BMW 502 Race Preperation

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Suspension

In stock form, the BMW 502 does not handle badly when driven as sedately as its designers intended. It uses 5-foot long torsion bar springs at each wheel with conventional twin tube hydraulic shocks giving a nice soft ride for the German autobahn. Cornering? I guess it corners about as one would expect for a 3500+ pound car with 8o-series tires, soft shocks, zero camber at front, solid axle at rear, and no sway bars.

So how do we normally make a stock BMW street sedan into a BMW track machine? Why, we go to a catalog and order up some Bilstein shocks, some firmer springs, maybe a coil-over shock set-up, adjustable camber plates, big sway bars, urethane bushings, etc. Wait, what's this? There are NO parts for this car in the catalog!! Oh well, if it were that easy everybody would be doing it, right?

So, what did we do? Well, we measured the stock suspension carefully to determine suspension travel at the shock mounts and how much room there was around the shock. Next we had the car weighed at each corner and then we called the Bilstein competition department in San Diego to talk about the possibilities. Limited, very limited. Rear shocks weren't too bad---new mounts would have to be fabricated due to changes in length and mount type, but that was to be expected. Front shocks were a problem. The rules dictate that the front suspension can't be changed substantially from stock design and this suspension doesn't have very much suspension travel. It is made from good material but it is spindly. The front shocks mount exactly half way between the inner pivot and the outer ball joint, meaning that they have half as much travel as the suspension out at the wheel. Half of not much is REALLY not much, and that makes the valving requirements for the shock absorber really critical. The only shocks Bilstein has with the needed absorption qualities in the small suspension travel specified were their Champ car shocks. And that's what we got---essentially Indy car shocks. Beautiful pieces that came equipped for use with coil springs over the shocks.

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