickyest things to design on a car. Everything is a compromise, to gain in one area, you must trade off in another. Even with lots of roll stiffness, some camber gain is very useful. All the purpose built cars I've seen have unequal length A arms, camber gain is one of the main reasons to go with that type of suspension in the first place.

To me it looks like he didn't spend ANY time at all thinking about camber curves, roll centers, anti squat, anti dive, or anything like that. He just put two A arms on it and said "good enough". I also don't see much triangulation in the frame, and if he's designing for light weight and stiffness, round tubes should have been used. While it's designed with CAD, it seems that he lacks knowledge and understanding of Mechanical Engineering. Those are some things that would seriously deter me from purchasing a car like that.

Even so, it's an amazing accomplishment and I'm sure it'll preform quite well.

As long as those A-arms are I doubt an unequal length setup would really gain much. Interesting design though, good job, I know how tedious doing something like that is. Built my fair share of ground up motortcycle powered race cars. Good luck getting it street legal.

I would agree with the triangulation of the frame, however his setup is more that adequate for a street car especially since he has structurally riveted (and bonded I hope) the aluminum plates to the chassis.

Pics of one the cars I built. Speads RS04 DSR, 2nd at the runoffs in 2005.

Edit: Hold on, look closer, the A-arm arangement is not parallel. Props on doing a AWD setup, Quaife ATD differentials??, interesting use of UHMW, however I would have gone with at drive shaft setup, chains are simple, but maintance is a bitch, especially with eventual chain stretching.

Very Impressive!! would love to drive it at Watkins Glen..