Why not use road car suspension geometry?

[adam2007]

why do some sports cars and formula one cars use push/pull rod. y not use normal car suspension with the spring and stut? what advantages do you get as why they use it? or is it manily down to its better at being packaged?

[marcush.]

road cars are build to minimise cost ,so concepts doing away with parts count-like the McPherson strut -is a welcome benefit to the beancounters and not really what the suspension guys want.
On the other hand a massive spring/damper unit in the airstream between tub and wheel would not really benefit aero and so a long time ago F1 started to build suspension with these elements tuck away from the airstream.
On the other hand you can manipulate characteristic in leverage and digression or progression to translate ever diminishing wheelmovements to something useful in terms of damperdisplacement.On the other hand all those linkages and joints will introduce flex in the system that you don´t want...so it´s a tradeoff as everything in engineering..

[RH1300S]

why do some sports cars and formula one cars use push/pull rod. y not use normal car suspension with the spring and stut? what advantages do you get as why they use it? or is it manily down to its better at being packaged?

Packaging and the ability to design in movement ratios and other things (like 3rd springs) also it gives them a chance to move stuff out of the air-flow.

Presumably, they can also feed the suspension loads into stiffer parts of the chassis.

Race teams can generally afford to design, make and maintain all those links. They can have expensive dampers that work within those constraints.

Road cars and a different set of priorities, cost and long life being pretty high up the list (also they generally have the height/space to use the systems they do without a big penalty).

[Just_a_fan]

Race and road cars have a whole different set of design goals and compromises. Race cars, for example, don't worry too much about ride comfort so don't need large travel suspension. They also don't have to maximise useable volume for the passengers either so can use space inefficient long wishbones. The need to maximise grip is not at the top of the road car designer's list but NVH will be. Vice versa race car designers.

Etc.

Etc.

[riff_raff]

As others noted, road car suspensions have different design priorities. Primarily, they are cost, packaging, and ride quality. An F1 car has no such requirements.

Road car suspensions are actually quite sophisticated, and the amount of engineering effort that goes into them exceeds that of a typical F1 car. Of course, an F1 chassis with a rubber-bushed, subframe mounted, multi link rear suspension would sure give a nice cushy ride!

[Just_a_fan]

There's the other point that the rules preclude many of the systems seen on road cars now. For example, McLaren's new road car is hugely more sophisticated than their race car in terms of suspension systems.

Given free rein, F1 cars would have fully active suspension systems.