In Defence of Squat (Yes, Really)

Subtitle: *For Off-Road FWD Vehicles With An Eye Towards The 90's Honda Civic.*

Do you hate me less now? No? Fair enough, nonetheless, hear me out and read some of the benefits to owning a mildly squatted FWD (some of this applies to AWD as well, some does not) offroad car.

Now, to be clear, when I say squat, I don't mean take AWAY any stock travel that you have on the rear suspension, I mean, lift the front more than the rear, and/or don't worry if the rear end of your car is sagging a little.

Reason #1: Damage protection. 

Have a look at the undercarriage of this EG civic (Definitely not my car, not even my picture, thank you internet)

Its a little tough to see the front end of the car, but from this picture you can see most of the major components that are vulnerable to damage from rough offroading. Here is the list of things I worry about, from most important to least important on the undercarriage:

• Oil pan
• Radiator support & by extension the radiator
• Transmission casing
• Fuel tank
• Brake lines/fuel lines/ebrake cables/exhaust
• rear eyelets where the lower control arms mount to

OK, so I'll tackle this from two approaches, the mostly stock car, and the heavily modded offroader. First, consider the mostly stock car:

The first two things on the list are far and away the most fragile items on the undercarriage; the rest, while important and damageable, are much hardier than those. You will notice that they are also both in front of the front wheels on the car. This means, that due to the layout, if you raise only the front and not the rear of the car, both of those things get further out of harms way than if you raised both the front and rear of the car equally. This is easily illustrated by thinking of the car as a third class lever, where the rear wheels are the fulcrum, the front wheels are the effort, and the oil pan and rad support are the load:

Now, yes, by squatting, you do put the fuel tank lower to the ground than you would have it if you were to lift it equally, and yes, you are going to have a bad day if you puncture a fuel tank, but consider this. Fuel tanks are considerably sturdier than, say, your oil pan, for a couple of reasons:

• They are made from much thicker metal (and usually have a thick layer of undercoating on top to further increase cushioning)
  
• They have strengthening ribs in them where oil pans do not 
• They have a much larger bottom size so when they take an impact to the tank, they are much more able to deflect and absorb that impact and possibly dent rather than puncturing like an oil pan will.

To back this up with an anecdote, I have offroaded both of my Civics extremely hard through some very punishing terrain with no protection to their fuel tanks and they have never given me any sort of problem. To contrast that, the VERY FIRST time I took Tom Civic out for a rip on a moderately rough dirt road with no skid plate, I punctured my oil pan and nearly destroyed my engine.

One final note re: oil pans vs fuel tanks. If you puncture your oil pan and don't notice, say bye bye to your entire engine. If you puncture your fuel tank and don't notice, well, you have to buy a new fuel tank. Time to upgrade to a $150 amazon fuel cell...

Which, actually is a great Segway. Now, for a moment consider a heavily modded car.

You want a badass offroader? You can just remove the fuel tank altogether and replace it with a fuel cell of whatever size you like put in the hatch or trunk of your car. No more fuel tank to even puncture back there. Same goes for the exhaust, you don't even need it! Run a hood exit or a fender exit. Eyelets are easy to armor up with some additional reinforcement/deflectors and if you are really concerned about fuel lines, you can run those through the cab as well, now that you've got a badass fuel cell. All that's really left on that list are ebrake cables which are easy to tuck up out of the way, and brake lines, which are solid steel recessed into a channel in the body, but if you are SUPER worried can be armoured up with their own little aluminum/steel/UHMW skid plates. In fact the ONLY things you can't really change the locations of are the things we are protecting by squatting: the engine, transmission, and rad support.

Reason #2: Durability/suspension angles.

Consider for a moment how the especially front suspension of a Civic is set up. Its a fairly classic double wishbone, on my beloved EFs I have a front crossmember/traction bar and a pair of radius rods holding my lower control arms straight, on EGs and EKs, they have an L or triangle shaped lower control arm with the brace going backward and accomplishing the same as my radius rods, keeping the LCA straight, not allowing it to move front to back on the car.

Now take that suspension, working while you fly along a dirt backroad at 80+km/h. You hit either a big rock, a water bar, or a ditch. If your car is straight and level, you have just introduced an incredible amount of load trying to push the front wheel towards the back of the car. This has to be absorbed by the tire, then the wheel, then the knuckle and the tie rods and rack, then the lower control arm, and then the chassis that it is bolted to. All of these things just got subjected to massive load in a direction that has no "give". It is very easy to bend or break any of the things I just mentioned. Now consider for a second this very poorly drawn side view of a hypothetical squatted car vs a normal car.

You can see that on the squatted vehicle, the castor angle of all of the suspension has increased, which means when you hit that rock or ditch, while most of the load is still there stressing all those components, a portion of it has transferred to the suspension's ability to travel upwards and this reduces the strain on everything else. This is actually an important difference maker when you are beating the absolute crap out of a vehicle that was never intended to deal with this kind of suspension loading, over and over again, at high rates of speed. A similar effect is noted on the rear suspension when it also hits that object.

Reason #3: Approach angle.

Of all the angles on an offroad FWD car, approach angle is the most important. Sure, breakover and departure are important too, I guess, but approach is far and away more important. It also happens to be the worst angle, on account of all the shite hanging off the front end of the car.

If, if you can get your front wheels up and over something, and carry the tiniest bit of momentum over said object, chances are excellent you have just successfully tackled that object. What with all the weight and traction being on the front wheels, the rear will usually just glide right over whatever you happened to make it over. Breakover, not really relevant, departure, not really relevant. 

Look again at my terrible hypothetical squatted car.

Check out that enhanced approach angle! Not only that, if you have a skid plate, the squat will help you slide up and over things you may not have been able to tackle before. Yes, your departure angle suffers. If you are that concerned about your departure angle, which you shouldn't be, cause the front wheels will just drag the rear bumper over anyhoo, just cut away the back of your vehicle until you have a satisfactory departure angle. There's nothing important back there, not like up front where all the mechanicals are.

Reason #4: Jumping.

If you've gotten this far, its because you are a wild person and you definitely have either already jumped your car or want to jump it. Have a watch of this video of me jumping Deathwagon:

 You will notice two distinct landings. The last couple where Deathwagon essentially faceplanted into the ground, landing on what amounted to her skid plate and jolting both her and myself very hard. 2+ years on and my back is STILL sore from this. It can't have been great for her chassis either, though she's never complained. The other landing (the first one) was beautiful, she hit the jump, glided through the air nose up, gracefully touched down on the rear wheels first, absorbed some impact, and then came down in the front. Beautiful. Graceful. Didn't hurt. That is how you want to land a vehicle, for the sake of your own spine, for the longevity of the car, and for the handling upon landing, so that you don't crash into something.

Well, squatting a vehicle helps put it in that posture and sets you up for success from the moment your wheels leave the ground to the moment they come back in contact. This is actually one of 2 main reasons that Prerunners started being squatted in the first place (The other being they have much longer travel suspension than stock, and its much harder to accommodate additional uptravel on a factory-ish chassis in the front than the rear, so their only option was to go down more on the front.)

Of course, just like camber, the scene kids got ahold of it and took it waaayyyyyy too far, ruining it for everyone. Exactly how a little bit of camber = beneficial for handling around corners, and stance kids sTanCE dUDe!11! excessive camber makes the car basically unusable in any conditions, a mild squat is beneficial and people squatting their vehicles like crazy again makes it basically unusable.

Too long; didn't read: Small amount of squat makes your car better offroad. Large amount of squat makes you a dick. Squat accordingly. 

Stay Frosty, friends.