Wheel Hop
 

I've put the winter stock tires/wheels back on. Decided to go out and practice launching. Any wheel spin resulted in some pretty serious wheel hop.

I'm wondering if this is a result of the Eibach springs and Koni's. I put them to full soft and it still did it.

Wondering if stock suspension guys are seeing wheel hop?

Was you traction control off?

Wheel hop would be pretty hard to search for because the search engine ignors anything with three characters or less, so here.

http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29020

What tire pressure are you running in the winter setup? I find with 32 psi in the stock tires, running RCE yellows, I get wheel hop fairly easy. At 36 psi it's all but gone.

Yes, traction control off.

Tire pressure is @ 36psi. Should I get serious, say take it to the 1/4 mi track, I'd play with the pressures. Thanks for the link. I'll give it a read.

The IRS setup is not ideal for hard launches and will cause wheel hop. I haven't tried launching mine hard to see in this car yet. Had this problem with my corvettes.. Nothing like a camaro or mustang with a solid axle for those hard launches..

As was mentioned in the link, wheel hop is caused by the suspension absorbing energy, winding up until something binds, and releasing that energy. It could easily be the tire sidewalls that are flexing and unflexing so to speak. That my conclusion from my own tire pressure testing with this car.

Full soft is too soft in rebound. That's why you're getting wheel hop. Why did you do that? Unless you can adjust jounce, not usually, changing rebound is silly. There will be an ideal range, very narrow, for rebound setting as this is needed for wheel control. Setting rebound too soft is as bad as setting it too hard. For hard launches you need higher rebound resistance, not lower. You generally set rebound as soft as you can and still maintain wheel contact in bumpy corners, for wet or winter driving. For dry track work you can increase rebound resistance a click at a time until you get no improvement in lap times, highly dependent on track surface and the type of bumps.

IRS is normally pretty much immune to wheel hop. The poster who thinks live axles are better doesn't understand how suspension works.

Leaf springs are worst because the axle actually winds up against the springs and them let's go, traction bars were invented for this reason. More "modern" live axles such as fitted to the new Mustang use multi link design with coil springs partly because live axles are so awful to drive otherwise. The new Mustang doesn't suffer from wheel hop (tramp) due to this sophisticated set up, irony is irs would have been cheaper probably!

Thanks for the input. I've had rebound mid setting, I took them to full soft as I've taken a new job and traveling quite a bit on rough roads, not as a test for the hop. It hops at mid and soft setting. I'll try firmer settings sometime.