Okay - not a whole lot going on here yet. For the uninitiated, I'd like to get this going as a discussion of different suspension types so as to highlight the benefits of the standard suspension of the 124 series versus the suspension available in the 124's contemporaries.

But for the time being, suffice to say that these cars really leave things like their English, Australian, American peers (Cortinas etc) for dead. The average English car of the time had MacPhersons with NO adjustment apart from toe-in on the front and axle-tramp leaf springs on the rear. The original spec (eg 124 Sedan and AC coupé) had a "torque-tube" rear end with two trailing arms, a Panhard rod and a sway bar. Later models (everything else) dropped the torque-tube for a more conventional prop-shaft and four trailing arms with the Panhard rod. If you know anything about rear-ends and getting power to gound, 5-link rears are the WAY TO GO. Curiously, they dropped the rear sway bar too.

Whilst not a suspension issue, the real Achilles' heel of any 124 is the diff. It's a conventional, open, spider-geared crown-and-pinion diff running 4.3 ratio in the 124 Special and 4.1 in everything else. When pushed, the spider gears have a tendancy to just BREAK (yes I've done it before). Lifting an inside rear wheel while cornering is a classic example of this. Accumulate as many diff centres as you can. Alternatively, you can buy aftermarket LSD's ex-US for a bundle of money or buy new Lada Niva (the 4wd car) parts for about the same bundle of cash.

Front-end is the same in all variants. Double wishbones with upper and lower ball joints holding the king pin, and coil springs holding up the lower wishbone (coils on the rear too). Sway bar too of course. As you can see, all pretty hi-po stuff. But the best thing is that it's all able to be disassembled and reassembled with relative ease unlike less well engineered cars from the period let alone today!

Modifications? Well all models can do with a bit of lowering. Coupé springs in the Sedan and Special do the job perfectly for the street. Polyurethane bushes are available all round in a variety of brands and do a much better job than rubber. I generally run mine at 0 to 0.5 degrees of negative camber. For the street that's just fine and with polyurethane that's more than enough. Thing with this is that the lower you go, the harder it is to get negative camber without fitting longer bolts on the lower wishbones.

If you want to go racing, there's more mods needed to get more negative on the front wheels but I'll get into that later. Basically, it involves the other trouble area of the 124 - the front cross-member.

More later...