I built a GT 6 to those rules with a great deal of help from Lanky, Bob
Tullius and Bryan Furstenau of Group 44, and I can say for certain that
threaded shock with springs over shocks were NOT allowed by the rules,
nor were they used on my car of the group 44 car. The GT 6 used a
single leaf spring in the rear that also acted as a control arm, and
there was no way of substituting a coil over without changing the method
of control arms and the number of springs in the rear.
The front could have had such a system in theory but was not done on any
of the GT 6's of the era. We ran a SPAX fully adjustable shock in the
front, no coil over adjustable height, and SPAX in the rear.
There was one very important trick in the rear to keep from breaking the
diff housing or the axle hub. Since the rear suspension had an
interference/binding motion, it depended on the rubber bushings to allow
compliance without binding. Everyone wanted to put a solid bushing in
the spring eye and the result was a bind in suspension travel and the
breakage mentioned above. To prevent this we all hid (illegal) a heim
ball joint in the center of the spring eye, spaced it for no fore/aft
movement and bolted it up to look like the stock unit.
We also adapted Datsun 510 half shafts to get rid of the GT 6 units,
which were sliding spline but with no bearings. Always would bind on
hard acceleration and cause rear end hop. The Datsun units needed to be
modified slightly, but when installed provided a sliding shaft on
bearings that would NOT bind on acceleration. That was a trick I
designed and when I told Lankie about it I thought he would kiss me.
Bryan had complained about the axle hop for many races and the new units
(legal) changed all that.
Cheers, Larry Dent
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