Lighter car suspension advantage question

[iloveboost]

Is the main suspension advantage, that you can use less damping to achieve the same level of handling and body control? Therefore the handling and body control is improved over a heavier car, with the same damping rate?
Thanks.

[kambites]

Is there a suspension advantage to lighter cars? Obviously the suspension has to be set up different for a light car, but assuming both are configured correctly I'm not sure that overall vehicle weight makes any difference from a suspension point of view (except for stressing the components less, obviously).

Lighter cars tend to have better controls because you need less assistance to give sensible weighting and it's much easier to keep things like tyres and brakes within a sensible temperature range, but in terms of ultimate handling, I'm not convinced it makes a great deal of difference.

[anonymous-user]

In fact, generally quite the opposite.

This is because the enemy of "free" movement is friction, and no matter how hard you try, you always have some friction in your suspension elements (dampers/bushes/joints etc) and on a heavy car, this friction is a smaller proportion of the total loads.

In terms of ride quality, what matters is the ratio between sprung and unsprung mass. The higher this ratio, the better the car rides.

[PhillipM]

The advantage is in tyre loading, usually the suspension is usually technically worse as the sprung/unsprung weight ratio is worse.