Quicker? No.
Allot quicker? Definitely no.
Common sense? Apparently common sense isn't so common any more.
On bad roads with plenty of bumps and holes, there will still be more road in between then there are of them. And who's to say most coilovers (such as my Ohlins) aren't valved to absorb (to a certain point) any movement faster than the typical cornering compressions?
Rally cars with their tarmac setups are far stiffer (both the tires and the suspension itself) than almost any car on the road. Have you seen the type of paved roads they drive on?
Returning to that Legacy I posted: The rally one I posted at the end was the Prodrive/Rothmans Legacy that Mcrae drove. Keep in mind, he won the British Rally Championship in both 91 and 92 which included driving in plenty of bumpy, paved, back roads, all with the setup on that photo which is far stiffer than almost anything on the road today.
Firstly, stop throwing rally videos at me. Especially not ones from my own country. I've been right up to these cars when they've been flying past, you've probably not been within a thousand miles of them.
Theres a massive difference between a purpose-built rally car that costs upwards of £500k to anything you can get on the street.
You'd be surprised how soft rally cars can run, mainly because they're so much lighter (the Group A Impreza you put a video up of weighed in at around 1050kg I seem to remember despite tens of meters of roll-cage and safety gear to weigh it down; a road-going WRX at the time was nearer 1200kg) so don't need to run as stiff to get the cornering capabilities they're after - it's the same principle as the Lotus Elise, which has a fantastic ride because it's light enough not to require mega-stiff suspension to make it handle.
So those setups aren't necessarily stiffer - and certainly not up to circuit standards. They're just very well set up, and often tens of thousands of dollars will have gone into making sure they work a certain way on a certain surface.
And apparently you're right about the common sense thing, because you aren't getting it - for a given wheel and tyre combination and an equal rolling radius, your ride
will improve with a smaller rim diameter and taller tyre. I'm not talking about spending thousands on coilovers because I know that with a bit of tweaking you'd be able to get some good results, but I never mentioned setting up the whole car in my post.
I am simply talking about wheels and tyres.
That's it.
And on that road-going Legacy, you'd be far better off batting down a country road on the standard wheels it was on rather than anything bigger,
unless you're prepared to spend thousands setting it up.
Is my point clear
now?
