Originally Posted by rhumb

While ride comfort may be an issue to some, I think a more important consideration -- for a performance car -- is ride compliance, i.e., the ability of a suspension to keep the wheels firmly on the ground over less than ideal (read: typical) roads. This is a critical distinction where us IRS adherents often get misrepresented by SRA mavens: that cushy comfort is the only real benefit an IRS offers. In reality, and on the majority of the rough and tumble roads in the US, the real benefit is performance and the ability to maintain a high level of handling performance off the artificial confines of a test track.

It seems the Shelby GT has made the typical big-three mistake of simply bolting on a bunch of very stiff springs, shocks and swaybars -- mated with fat tires -- to generate heroic test pads numbers that quickly disintegrate when challenged by real world roads. Sure, the ride might be flinty, but the real problem, as noted by C&D, is the serious collapse of handling performance on the roads most of us drive on. What good is a .90G skidpad cornering capability when in reality, your forced to tiptoe around most of the roads driven on lest the car get bucked off into the weeds.

So perhaps a go-cart stiff suspension is not the best approach to actual real-world, off-track performance but rather, something a bit more capable and resilient like the RX-8s, which seemed to, at least in the eyes of C&D, make up for the Shelby's prodigious straight line performance.