BMW 502 Race Preperation

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Suspension (continued...)

Carrera rules restrict us to retaining the stock springs, but they say nothing about adding additional springs. We have retained the original untunable torsion bar springs to satisfy the rules, but we have added new coil springs over the shocks at all four corners. At the rear this was done using a Bilstein competition kit, again supplied by Bilstein of San Diego. Rear mounts were fabricated at both top and bottom and then snubbers and straps were installed to prevent shock damage by bottoming or topping out. Front upper shock mounts were fabricated and then travel-limiting bumpers were calculated and installed. 

     Very late 502s came with a factory-installed anti-sway bar, but that skinny little bar was of no use to us. Jeff Ireland, of Ireland Engineering in Los Angeles, made us a set of larger sway bars from our measurements and we eventually installed them after we had made certain that the car handled reasonably well without them. We had some concern that we might create some sort of Frankenstein monster if we did everything at once and it was not well balanced, so we worked out the suspension initially without the sway bars connected. Once we were satisfied that the car was well balanced without sway bars, we welded in some reinforcement plates at locations on the frame where the sway bars would mount. This reinforcement was necessary because of a peculiarity of this cars frame. The frame is made of thin-walled heat-treated steel, strong and light for its size, but intolerant of compression forces perpendicular to the frame tubes. Another place these reinforcement plates were needed was at the roll cage attachment points. If not for these plates, any force sent into the frame tube might cause the tube to collapse. Once the sway bar plates were in, the aluminum mounting blocks for the sway bars could be mounted, and the suspension attachments for the links could be made.

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