Suspension - "Big IS better..."

The front suspension has been through a few major revisions.  The reason for this basically revolves around the large side-loads that are generated on the Macpherson strut by the wheel/stub axle combination.  This creates a high side-load point at the top of the damper canister, where the upper seal resides.  The telescoping design also requires that the piston is somewhat smaller than the canister, creating another weakness.  A-arm cars do away with this nonsense by locating the wheel with an upper/lower arm setup that restricts movement to an arc, with all loads on dampers being longitudinally down the shaft.

The car originally came with a dual shock setup on the front.  The inner shock was mounted on a double-shear bracket welded directly to the middle of the lower control arm (conveniently made out of pressed steel), whilst the top was retained by a single pin through a bracket stitched to the engine bay wall.  I vaguely recall that the inner shock was a stock HQ front damper, whilst the outer was a KYB in the standard strut.  The original anti-roll bar had also been retained.

The first modification was to remove the inner damper/shock combination.  The combined spring rate was just too much for the weight of the car, with the resultant poor ride and inability of the front wheels to follow the terrain.  The KYBs lasted a single race, so they were replaced with Bilstein cartridges.  Unlike the Datsun, which had solid rose-ball upper shock mounts, an attempt was made to retain the rubber/nolethane bushing.  In hindsight, this was a very bad decision, and we had nothing but grief with the things (always being torn out) until we eventually replaced them with solid mounts.

The second major modification was the installation of the much stronger, more readily available (in new components), better supported VT lower arm, steering knuckle and hub.  To this we bolted a custom made strut, holding the Bilstein damper.  Unfortunately the side-load on the Bilsteins was too much for them and after 4 pairs of the things (they all had bent pistons) we decided to bite the bullet and get some good shocks.  Now some of the Group A rally cars run a shock (of one sort or another) made by a guy called Murry Coote over in Queensland.  He runs a joint called Proflex and made us a set of Macphersons to suit a VT Commodore (with a little more travel).  The ally top caps were made by Rob (a mate of ours who works for a mob called Geocam).  Together, this combination performed flawlessly, and we've had no further problems with either the shocks or the ally tops.  In fact, the things are so strong, they even survived a collision with a tree that bent the wheel back into the driver's footwell (see the Breakages gallery).

Having broken quite a few studs out at Hyden, the original Commodore studs were replaced with a 9/16" version.  This required redrilling the front hubs, rear axles, all discs, and all rims (including all spares).  This was quite a laborious process, however there were no longer any problems with studs snapping off.