The Royal Sport is a 1969 Camaro Convertible owned by Royal Purple Synthetic Oil , and it’s a machine intended to hold the road on the drag strip and on the road course. Rather than use the stock-style suspension, we’ve opted for a complete chassis under the car. We called on Jeff Schwartz for the chassis. In this installment, we are test assembling the rear suspension components on the Royal Sport 1969 Camaro to make sure they all fit and work right before we disassemble the whole works for paint and for powder coating.
Jeff Schwartz: "This rear suspension design is a triangulated four bar set up. There are many different suspension designs out there, and each one of them has their particular benefits and disadvantages. The beauty of the triangulated four bar set up is with a tight packaging situation like we have on the Camaro, you don’t need a stabilizer bar or a Watts linkage. It is a good all around set up that’ll give you good performance both in handling as well as ride quality."
"One of the main goals of the rear suspension is to properly locate the rear axle assembly under the car during all driving situations. To complete this, the chassis uses a triangulated four link design. "
"The upper links are the primary method of handling the side to forces and centering the rear end left to right. They’re also used to set your pinion angle. On this particular chassis we are using threaded rod ends and threaded tubes so you can pinion angle and center the rear end housing in the car very quickly and easy. All of the rod ends on this project are QA1 rod ends. We found that there are many types of rod ends out there, and for the safety that we require with this chassis, we recommend the top of the line QA1 pieces."
The rear axle assembly is another area of the car where the chassis builder has many choices on what components he can use.
The rear end in this car is a Speedway Engineering Track 9 unit, housing a center section built by Ron’s Rear Ends in California. The axles are 31-spline pieces from Dutchman. All of the components that we are using here were tailored more for the street/track use rather than hard core track use. “In the typical speedway car, they may throw all the parts away after one race, and we need this thing to last more than 500 miles!” Schwartz added. “We’ve got the more durable street type stuff in there.”
The Royal Sport Camaro is being built to drive so the part selection has to be able to handle street and track usage.
“The intended use is going to be a mix between a street and track car and it has to have excellent driving characteristics like all of the projects that we are involved with here at Schwartz Extreme Performance . The QA1 rod ends are Teflon lined and that will give a little bit of damping to any transfer of road harshness and vibration to the body. This car here, once we get it dialed in, we’ll be able to take it to the drag strip and have it perform. We also want to take it to events like the Year One experience and hammer it around the road course and really show what the car is made of.” Schwartz quipped.
So is it as easy as just bolting parts together?
“Yeah, it’s very easy to put together a project with a bunch of bolt on parts. You could have the best components bolted onto a car, but if its not dialed in and tuned, it’s not really going to perform. There is more to putting a chassis of ours underneath a muscle car than just bolting it in and bolting it together. In a future episode we’ll show you how to dial everything in. There are numerous adjustments here so we are going to take you through those and show you how that affects the performance of the car. “
“It’s impossible to design the actual perfect you know suspension because it all involves theory and also personal preference. So, you know, just because the engineering works out perfectly on paper doesn’t necessarily means that you are going to like how it feels on the track” Schwartz explained.
The team at Schwartz Extreme Performance have applied a similar theory to a variety of car applications not just the 69 Camaro. This isn’t the only version of this chassis. They also have a version that fits the GM “A” body car and the first one of those that is going to be hitting the street is on a project called Devisation Wagon.
“Imagine a 1964 Chevelle 2 door station wagon with 15 inch diameter brakes and 6 piston calipers and 20x13 inch tires in the back, but still with the coil-overs and so forth it’ll have a real nice ride and with all this race car technology this things is going to absolutely shred around the race track… and it’s a station wagon!”
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