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Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey
With soft springs and bars that allow a good amount of roll, the roll inertia of the body can have a noticeable effect as you swing it hard from a turn in one direction to the other. This is a reason that SUV's typically have rollover problems; if you're going straight and crank it into a hard turn in one direction, the SUV will probably be fine... but if you then immediately crank the wheel back over for a hard turn in the other direction, the sprung mass builds up so much inertia as it's going through that large roll angle that it overcomes the fully compressed/twisted resistance of the springs and bars and just carries itself on over until the C.G. is outside the track width and it overturns. I don't know if that's a completely technically correct explanation, but it should be close.
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For the most part, I don't beleive the CG moves much until you run out of suspension travel, or one set of wheels lifts off the ground, and it is the roll that cause one of those two events.
But what is roll? I beleive roll is the CG applying it's force/momentum through the leverage of the susension all the way to the tire contact causing the body mass to rotate. Now you have rotating mass, in addition to the momentum of the CG when you run out of suspension travel.
Does that sound right?
I'm not sure a stiffer suspension would be much better because the bad driver input that caused the roll would instead probably cause a spin, that same driver would overcorrect and as the car spun in the opposite direction, undoutedly something like a Kia, Daewoo, or curb would act as a pivot point at it would roll over anyway.
