DOES THE HDK SUSPENSION K-MEMBER HANDLE BETTER THAN A T-BAR SUSPENSION?
I understand, some will obviously never get it.....and I'm A-Ok with that.
See Denny, this is where you lose me. Of course you're "A-Ok" with that. The people that don't understand suspension geometry are the ones buying your kit. You've said before none of your customers ask questions about it.
And that's why I couldn't do what you do. There's no way I could sell a product without analyzing all of that geometry first. But that's exactly what you did. Sold a product for years without even knowing the suspension geometry was worse than what the factory stuff is. I mean no, it's not dangerous or terrible or anything like that. It's realistically not bad or different enough that most people would ever even notice. But the numbers don't lie, and all the numbers anyone has ever posted for an OOTB coil over conversion are worse than a stock system with only a 1" drop.
How about if HDK, or any other manufacturer of a coilover conversion wants to REALLY show a handling advantage we do a shoot out? Let's say, each competitor puts in 10k cash into the pot, everyone weigh the same, scaled percentage the same on all 4 corners, and everyone run the same wheel/tire combo, (some spec tire) and we can run a professional road course or asphalt oval? Fastest lap time takes the pot? What yall think?
I mean I think we all know the answer to this. If you set the cars up similarly enough it will be on the driver and the tires.
In the real world two cars are never set up closely enough. With effort put into tuning the geometry won't be different enough to make a significant difference at the kind of events that these cars get used at. I mean, if you grabbed an F1 driver and some real time equipment and had it so ONLY the suspension geometry differences would make the time difference, maybe it would tell you which set up was better for the track you were on that day.
Really, I think the most telling part is not a SINGLE coil over conversion seller actually advertises their out of the box suspension geometry. Not even RMS, and we know Bill Rielly knows how to do it, because his numbers are the ones that we use most of the time for the torsion bar system. If the geometry was slam dunk better, you know he'd publish it.
After that, you can just look at the results of all the competitions. Optima, Moparty, SCCA, whatever. You still see torsion bar equipped cars coming out on top more often than not. And yeah, driver skill, car set up, yada yada blah blah. But if coil overs were hands down better, well, are all their drivers that bad?
I already put up. I picked a guy who had no big luv for the coil over / rack conversion but had what I needed.....an open mind. He found that it made his Gen III conversion much easier all while increasing room, dropping nose weight and gaining adjustability.
Sorry if that isn't good enough for ya......BTW, maybe I missed it, but ya' got any pictures of your contributions to our hobby?
Right, a customer,
@racerjoe, was the one that finally did some basic geometry analysis. And after doing that, added a 2" extended ball joint to get the camber gain on your system to be SLIGHTLY better than a bone stock torsion bar system lowered 1".
Increasing room? No. Just changing where some of the components fall. They make headers to fit a GIII with torsion bars. In fact, they're the same headers all the guys with coil over conversions use. What's the gain there? Slightly less annoying installation? That doesn't change anything at the track. Every time the header question comes up the guys running coil over conversions say they're running the same headers as everyone else. If it got you some better, cheaper header options then great, but does it?
Dropping nose weight. Yup, covered that too. Like 30 lbs manual to manual, about the same if you compare HDK power to a Borgeson set up. Only the stock power steering is a big jump, but yeah, most people that are building handling cars don't run stock power steering do they?
Adding adjustability? What? The SPC UCA's I run are the same as Joe's. Ride height? No, that's not any better than a torsion bar set up because the ride height is easily adjustable with the factory stuff. Track width is the only thing in your system more adjustable than a torsion bar set up with a good set of adjustable UCA's, and even that isn't all that helpful because it ends up being about the same as what we all run with the factory stuff to clear everything that you have to clear anyway. And the narrower you make the track the worse the geometry gets, so how much of an advantage is that again? The ability to make the geometry even worse?
The Green Brick decimates all.
Yeah, um, 32 years ago.
The 'brick's set up was good for when it was built, but, it's a pretty basic set up. A couple of the first iterations of my Challenger's set up were similar. But compared to how my Duster is set up now? Nope. Just the street tires I run are substantially better than what they used then, and then everything else follows from that. How the green brick was set up is where I would start someone that wants a basic cruiser with decent handling manners.