[CSGAS]

Originally Posted by Zoomin

Seems like one more place to have to tune to get the effect you want. As far as the added power goes, it would seem your brakes are going to be doing a lot more work as well. What changes do you your think will be necessary? A larger contact patch?

Imagine slapper bars on a leaf spring suspension first.

Now relate those to bars (Lakewood used to make some) that mounted solid at the front but slid along the tube.

Next imagine a spring that can be swapped out to adjust how firm or soft the "hit" is on that tube that slides, while the torque tries to wrap-up the leafs and that effort is diverted to transferring weight.

The bumpstop in that third link acts like a spring in a single Lakewood-style bar in the middle of the suspension. In a stock application, like Monzas/Camaros/Firebirds/ etc, the leafs are instead coils with one fixed-length trailing arm to locate each side. That's probably obvious to most members here. Instead of a bumpstop/spring, the stock applications have a bushing at the front mount--for much the same reasons our truck trailing arms do, and like Rob put back in his third-link to make a "soft-hit" panhard bar.

In racing, the front link is "solid"--sorta. Often the front floats. a system of chains and links like sway bars have are used to restrict the floating front location, making the hit softer still. It isn't always used--dirt cars are different from asphalt and even within the two a loose setup has different needs than a neutral or balanced setup.

Hopefully I oversimplified it enough that Rob will still sound like the genius he is, next to me. Good luck Rob, on the "soft-hit" panhard bar! I like the concept and wish I'd thought of it.