Corvette Leaf Spring - Racing Concerns

Racing Concerns

• Running stiffer springs left-to-right would require either asymmetrical spring mounts or an asymmetric spring. However, a few companies such as VBP offer kits that allow independent adjustment of spring rate and ride height at all four corners of the car.
• Regulations often prohibit the use of leaf springs; NASCAR does not allow them.
• The more compact shape of a coil spring can allow for variation in more suspension design and spring placement. Because a transverse leaf spring must span the width of the car, open-wheel cars are too low to use them. The leaf spring would have to pass through the gearbox or the driver's legs.
• Coil springs are not car-specific. A Porsche, an LMP, and a Ferrari can all use a spring custom wound on the same generic equipment. Custom composite leaf springs require expensive retooling and cannot be used across car models.
• The characteristics of coil springs in a performance environment are known, and racers will use what they know. Most race teams do not have adequate experience with leaf springs to use them in this capacity.

Carroll Smith is quoted in his book, Engineer to Win

If I were involved in the design of a new passenger vehicle, however, I would give serious consideration to the use of a transverse composite single leaf spring of unidirectional glass or carbon filament in an epoxy matrix. This would be the lightest practical spring configuration and, although space constraints would seem to limit its use in racing, it should be perfectly feasible on road-going vehicles, from large trucks to small commuter cars. (Since I wrote this paragraph the new-generation Corvette has come out with just such a spring to control its independent suspension systems-at both end of the car.)