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The design of passive suspension systems is being improved since the early days of the automotive industry in order to obtain the best tradeoff between ride comfort and handling. In this context, passenger cars tend to prioritise ride comfort whilst racing cars tend to focus on handling. On the other hand, Formula SAE is a series of undergraduate competitions in which the students design, build and compete with small, formula-style, mono-seated vehicles. As part of the competition events, the vehicle experiences tight corners and short-length slaloms. The minimum turning diameter and the shortest length of slalom period conducted by Formula SAE prototypes are 9 m and 7.6 m, respectively. Therefore, high controllability of vehicle dynamic behaviour is required in order to enhance the cornering speed, this is achievable by working on the dampers to optimise the rates of load transfer in cornering.

The intake system of an internal combustion engine plays a key role to determine its performance. Gas dynamics varies with many factors, such as whether it is fuel injected or carbureted engine, temperature, runner length and diameter, valve timing, number of cylinders and others factors. A careful design of the intake system provides the engineer a possibility to manipulate the dynamics of the gas, allowing taking advantage of the engine's operation at some moments. The aim of the current paper is investigates the effects of intake runner length and diameter on the performance of a four stroke and single cylinder engine, design a three stages intake manifold for this engine and elaborate a design algorithm to find the best intake runner length and diameter configuration. The characteristics that were taken in consideration to evaluate the engine performance were the brake power, volumetric efficiency and trapped gas.