You shouldn't reinvent the wheel but if you find yourself in that position, at least learn from existing wheels. On that note, when we started designing the suspension of the VeeDub ReDub platform from scratch, we decided to gather data from several existing cars instead of starting with nothing.
One such car is the new (mid-engine) kid on the block: the C8 Corvette. The longitudinal layout of the engine limits the takeaways from studying its suspension (especially at the rear) but we were able to gauge the basic front end geometry like camber, king pin inclination, scrub radius and camber gain to get an idea of what Chevy was working toward.
The car we gained the most useful information from was the Lotus Elise. This makes sense with the Lotus Elise being the most like the VeeDub ReDub platform in terms of weight and size. To gather as much data as possible, we bought a salvage titled 2005 Lotus Elise.
We measured as much as we could on the car and recreated it all on the computer to study how the suspension moved. The suspension wouldn't work perfectly in the VeeDub ReDub platform and had to be tweaked to work with our dimensions but what we ended up with is very heavily Lotus inspired.
We're using tubular control arms with spherical rod ends on the inner ends and ball joints on the outer ends. The aluminum uprights will be a custom CNC machined assembly designed to receive the front bearing hubs from the Mk7 GTI. Shocks are QA1 single or double adjustable coilovers.
Keep an eye out for upcoming blog posts to see the next steps of developing the VeeDub ReDub platform. You can also subscribe near the bottom of this page.