Your illustrations show transverse mounting of the spring/dampers, but once you start down the bellcrank road there’s no reason you couldn’t change the axis of rotation to accommodate a parallel longitudinal layout. You see this quite often in open wheel formula cars. This would give you more latitude in the length of the suspension units.
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Good point, thanks. So many options once you move the damper away from the control arm
Also, looking at your illustration, it looks like you are using and actual upper control arm, not the standard Jaguar practice of using the halfshaft? If I were starting with a clean sheet of paper, I would use tension rods for the suspension loads instead of compression rods. Because compression rods have to be designed to survive buckling, pure tension rods will always be ligher.
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The context of that illustration probably isn’t clear, it goes back to another discussion - it’s actually the front suspension, where we’re using the upper control arm as a rocker to drive the damper.
At the rear though, we are using an upper control arm in place of the halfshaft for a couple of reasons. It gives us more freedom with the camber curve and coupled with a true lower control arm it gives us control of steer angle. We no longer need the diff to be part of the suspension so we have truly independent suspension in all three planes.
Your point about tension rods is a good one, I’ll take a closer look since apparently we’re tearing up the back end again!
Thanks for the suggestions.
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I’ve posted an update and picture of a concept layout in the “questions no one was asking” forum, as it seems a more appropriate location for such fringe activity
The question no-one was asking - #31 by CliveR
