Here we go again...
I can't really be bothered to go into detail really tonight, it's late.
Ok, so what is handling?
It's the car's capability to carry out a variety of tasks.
To assess a cars handling you need to look at what it is required to do.
for instance road cars are going to have to deal with pot holes, bumps etc, and will have a great compromise made for comfort. you can have hard low suspension that can cope with the bumps and keep good grip, but then it's too oncomfy for 99.9% of people.
If a road car can't handle taking bumps, jumps, potholes, ridges etc at a reasonable speed without jumping about all over the road, losing grip due to bottoming out, taking off, bouncing you into a hedge, then it doesn't handle very well does it.
It might GRIP well on a smooth surface but that's not much use, you should see some of the roads around here. Grip is a totally different thing to handling, it's just the amount of G force that a car can create during a cornering exercise. A car can corner faster or slower with the same amount of grip, depending on how it uses that grip, what the handling balance is for instance
Then that's just talking about the ride height in terms of travel. What about talking about how the ride height affects the cars suspension geometry. from the factory it's set up so that it is optimum for road driving. the idea is that under cornering the geometry changes to try and keep optimum contact between the tyres and the road(camber caused by compression/extension depending on which side it is) and then there's caster & toe as well. when you lower the car, the geometry at ride height will have changed, the lower you go the further from "normal" it goes. This will affect not only cornering ability but straight line stability and tyre wear. People think more negative camber is good. Why is it good? If you have the suspension setup correctly, the inside tyre in a corner will have positive camber, this will keep more of the contact patch on the road, and the outside will gain some negative camber, as the car is rolling. The suspension gains this when the car rolls, from standard geometry. if you start with lots of negative at ride height, you will end up with lots of negative on the outside tyre, which is good, but you'll still have negative on the inside, which will lose you grip ultimately, the more grip you can get from each individual tyre the better. If there was no body roll there would be no need for camber.
Centre of gravity? It's pretty damn low in a saxo anyway, and it's not the be all and end all of handling & grip. Given the lower the centre of gravity the less weight transfer one will get, hence less roll, but then lowering a car where the roll centres move differently front and rear will move them, say the rear roll centre stays the same if you lower a saxo, and the front drops, until the wishbones are level, then when the wishbones start to point upwards it won't go down anywhere near as fast. You are messing with the handling balance of the car by altering one roll centre but not the other.
You want the wishbones to be totally parallel to the road at ride height ultimately.
Then there's steering arm angles & arc,s which are affected when lowering or raising the car. Ideally you want the steering arms to be parallel to the ground when at ride height.
I'm getting really bored now...
Anyway, look at the real rally cars, they are using totally different steering racks, they use fully adjustable wishbones, they use uprated torsion bars and anti roll bars, they use fully adjustable alloy top mounts to tweek the front end geometry. And they don't sit slammed on the floor, they have a respectable ride height, and i'd bet that they have perfect suspension geometry, they were made to handle properly by people who know what they are doing, not some bloke from essex who races in stock hatch and thinks having his car lowered 60mm feels best. I've had a LOT of experience with saxo suspension, and can tell you right now, the most balanced saxo i've ever driven by far, was 20mm lower than standard with suitably hard front springs, uprated torsion bars etc, even on road tyres it was leagues ahead of any of the lower setups i've had. and i know exactly why, because i designed the setup after reading a lot of suspension tuning books, written by people who setup real race cars, and using the theory together with lots of testing.
My new track setup is going to sit 25-35mm below standard.
Is it all about centre of gravity still?
