Does anyone actually use bag for competitive use? I've heard some debates here and there about bags vs coils and how they are taking over, but. I don't know of any professional team using airride suspension. Thanks.

 

From my own experience from working on Mercedes Benz, which does use a lot of Air and hydraulic suspension setups, they seem to use the hydraulic version on the more sport oriented models. Although the funny thing is on their top sports cars, SLR,SLS,Black series, its all standard coils.

Anyhow, hydraulic suspensions react very quickly, you can fine tune their characteristics, you can eliminate swaybars. The downside is they fail and leak a lot, are very expensive to replace, and imho a hydraulic suspension wont hold up to regular track abuse like a standard coil setup, which I think is one reason of Im sure many, they aren't so popular on the track.

Now something like what GM has done with the magnetic ride, Ive heard good and bad. I don't know much about those but that's another style that's out there.

 

I know some old school muscle cars use air ride for track use and have had good results

 

Never heard of that. Also I always just assumed airride was strictly for show.

 

air ride suspension seem to be catered more for comfort and someone needing a height adjustability feature. Air suspensions are even worse than hydraulic suspensions. Those airbags always leak.

 

I'm such a noob, didn't even realize there was much variance. When you say hydraulic suspensions your referring to old school style hydros?

 

No this isn't like the low rider hydros.



The hydraulic suspensions are pretty advanced and react really fast. With all the computer aids and response times they are able to ditch sway bars completely and do everything with just the struts. The system uses hydraulic fluid pressurized by a belt driven pump, controlled by a computer. As far as the handling aspect, they are awesome, the car can stay flat around turns pretty well. These things are not sturdy, at least not on German cars. Ive had to replace quite a few for folks who have simply swapped in larger wheels. The decrease in profile on sidewall was enough 'stiffening' of the suspension to cause these struts to prematurely fail and give the customer $5K repair bills.

The air suspensions Benz uses, airmatic, are powered by an electrically powered air pump feeding air to the lines. The air in those lines are less than 10 bar iirc. The issue with those is that the air likes to leak out of those struts and rear air bags very much. There is actually even a tolerance for how much is allowed to leak. If you leave your car parked for say a month, expect it to be normal if its bottomed out.

These are my experiences with these two types of suspensions, Nothing really to do with evos, but this experience has led me to the conclusion that maybe these are at least some reasons we don't see them really popular in motorsports.

 

Ah ok, yeah we owned a mercedes with the airride. That new hydraulic stuff sounds pretty awesome. I figured there would be some big time teams running something like that but I guess it's far more cost effective to run coils. Thanks for the help brother, nice username btw

 

Thanks. Also keep in mind that alot of times their are rules against stuff like this as well. Im sure they can be made race ready.

 

I want to make a note that many (not all of course) of these setups which are hydro or magnetic etc... are for the dampers, they run conventional springs, something for you to consider.