Hi, i'm new to the forum, wanted to ask a simple suspension question, which I haven't seen addressed on any of the other big suspension threads here (or my teammates).
I have read TTW and part of RVD, so I do know the basics, this is more of a FSAE specific thing that I was hoping to hear some experienced opinions. Might be totally amateur, but gotta start somewhere right?
By rules, we are required to have 1in of up, and 1in of downward travel. From what I understand you don't need much more than 2in (my team's current car has about that much) travel front and rear - rear a bit more.
So, that would mean that to meet rules the car has to sit halfway into its travel - from my limited experience tuning the 15' Ryerson car (of which I did not design the suspension, and the designer is pretty much unreachable for help), that means
a pretty soft setup (from looking at the driving, and a bit of driving myself - also installed linear pots, haven't got data yet)
So heres my question - is a half droop setup inherently too soft for our kind of tracks? (with sufficient antiroll) or is that a reasonable setup on a racecar like this?
Also, seeing teams have pretty stiff roll resistance, is there even any value in having that much spare droop, performance wise?
Thanks in advance for the responses.
Figured I should have an intro -
2nd year mech at Ryerson, suspension Co-lead along with another teammate for this year.
Car took 2 years - 1 for design, 1 for build (painfully inefficient time management). I was there for the build, and so did not even meet the guy who designed suspension -
he graduated, and didn't keep in contact. This year i'm doing a partial redesign, of which one thing is adding adjustability to get some good real world testing of different characteristics.