While the drag cars of the 1960s and 1970s were nowhere near as complex as the machines of today, there was still a lot of engineering involved in getting them to work the best they could down the track. Among the neatest developments during the drag wars came from Chrysler in the form of their vaunted Mopar super stock springs. These things were designed to get cars hooking and booking and if you can believe it, they provide a link between the past and today’s advanced cars of the present.
If you have ever seen a powerful drag radial car work on the drag strip you know that one of the things that happens as the power comes on is that the rear of the car actually rises instead of squats. The reason this happens is because the idea is to drive the tire into the track to keep traction. This is done now with all kinds of cool stuff like advanced shocks and rear suspension geometry but back then when stock and super stock were a way of life and stock suspension pickup points were part of the program, engineers had to work with what they were given.
Chrysler engineers designed special rear leaf springs for semi cars and those are what ended up being sold as the vaunted Mopar Super Stock springs. As you can see here, the design of the spring causes it to do virtually the same thing (in a basic way) as today’s most advanced small tire drag racing cars. Pretty awesome, right? We shouldn’t really talk about these in the past tense as they are still used successfully by LOTS of sportsman drag racers in the bracket racing/stock/and super stock ranks than you could imagine.
