P6B racing suspension

R

RACER

New Member
Hi all,

I have a 1974 P6B which has been in the family since new, under covers for some 25 years. I'm rebuilding her as a wide body racer inspired recreation,
my first job will be to design area such as suspension, does anyone have infromation on P6B racing supsension designs/setups?

cheers
 
May I refer you to this section http://www.p6roc.com/p6index.asp

some where in there you will find an article by an NZ chap who rebuilt his car for race including suspension mods.
Also there is a great deal of excelent info amongst it all.

Perhaps some one knows the direct link to the article I refered too, was recently posted on this forum about a month or 2 ago.

And of course welcome!!

Graeme
 
G'day RACER,

From one Sydney sider to another,..welcome to the forum.. :D

Your project sounds most interesting,..by all means please post some pics when you have a chance.

All the best,
Ron.
 
Welcome aboard RACER!

Just how far do you want to go? I'd start by wetting your appettite by going to the P6ROC forum and looking in gallery/Krich where you'll find some tasty pictures of of the Team Willpower car.

There are at least several proper racing P6's in Australia including one of the factory cars, so I should see if you can track them down.

In the UK there is one circut racing car which is prepared by Alan Ramsbottom at Leighton Buzzard (tel no and contact detail in the links section).

On this forum you will need to look at Sowens posts in the project section for his actions on fitting a Jag diff and wide wheels on the rear.

As introductory comments:

1 Lowering the front or changing any of the front geometry is quite tricky. Plus the front suspension has a large camber change in bump. Very stiff shortened springs will work OK, shortened but soft won't. Note that the ride height you choose will have a big impact on static camber. The anti roll bar can only be taken out so far because of its location, if you want a really heavy front roll bar you're going to have to add a suplementary one at low level. It is possible to give the front a small amount of additional negative camber by washering out the location point of the front pivot arm on the bulkhead. Any alterations to the front suspension should be preceded by fitting the "Australian Kit" from the Rover Car Club of Australia. This substantially stiffens the front inner wing and chassis rail and gives re-inforcement to the shock absorber mount. Result is noticeable improvement. Shocks are built upside down - ie going over a bump stretches them, so you really need bespoke ones from someone like Alan.

2 At the rear there are two issues. First is space in the wheel arches of the base unit and their interaction with the rear door shut faces. Any move to go beyond 205 section tyres requires substantial mods to the base unit and doors. Read Simon Owens posts carefully. Obviously the wings are no problem. Second issue is the diff. The diff itself is very robust, not so the input shaft and the output flanges. Copy Simon's conversion to a Jag diff! Note that all the cornering forces are taken into the base unit via the diff, not via the suspension. Diff location is therefore the key issue for succesful cornering! Don't abandon the de dion. This is the Rolls Royce apogy of rear suspensions and nothing from BMW, Jag or (spare us) Holden comes anywhere close. If you want a tad of negative at the rear just machine the hub faces or insert wedge washers.

Is that the sort of thing you wanted to get you started?

Chris
 
What a response. If only I was at a stage where I could consider that!

Sowen's project is a pretty impressive feat of engineering, if you're interested in modding the rear end you couldn't get a better blog to give you an idea of the work involved.
 
If you do decide to copy the Jaguar diff mod, remember it is an immensly heavy bit of kit, and pulled the rear of my car down by an extra inch :shock: . It is also slightly larger, although the discs are similar in size, so depending on how well you can mount the diff, it will always hang down low, but on the plus side, it should be good for 300-500bhp depending on the overall weight of the car and tyres used, and comes with lsd and a wide selection of ratios.

Being as you have a v8 shell, it would be possible to build a subframe picking up on the rear diff mounting plate and the front suspension crossmember mounting points and not do any cutting or modifications to the shell, although I cannot gaurantee this as I'm using a 2000 shell.

Here are two articles about the original racer on Rudiger Wicke's site.

p6 racer 1 article

p6 racer 2 article

Reading those articles, it looks like the orginal front suspension was deemed just strong enough by the builders, although there is some scope for upgrading for fast road/racing or just simply the extra loads of fitting wider tyres. The rear would benefit from some extra reinforcing around the top links where they locate on the side of the boot floor, and depending on condition of the elbows, the upper and lower arm mounting points may require some attention. They seem to have a habit of failure from rust, although as it sounds like yours has been dry stored for 25 years, you may not have that issue, but better safe than sorry.

Good luck, and post up some pictures :wink:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top