you show A body suspension on your site coming this year, is that still a plan or are you not doing the A body stuff at all?

Jody

Our level I stuff pulls 1 G
Level II pulls just under 1.1 G's
That's sustained G's not peak.

Track times were silly - we took almost 15 seconds a lap off on a 1.3 mile road course, with about 4 seconds of that attributable to wheels and tires. We originally were going to do a full comparison on the TV shows, but in the end the gap was so big we decided against focusing on it.

We'll get some opportunities to run against (i.e. smoke) some modern cars this year for some meaningful benchmark comparisons.

BTW, the fancy bumping machine is what top F1, IRL, Champ, ALMS, Grand Am and NASCAR teams use - or rather these teams use the same guys we work with. They also do alot of work for the OE's. That machine is so precise we could see differences in the tire pressures and how they carry over to the vehicles handling. All the tools we used were OE and professional race level, right down to a ride and handling specialist on the track and street - he's a guy that gets lent out to the OE's when they have issues to sort out on production vehicles.

As we get some more time and opportunities it will become very clear just what our stuff can do. Also as more of our builds and customers running our stuff gets out there.

Level I we're definitely not doing for A-Body at this time.

Level II for A body we're still not sold on the market and waiting for enough serious buyers to step up to do it.

Or to say it another way, we think our time and resources are better spent developing the next Level II for another platform altogether now - a non Mopar one......:rolleyes:

We haven't seen many (or really any) real high end builds of A-Bodies or people seriously campaigning them on track (as in road courses). We're very close to starting work on a drag package and that we would definitely do for the A-Body cars as well as it will be easy to do so.

Chassis stiffening as well we constantly go round on doing for the A-Body cars and do get lots of requests for it. We may have a way for developing that faster/easier, but there's only so many projects we can focus on at once and some of the others look to be more exciting/rewarding.

We will be announcing another new product probably next week that will be done for B, E and A body Mopars, but it's quite a bit less ambitious than some of our other stuff.

very cool, I was leaning towards an old school drag type car anyway. :)

Jody

Steering Column
 

John,

Can the E-body version be ordered without the ignition switch?

Nick

Not to argue at all about the competency of the high tech machine and its ability to measure small changes. But I had a teacher many years ago that would say "There's many a slip between the cup and the lip".

If your selling a very competent suspension system at a not cheap price, it doesn't make sense to me to not demonstrate over and over again, its superior performance. And I haven't seen a demo against a Vette, or a Viper, or a some other modern performance car that handles well.

Another idea would be to run your car against an E body with an Alterkation front and an Air ride 4link rear. Seems like the Air Ride guys like to do demos. Would be fun to see.

We could do it as a special order but would cost more than the B column w/ no key. We debated whether to offer them that way or not and decided it made more sense to just do it with key on column. It's one of the reasons we had these made up as it was alot of work for us to machine brackets etc., to move the key to the dash on an e-body.

If you noticed in my last response to your question, I said we would be doing more on track comparisons, especially with modern cars. In addition to the cars you mentioned we're thinking more like Ferrari, Porsche and BMW.

LOL - you're making it harder and harder for me not to tell you what I really think about the products you're mentioning, but that's just not something I do. If you get the opportunity to do it in person somewhere, just look at our stuff and the ones you mention and you will easily see significant differences.

I won't pick apart other people's products. However, engineering and testing aside, if you have a reasonable handle on suspension technology and product design (as in how it's been put together), you will see there are huge differences. Alot of those differences come down to cost and what the intended application is. I'd love to laundry list all those differences for you, but that's just not how I've ever done business.

As far as shoot out type stuff, we're all over it, but it needs to be at a real road race track (not an auto-X) and needs to be covered by a major magazine. I've been pushing several mags for some time to do a real shoot out w/ some simple rules - I've even offered to pay for the track.

One little anecdote for you on the technology. When we were running our Level II setup on the 4-post rig, the engineer that would review the runs would go through all kinds of data after each run and identified something going on at the rear of the car, but only at a specific frequency (the runs are done at varying speeds from big slow movements to very fast small ones). So they set the rig to run continually at that specific frequency and we crawled under the car to try and identify it. We did find it and ended up making a change to one of the mounts that's incorporated in the production units and the cars we build. Something like that you would probably never be able to find otherwise. I could easily write a book on all that we did, why it was done and what we found.

We've got alot going on and I don't want to let the cat out of the bag right now on a number of things that relate to what you're asking about. It's just going to take a little time.

Its ashame there isnt enough people racing A bodies on road courses, they weigh less then E and B bodies and seem cheaper to go racing with. The Early A bodies did well in the Trans Am series when it first started up. Chrysler should have kept using the A bodies in the Trans Am series, they probably would have faired better then the heavy E-bodies. Of course They didnt see the series as important enough to keep involved, i guess Nascar and drag racing was more important.:(

Thanks for the response, look foreward to yout tests, any thoughts on a sequential shift, high hp transmission for mopars?