When I was really into this stuff I had a wood furring strip that I used as my stand-in for a hose, but I also remember Fred moving past that test in favor of dropping the car onto the bench. I know that's what I moved onto because I felt that was a little easier to judge what was going on with the car.

One thing I've been thinking about that Fred never really got into that I remember is ride height. Now that carpet and turf has taken off we have cars dedicated to running on them and one setup feature those cars are optimized around is really low ride heights - I've seen as low as 13mm on a 2wd buggy. Every technical article I've read about full size car tuning talks about the benefits of lowering ride height, so it makes sense to get your car as low as possible. But one thing I've noticed - people still seem to be running higher ride heights on dirt. I think the lowest ride height I've seen for a dirt setup was maybe 19mm? Why aren't people running the lower carpet ride heights on dirt? This is a genuine question.

On my basement track that's low grip smooth concrete my car got faster and easier to drive as I lowered the ride height. I'm at 15mm right now. Going that low did get the roll centers a bit out of whack - lowering ride height lowers static roll center. Fortunately these newer cars are designed to be able adjust the RC's back up even at lower ride heights so that's what I did. The car drives great and doesn't bottom out even when I overshoot the landing on my big jump and flat land. I'm excited to get it to a real track to see how it performs and what problems I might run into running the car that low.

What does anybody else think? Does running a 2wd buggy as low as 13mm on dirt sound crazy or a good idea?