Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Cassani
Decades ago a discussion of ride height, camber and so on saw one of the participants tell the group a suspension can be configured to lower the COG.
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You can create a geometry that lowers the car's COG a very small amount on roll but it's a physical effect that's hardly significant.
Quote:
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He claimed Lotus (Chapman was alive at the time) designs for a COG that is effectively a foot or more below the road. I still have not been able to determine whether this claim has merit. What do you think?
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I've seen some fancy (all mechanical) designs that, with cornering forces, make the car roll in the opposite direction than you would expect. I think there was one in the Costin-Phipps book of the '60s, and I've seen another one more recently. But - it's all playing with geometry and linkage. You could do it more simply by having a roll center that's above the COG, but that creates a very unstable situation that actually raises the COG on cornering. (Think VW swing axles front and rear.) At this point, technology makes roll-less cornering pretty easy to do with active suspension, but apparently most people aren't very comfortable with how the car "feels". Some years ago I worked out an approach that required only a small amount of power to achieve near-zero roll, but it never got past the paper stage.