The old F1 cars used trailing arm front and rear suspensions and then in the mid 60's switched to the double wishbone suspension on the front.
Why did the trailing arm suspension go out and who is credited with inventing the wishbone suspension?
MG used double wishbone suspension on their r-Cars as early as 1935 and they were possibly not the first to have that arragement.So F1 of the 60´shad nothing to do with their invention.
Having a great interest in cars and aero, but having no understanding of many of the mechanicals...
What does a trailing arm setup look like and how is it different than a double wishbone. Is there any advantage to trailing arm relative to it? I tend to read that double wishbone is perferred by 'drivers'.
Can't direct you to a pic of a trailing arm suspension off hand, but it basically 2 rigid rods pivoting around a point fore of the axle and the rods are rigidly connected to the axle. Horrible camber control, roll steer this. Are you talking 3link, 4link or something else, as there are so many names for about the same type of suspensions with slightly different configurations for each. I foyu have the chance to look at a NASCAR type car they are of this variety.
The trailing arm suspension I am refering to has two equal or unequal length radius rods that connect to the wheel and and back to the chassis. They run perpendicular to the car chassis. The trailing arm alco connects to the wheel but runs parallel to the car chassis. The trailing arm acts as the structural member of the suspension the radius rods control the wheel camber.
Look at any old F1 car from the mid 60's and you will see a trailing arm suspension at the rear. Why did they go out of favour. Was it because of the increased grip of the new tires and increased braking loads that prevented the suspension from being rigid enough?
the trailing arm arrangement leads to a zero camber change in bump or droop ,not too bad ,as long as the chassis itself does not roll itself.Nowadays it seems almost possible to revert to the trailing arm layout,the roll centre at ground level with the ultra low CG heights of
todays cars making the leverage not that big a problem.this layout could put the main masses of the car closer to the CG also...anyone out there daring to do such a layout?the aero gains could be worthquite a bit too.
Didn´t see much need for camber gain with the sorts of rollangles of recent years....looks like current designers rely more on detail development and shy away from radical approaches.
If I'm not mistaken the "trailing arm" suspension described as "2 unequal radius rods and a trailing" arm is the forerunner of the current 5 bar multilink suspension. The "trailing arm" is structural in that it carries all the longitudinal loads (braking or acceleration forces) from the tyre to the car. The radius rods are for camber control but they also provide lateral structural rigidity - the cornering loads are carried by the radius rods in tension or compression rather than by the trailing arm in bending. I'm not 100% certain about 5 link suspensions myself as the trailing link causes its attachment point to move vertically in an arc, while the lateral links mover vertically in a straight line - perhaps for a very limited range of travel the arc is approximately a straight line.
If anyone in F1 today returned to a trailing arm suspension it would require a major rethink of the whole chassis as the loads have a completely different geometry at the rear and the front suspension would have to carry the majority of the roll moment - not a desirable situation as the front of the monocoque has a much lower torsional rigidity than the rear, unless they compensate for the smaller cross section with more fibre layers...
of course you could not stick such a layout to a current car,but think twice...of course you could...It´s a matter of designing the suspension arm with the flexures bolted to the bottom of the chassis ,something like a T or V shaped carbon moulding,I happen to remember even that one John Barnard had something like that in the pipeline when he was a ferrari Man last time...
What I was referring to was transferrring forces from the suspension members to the chassis: with the current double wishbone arrangement onthe rear, longiturdinal forces on the tyres are carried as a couple of LATERAL forces at the attachment points on the gearbox, with some longitudinal reactions. The gearbox is fairly rigid laterally and can cope with these. The lateral forces on the tyres are carried as axial forces in the wishbones directly into the gearbox.
In a trailing arm setup, longitudinal forces would be transferred to the chassis as longitudinal forces at the attachment points - probably the bottom of the sidepods unless you wanted to increase the wheelbase. Lateral forces at the wheel will become LONGITUDINAL forces at the attachments for a triangulated trailing arm. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, the sidepods are designed for lateral loading (ie. side impact) and not significant longitudinal loads - which would require that the structure of the sidepods would have to be strengthened significantly to carry these new loads.
The point I was trying to make is that an F1 chassis, being a fibre composite structure, is highly anisotropic and is designed to accept very high loads applied in certain directions at certain points only. Its strength in other directions at other points is (probably) not as high as in the design directions - I stand corrected on this one. So changing the suspension geometry means the chassis must be examined to see if the
