Hey Z,

To answer your questions, plus a few extra thoughts. I will try to be brief but it doesn't always work out as I like to be sure I am understood!

Q1. There are tripod style cv joints at both ends of the drive shaft to (obviously) transmit drive and accommodate the "extreme" drive shaft plunge. The CV at outer end was moved out as far as possible and became housed in the upright. This was to make the shafts as long as possible in order to reduce drive shaft angles.

Q2. That is tricky one... The car that was pictured on page 9 was the car the team and I built for FS 2009. That was four years ago and my final year at uni. Since then whilst occasionally thinking about such things I have never really sat down to seriously give it thought. Real life and other such things tend to get in the way! But a few thoughts I have had...

1. I have pondered the idea of how to mount the spring/damper units low down, preferably on the floor. But the obvious problem being that the pivot is effectively at floor level and that leads you to using an upwardly angled push rod.

The key benefit to this in my eyes (other than the obvious CoG etc.) would be that you could really easily build what would basically be a ladder frame chassis that all the suspension would work off. This would be easy to make with excellent precision and you would have a rolling chassis in no time. The rest of the structure could then be made as light and as minimal as possible just to comply to the regs.

2. Mono-shocks and air springs. Kind of conflicting again. I have long pondered air springs as a cheaper and lighter option. Also, we used cane creek shocks/springs and there was basically too much adjustment. Most teams I think struggle for testing so a more basic shock system set up well I think would be better than a fancy system set up badly.

A mono-shock system would also reduce cost. As you are basically de-coupling roll/bump with the LL I think a mono-shock system would work well, although I admit I haven't actually given this more than 2 minutes thought at the moment. If you ran a mono though I doubt an air shock would be beefy enough to cope with the weight of two axles.

3. The whole thing just needs building with a bit more finesse and precision than we managed! But we did the best with the limited time/resources we had.

4. More recent Lancaster teams split the top and bottom wishbones. They still pivot along the same axis but they are separate arms. Our systems the top and bottom arms were welded together at the pivot point. I guess this just makes fabrication easier for them but I'm not sure.

Cheers,
Malcolm