Quote:
Originally Posted by Chad_W
I'm wondering with our lower center of gravity and huge choice of stiffer springs and dampeners, can we benefit from reducing anti-roll stiffness?
Ideally the ideal suspension is about the correct spring rates and appropriate dampening. The roll bars should just be used to dial in understeer/oversteer
Has anyone played with this idea? I'm thinking primarily from a street car perspective, where improved ride quality is appreciate and more independent wheel movement can provide more overall grip.
As an example, the new Miata has a bit of body roll, but an tremendous amount of grip and reasonable compliant suspension.
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It's all a balance. If you were to take the sway bars off the car, you'd have waaaay too much body roll. We can all agree on that. But let's say you increase your ride frequency to something super high like 6-7 Hz to make up for the lack of roll bars. Something sufficiently high to get your roll rate back down to the 1-2-1.5°/G level that's a good non-downforce racecar level. Now you've put some massive, massive springs on the car, so stiff that your car is upset at the slightest bump and you're skating all over the track.
So why not just have a higher roll rate? Weight transfer. It'll take forever for the car to take a set from one corner to another.
If you want to make your car roll like a Coupe DeVille, then yes, take off the sway bars. But you'd be messing up all kinds of analysis that's been done on matching ride and roll frequencies to the environments these cars will see.