Imagine that you are driving on a nice smooth road. You drive up a hill and all of a sudden you see a giant pothole just a few feet away. Brakes as hard as you can and manages to slow your car down significantly, before your front wheels hit the pothole. ASS! BOOOM! BAH! Immediately, you feel that something is wrong with your car. You slowly approach the shoulder and look at your front wheels. Hmm, it looks like your front suspension is damaged …
As you wait for help, you notice that another car, exactly like yours, of the same make, model, and year, is approaching this pothole. Your driver is also braking. Surprisingly, you hear the sound of the engine revving just before his car hits the pothole. His car shook, but you don’t hear any really bad sounds. Look, this guy isn’t stopping to check his suspension, his suspension is fine and he’s continuing his ride!
Was his car stronger than yours? No. Was he driving slower than you? Probably not, it might be even faster. Could it be that you just didn’t realize that your suspension is broken? No. This driver knows the physics of braking.
It’s a really easy concept to understand. The weight of your car is distributed evenly between the front and rear axles. But when you decelerate or accelerate, this weight distribution changes. When you brake, the front axle receives more weight and when you accelerate, the rear axle receives more load. You have probably noticed that your car leans forward, when braking, and leans backward, when accelerating. It doesn’t seem like a big problem at first glance, but it is a big problem for your suspension. The front axle load when braking can easily be twice as high as when accelerating, or even more! And this translates directly into the load that the suspension has to bear.
So the correct sequence to follow in such a situation would be:
1. Brake as hard as you can until the last moment. If you have a manual transmission, consider lowering one or even multiple gears, to have the maximum possible torque on your wheels available for step 3.
2. Stop braking when you have enough time to complete Step 3, before the front wheels hit the pothole.
3. Push the accelerator pedal to the ground so that it hits the pothole while accelerating hard.
This method allows you to easily drive over deep and wide potholes without damaging the suspension. On smaller obstacles, you probably don’t need to push the throttle to the ground, and the key point is to stop braking just before the obstacle to transfer the weight to the front wheels. In this way, you use the laws of physics to your advantage, and your suspension will happily serve you for a long time.