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Quick racing discussion
All this is well and good, but there are situations where drastic measures are required to reduce or eliminate lift. For instance, lift increases with power and torque. So what do you do if you have 650 hp in a light asphalt drag racing sled?
This is the problem for some of the most radical sleds that show up at AmSnow’s annual Super Sled Shootout in Martin, Mich., each September.
We spotted some interesting Pro-Line suspensions in the pits. Pro-Line controls the load on the track by independent springs and shocks along the rail. The forward acceleration force still goes through the suspension arms, but they are now very long and mount almost all the way to the rear. The angle is so flat that the total lift force is very small even with a 650-hp turbo engine turning low sevens in the quarter mile. On a sled with 200 horses you’d use shorter arms for drag racing.
Conversely, oval racers want some lift to give good acceleration off the line, but in the turns they want more weight on the skis for maximum steering grip. Snocross racers may actually want some lift on bumpy tracks so they can control the skis and lift them over obstacles by using their engine’s torque.
But because of all the different requirements, you cannot make a suspension that does it all. As a result there is great variation in suspension design, and suspension development has been accelerated by our sport’s diverse racing applications.
Racing improves the breed, whether it is snocross, oval or drags, and each application requires a suspension with its own particular design to meet the challenge.