Motorsport Wheel Alignment: Double Wishbone
Double Wishbone
01.31
00:00 | - Double wishbone suspension or double A-arm as it's also referred to, is usually considered to be the ultimate when it comes to a suspension arrangement and as such, this is the suspension design choice of the majority of purpose built racecars including open wheel racecars such as Indy Car and Formula 1. |
00:19 | The double wishbone design incorporates a pair of arms that approximate the shape of a wishbone, hence unsurprisingly their name. |
00:26 | Each arm locates to the chassis at two points which provides lateral and longitudinal location of the hub, which is then attached at the extremity of the wishbones. |
00:36 | The double wishbone suspension system will normally utilise unequal length arms where the upper arm is shorter than the bottom. |
00:43 | This design feature means that the upper and lower ball joint at the hub will move through different radius' or arcs and this can be used to control the camber gain as the suspension moves through bump travel. |
00:55 | The flexibility of the double wishbone design allows suspension engineers a lot of flexibility in terms of camber change curves as well as roll centre location. |
01:04 | This, couple with the ability to engineer a double wishbone suspension system to be lighter than the likes of a MacPherson strut, is why the double wishbone system is generally favoured for performance applications. |
01:17 | Compared directly to the common MacPherson strut system however, the double wishbone system is more complex and more expensive to manufacture and there are more bushes to wear out. |