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The TCA is the Track Control Arm i.e. the bottom arm that pivots on the centreline of the car and connects to the bottom of the Macpherson strut. It has a bush at the inner pivot point and one at the end of the anti-roll bar. I intend to fabricate something along the lines of what I described myself at some stage. I will re-use the TCA bushes as they are polyurethane, one for the new TCA inner pivot and one for the inner pivot for the compression strut just to reduce the NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness) as this is essentially a road going car not a pure racer.
If you look at the Japanaese racer featured on this web site you will see that this has a 'tension' strut which controls the caster. I'm not keen on the tension strut arrangement for two reasons:
a) The loads are transferred into what is the weakest part of the chassis that can suffer from a lack of torsional stiffness. The compression strut I described feeds the loads back into the chassis at one of the stiffest locations.
b) To effect anti-dive the line through the front and rear inner pivot points should intersect with the rear trailing arm line somewhere above the central tunnel and inside the car. The higher the intersection the graeter the anti-dive. If you rely on the anti-roll bar or a tension strut then to get a steep enough angle the front pivot point would need to be lowered closer to the tarmac, which will limit the angle to be acheived. With the inner pivot of a compression strut there is less of a problem of getting it high enough.
Clive
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