My 1994 track day car has VRB brand front spring set up, and today I noticed - at the racetrack (!) - that the tip of each side of the front leaf spring does not have what I believe is supposed to be a rubber coating. All I know is that most of this rubber has broken away. I hate to sound stupid, but I’m gonna ask anyway - should the car be driven in this condition? Do the spring ends need to be covered in some kind of coating to avoid direct contact between the leafspring material and the aluminum a arm? I think the car has actually been track driven with some of this rubber already gone, but I just happened to notice the situation today, because it’s possible a new piece of it came off. In the research that I have done today, I have learned that VBP is out of business, and even when they were in business one of the things that they were pretty bad about was providing any sort of detailed instructions or owners manuals for their parts.

I looked at a picture of the stock spring and the entire ends are not coated in a plastic/rubber material like the VBP product, but just seem to have an under-pad material only.

some degree of common sense understands that having some sort of rubber pad in between the leafspring in the aluminum makes sense, but it seems that the stock solution of a padding material in between, And the aftermarket VBP with the entire tip sleeved in rubber just seems something that would be destined to fail/deteriorate in a relatively short period of time.

I’ll include two pictures. One shows how much space there is on the top side of the a-arm for the spring to travel within, laterally. The other picture shows one of the end tips and you can see that there is some remaining rubber on the edge on the left side but no rubber anywhere else.

This spring it’s self does not have any cracks on it that I can see. The issue at hand it is the lack of the rubberized coating, and how bad of a problem is it.

Thanks!!!

 

There should be something between spring tip and control arm, to protect spring. VBP sold spring tip pads and it appears it's there in first photo. 2 part 3M adhesive was recommended to attach them. I doubt it would fall out. Bore scope might work to view between spring and arm to look for pad. Otherwise front suspension would have to disassembled to allow control arm to drop away from spring.