Our friends at AFCO Racing Products and Dynatech Exhaust have once again made their way down to the highly-anticipated No Mercy IV heads-up doorslammer bash at the South Georgia Motorsports Park this weekend, where their support staff is on the manufacturers midway showcasing all of their suspension, cooling, and exhaust products, while also providing customers with free shock dyno services, along with on-site rebuild and re-valving services. While that level of service and support is certainly big news in and of itself, the AFCO team is making waves with the unveiling of a brand new product targeted at race cars just like those competing in the wild small tire eliminators in Georgia.

Upon their arrival this week, AFCO pulled the wraps off a brand new, double-adjustable strut that’s being developed for the Fox body and SN95 Ford Mustangs, which virtually rule the roost, so to speak, in the small tire racing world. The new strut is a steel-bodied part that AFCO plans to offer with a very broad range of valving options to suit 1979-2004 Mustangs of virtually any walk, whether it’s a low four-second Outlaw Drag Radial car or a weekend warrior bracket machine. These valving options will run the gamut from full-soft to full-stiff, while the compression side of the strut will feature AFCO’s proven BNC valving to help control the front end of the car after a wheelstand.

“We’ve been highly successful at putting this valving in our standard shocks to control how the car reacts when it comes down from a wheelie, so that it doesn’t cycle and bounce, bounce, bounce, and unload the rear tires,” explains AFCO’s Eric Saffell. “So effectively what we’re doing here is transferring that BNC valving into the struts so when the car does land, it touches down softly and you don’t see a spike in the driveshaft speed because the front end unloaded the rear tires.

 “The last thing you want is a driveshaft spike from significant changes in weight bias from back to front, so we can absolutely say that this strut works in that capacity,” Saffell goes on to explain.

On the suspension side, the range of adjustment is broad enough that AFCO will be able to let the car weight transfer quicker on marginal tracks, with valving options available to fully lock the front end. And highlighting one of the key features of these new struts, this process is handled hydraulically, and the strut is proving to be very effective at con trolling the front end travel at launch.

“This was one of our primary design parameters — we wanted to be able to address the weight transfer, and do it hydraulically rather than mechanically,” says Saffell. “In addition to the broad adjustment that the AFCO strut is going to have on the rebound side, it’s also going to allow the racers to better dial the car in to the race track to achieve maximum weight transfer without big wheelies, because as power ramps in and the power comes in, it’s going to climb and cause you to abort the run. You want maximum weight transfer without maximum wheelie, so we can control the rate of rise of the front end and still promote traction and weight transfer without experiencing the power wheelstands you see with the faster cars.”

The strut utilizes the tried-and-true rebound and compression adjustment mechanisms found on AFCO’s double-adjustable shocks, and is a proven system that many of AFCO’s customers are already quite familiar with. The proven fluid control system has also been carried over from their other components.

“We’ve put all the right pieces together with this strut, which was engineered entirely in-house, and our staff just knocked this one right out of the park,” Saffell proclaims proudly.

AFCO is already in very fast company in their on-track testing with a couple of front-running competitors in the radial tire realm, as the strut has runs in the 4.3-second range at well over 180 mph to its credit. Prior to testing in the field, AFCO’s engineering team put the strut through rigorous testing algorithms, cycling the strut to temperatures north of 200 degrees over an extended period of time in a simulation that represents more than a lifetime of use on a ¼-mile dragstrip. This was done, as Saffell tell us, to ensure that the seal, the O-rings, and fluid control were all performing as they were engineered to in a test that simulated a harsher environment than a strut would experience in its lifetime on a 1/4-mile drag strip.

AFCO’s engineers are continuing to test the strut in the field and at their southern Indiana manufacturing facility, the company has targeted a potential release in the first quarter of 2014 as racers begin preparing for the season ahead. More information on pricing and availability is expected to be released at the PRI Show in indianapolis in early December, and we’ll be there to report  on that and a whole lot of other great new products from AFCO and Dynatech.