by GR » Sun Apr 25, 2004 11:49 pm
The MacPherson (strut) setup always has shock absorbers as part of the assembly (as you can see, shock is not strut, shock can be itself or part of a strut). Cars have shock absorbers because its primary objective is to prevent the car from oscilliating (back and forth) and prevent wheel hop (wheel floats in mid air) which can be dangerous. To make it easy for all of you, your Solaras have less parts of the suspension to deal with, with the tradeoff of only moderate handling.
Take, for example, you bought some Ebay shock absorbers (which never existed for the Solara), and you installed them, only to find out that your car is having an orgasmic experience while on the freeway. For the car maybe, but certainly not the people sitting in it. That's basically what the shock absorber does.