Validation!

Earlier in the year, the Metroneige team had a bit of a debate on how to deal with "depowering" the front axle on our car: refer to this blog post. It was meant to have driveshafts going to both front wheels, which is nowhere near useful to us. Avid readers will recall that our solution was to remove the driveshaft at the CV joint, and retain the outboard portion of the CV to keep the hub/bearing assembly bolted to the suspension upright.

Fast forward to recently: I have noticed something while looking at a Pontiac Solstice up on the lift. Looking at the suspension uprights I saw this:




Those are the front passenger side uprights. Notice what GM did in the center, I see splines, indicating a FWD origin. The brake caliper is towards the rear, so I'm guessing they are just flipped upside down. Also indicative of this is the fact that the steering rack is on the forward side of the pivot point, and "upside down" as opposed to conventional. Note that the camera is "looking back" from the front of the car.

This brings me to the rear end:





Those are the passenger side rear uprights, which also look identical to the front. The front of the car is towards the left side of those pictures. If you squint a bit, you can imagine this axle-upright combination the way it was designed to be used: FWD! I don't have the correct angle to show you guys but they even use the tie rods as part of the linkages.

Gotta love parts bin engineering.

Conclusion: GM did the same thing to the front suspension on the Kappa platform cars as we did to the Metroneige! So I guess the concept is valid.