Everyday Modifications for Your Triumph by Iain Ayre

Author:Iain Ayre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crowood Press

For anything bigger than a 2500cc carburettored six, you’ll have to get serious about the rear end. This is a Jaguar XJ6 rear axle on a custom frame under a 5-litre GT6.

Almost all suspension tuning starts with lowering the car, which lowers the centre of gravity, reduces body roll and usually involves stiffer springs, again reducing roll and improving stability.

5

suspension and steering

The first sentence of any chapter in any book on Triumph suspension will be about sorting out the suspect swing axles. There was, and is, a ‘camber compensator’ available for the rear suspension that is a quick and easy semicure for the wheel-lifting issues. It consists of a single leaf spring that attaches to the underside of the diff, opposite to the stock spring on top of the diff, and the ends go to anti-roll bar-type links on the outer suspension.

Lowering the ride height with blocks between the diff and the spring also helps, and changing the spring for a flatter and stiffer one resulting in more negative camber also helps. Buying a Mk IV Spitfire or a Mk II GT6 with factory improvements is another partial solution.

My Midge kit car weighs almost nothing at the back, and although the original transverse spring had half its leaves taken out, the back end was still wayward. With a Vitesse engine and an all-up weight of something like 1,300lb (590kg), the car was too fast for sub-Herald handling to be acceptable.

I changed the whole assembly for a Dolomite live axle. The Midge had its own new chassis but it was still based on Triumph geometry: the new axle was mounted on trailing arms going between new upper and lower mounts on the axle casing and outriggers on the chassis. It was located sideways by a Panhard rod from the chassis to the axle, and it was fitted with coilover shocks, so the choice of shock hardness and spring rates was limitless. It has been a successful conversion, although it’s fairly radical. If I were doing the same thing again, I would now think about using the back end of a Mazda MX5, which is independent, well engineered and strong, and comes in a very tidy and convenient subframe.

For anyone new to car tuning, the hardness of uprated shocks can provide a bit of a surprise. The different brands vary in their stiffness, but many are a lot more brutal than you might expect. If you’re just looking to sharpen up your car a little, and replace old standard shocks with slightly more stiffness in the suspension, you might not like what you get at all. Even on minimum settings, some shocks are too hard. If the adjustment only goes between concrete hard and granite hard, that’s not much of a choice. I’d definitely recommend joining a Triumph club in principle anyway, but one of the benefits is that you can ask to be taken for a drive in cars fitted with various shock absorbers and see what they feel like. No petrolhead will ever refuse to take somebody for a fast demonstration ride in their top toy.

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