Citing what they see is a trend toward race cars with greater front weight biases than in the past — particularly in heads-up cars where heavy superchargers, gear drives, and multiple turbochargers are becoming the norm — AFCO Racing engineers have returned to the drawing board to develop a new range of valving options for their shocks, which they plan to have available to the public in early 2017.

“The trend is certainly more prevalent with heads-up racers as they’re trying to develop more performance, but we’re seeing more opportunity to work with Stock and Super Stock racers, as well as fast bracket racers with applications that are more nose-heavy or tend to wheelstand more often,” says AFCO’s Drag Racing Manager, Eric Saffell.

“We know what goes up must come down, and in order to make a really clean run, we want the front end, when it settles, to not cycle up and down — or dribble — as the car continues down the race track. We want the car to land, come down a little below ride height, and come back to approximately ride hight and not do subsequent wheelies.”

Saffell and the AFCO engineers have seen the weight bias on full-bodied cars move from traditional numbers like 52/48 more in the direction of 55/45. “A lot of this comes from heads-up classes, but it’s not uncommon to think an iron-headed big-block engine in a factory muscle car application with the motor more forward of the spindle than one would like, for the weight balance to be heavy toward the front,” he says.

Saffell and company find that it can be difficult to slow down the compression of the shock as the car comes back down and in turn quickly settle the car. As such, they’ve been working to develop new piston and shim stack designs for their shocks catered to just such kinds of race cars— be they nose-heavy, frequently wheels-up, or both.

“If there’s extra weight on the front of these cars, we see it effect how the shock controls it. If there’s a few hundred extra pounds on the front end, and the shocks were initially designed for less weight than that, we see more front end travel than we prefer, and when it lands, will go down too far, there’s a fair amount of toe-in change (which can scrub off elapsed time), and an extra bounce of the front end upon extension. So, we’ve taken what we’ve learned from seeing this and re-worked the shock internally to help control all of this mass coming back down to earth.”

AFCO plans to have the new valving options available by December, with availability early next year.