In our last story about Suspension for our upcoming S13 Project car, we went over what we feel is the ultimate front suspension/angle kit for the S Chassis from GKTech. Now let’s go over the rear suspension offerings from GKTech which we also feel that it is perhaps the most well-thought-out rear suspension for the Nissan S Chassis, the Nissan Z32 Z car, and the R32 GT-R.
The multilink rear suspension design of the S Chassis, the Z32, and the R32 was Nissan’s first venture into the world of multilink designs and it was designed at a time when multilinks were just coming on the market from various manufacturers. It was an era when fast-ramping anti-squat geometries and active toe steering were thought to be the solution for many vehicle dynamic issues and the Nissan suspension of this era had all of those bells and whistles. Now that tire and damper technology and our knowledge of vehicle dynamics have increased greatly, all the extremes of the Nissan suspension geometry have been found to hamper high-performance driving. When we were competing with the S Chassis, we completely re-engineered the suspension geometry with all bespoke parts. This sort of thing was well beyond the reach of the average enthusiast but now GKTech makes it available to anyone.
GKTech’s rear knuckles are perhaps the best though out knuckles on the market for these Nissan chassis. They incorporate every single aspect of what we used to in our Pro Drift car. We used to have to fabricate these parts but now you can simply buy a better product than what we came up with off the shelf!
As a starting point, the GKTech knuckles have provisions for 40mm of lowering without messing up the geometry. This keeps your roll center in the proper place. The stock S13 rear suspension has the rear roll center migrate greatly with suspension movement. We have found this, and an excessively low roll center when the car is lowered makes a gripped-up car twitchy and hard to control in both drift and grip driving.
8 comments
It’s a little funny to me that you’re raiding gktech’s catalog because I came across them the other month and thought that they had a lot of interesting ideas in terms of engineering a whole system.
The mention of OEM ideas on anti-squat and so on just brings to mind a question that I’ve been mulling over – do you have sort of a rough geometry philosophy or with the production based stuff you do a lot with, are you too constrained to do more than “this is optimal within the limits I’m forced into”?
For me, I do not like anti-squat and anti-dive. For production, cars that have to have softer suspension and less sophisticated dampers. a small amount is probably ok. Nissan’s of this time had 30 plus percent, a stupid amount that has negative side effects. Things like bad wheel hop and squirting sideways when on the throttle. Nissan back way off on anti in the later models of these cars.
Do you have sort of a “this is the top priority” geometry-wise? I’m doing my tube car final suspension revision (which is to say, final before it turns into steel and I maybe decide to change it later based on on-track data) and decided to focus on “roll center in reasonable places and stays constant relative to CG” as kind of a way to narrow things down.
I understand if this is getting too into the weeds for a comment thread. 😉
In my opinion, nothing beats good old-fashioned unequal-length A-arms.
You should just know that double wishbone SLA suspension is ubiquitous and so far has not been reasonably improved upon. It’s simple, it’s light and easy to understand.
You can technically do trick stuff like put a hydraulic ram in an A-rm mount and give dynamic negative camber to outside wheels like the Mercedes Carver concept, but that’s obviously way too costly and complicated for a single person to do.
Someone went to a lot of trouble to make their product not look like the Driftworks Geomaster 3 rear knuckles.
That is because it is very different. The geometry is different for all the reasons we mentioned and there is axle clearance for 930-type CV’s. We used those knuckles before and they would not work with DSS axles.
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