Friday, December 7, 2007

Improving the stock suspension for track use, planning

Because a wannabe sports car fills up the garage, we have some time for planning.

A red, soon to be black, Karmann Ghia.

Modifying the suspension for race track use seems a bit more difficult than we thought.
Pictures from beneath the car, from where you can see the problem spots.

The suspension bushings aren't aligned with each other. This is no problem in a stock car with elastic rubber bushings. But if you want to replace them with something stiffer to keep the wheels aligned under racing abuse, you will have problems.

A drawing of the front suspension point for the lower front a-arm to clarify what I meant. The front suspension point is far from ideal, it consists of two washers that tighten two rubber donuts on a steel plate, and this is all that limits longitudinal movement of the lower a-arm.

In the back the situation isn't as bad, but not very good either. The bolts are almost aligned with each other. If the bolts holding the rear suspension would be aligned, it would be easy to turn a couple metallic bushings to replace the stock ones. We do have some ideas to get it better.

Camber adjustment is also one thing that will be improved. We would like an adjustment that is easy and accurate to adjust even on the race track.

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