Cobra Clearance question

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by ldmclain

I had a 2009 ZRI recently that would barely scrape ...

Thoughts?

It really doesn't matter how low a car sits, it's the angle of the change from, say, a horizontal plane to the sloping driveway and the distance of your lowest body part to the tires (usually just the two closest tires). Even if a car is only a half inch off the ground, it's not gong to scrape on a flat surface. Likewise, it's not going to scrape going up a steep incline once it gets all four wheels on that incline, and it might not scrape once it has the closest two tires on the incline. On most Cobras, the sensitive transition is when you have all four wheels on one plane, and you start driving up the slope. The oil cooler shroud can sometimes hit the ground until you get the front wheels on the slope. A good "cheater way" is to come in on an angle and get one wheel up on the slope and then turn hard to get the second wheel up on the slope. It's really a basic trigonometry question, but the less than four inches of clearance that I have on my oil cooler shroud on my ERA rarely scrapes on anything if I'm going slow enough, and if I come in on an angle I can get over, up, or down safely on just about everything that's not ridiculously angled.