03-24-2008, 02:19 PM
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very senior member
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Join Date: Apr 2003
Posts: 20,310
 Rozenburg, Holland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by culver
I speculate the reason the Corvette racing car uses the coils is due to ready parts availability. A racing coil spring is not vehicle specific. You specify diameter, rate, etc and you get a spring. Additionally, spring winding equipment is very flexible. So if say Hyperco doesn't have the exact spring you want they can make it relatively inexpensively and quickly.
However, the fiberglass leaf spring is application specific. As such it would be a custom fab job to make just a few springs for the car. This isn't a big deal for the production Corvette. What's 200 prototype springs when GM will make well over 100,000 of the production springs. In racing we might be talking about wanting say 10 sets of 10 different rates. Given that most racing dampers short of those used in F1 are designed for coil over applications, why not use what is readily available? In this case I really think it's a case of what works easily for the application vs what works in volume.
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very plausible, is there any official statement from Pratt&Miller or Corvette Racing?
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