Van Compass Rally Inverted Strut

The Van Compass Rally Inverted Strut addresses a known weak spot on Sprinter Vans out-fitted for adventure. In case you haven’t been paying attention, MacPherson strut suspension replaced traditional truck-based suspension designs in cargo vans over the last decade. Thanks to bean counters, and engineers looking to maximize interior space. While that’s great for church vans and package delivery professionals — it creates a pain point for the adventure van community.

 

 

A MacPherson strut combines multiple suspension components into one. This helps reduce material and assembly costs and frees up space, yet, it creates a compromise for the off-road van aftermarket. The strut needs to allow the suspension to compress vertically, dampen movement, rotate in the horizontal plane, and handle all inward/outward loading of the wheel and tire. That’s some major responsibility for one component to handle.

 

Larger Oil Capacity = Precise Dampening

With traditional strut designs these requirements are handled adequately. But, if you travel off the beaten path, additional dampening and material strength is needed to handle the steering and suspension loads. Especially, if you’ve fitted larger tires and wheels for better traction and ground clearance…. on a van outfitted with all the creature comforts of home — that’s packed for the long weekend. Now, stock struts are working way harder than they were designed to.

 

 

Understanding the need to control theses forces, aftermarket suspension companies add additional shocks with high-tech valving, ‘coil-over’ springs, and SUMO bump stops — but, they still rely on factory-style Macpherson Struts: a basic shock body with a clamping bracket. Thinking outside the box, Van Compass settled on a design configuration popular in the world of rally racing, power sports, and mountain bikes: an inverted damper.

 

Ideal leverage Ratio. Less Deflection.

Working with Falcon Shocks on a truly unique product, the inverted design flips everything upside down and uses a specially designed damper body as the load bearing shaft with a precision machined lower-strut body — housing oversized bearing surfaces. Now steering inputs are precise and notorious sprinter sway is thwarted. Most importantly, however, oversized wheel and tire movement is controlled when off road without comprising on road comfort. Read what Van Compass has to say about the technology and benefits here.

 

 

Perfectly Complements Existing Van Compass Stage Kits

The Rally Inverted Strut is backwards compatible with Van Comapass Stage Kits. If you’ve already installed a 4.3 or 6.3 kit on your Sprinter Van with adjustable shocks, it’s recommended to go with the non-adjustable version. If you’re starting fresh, the Rally Inverted Strut is designed as a direct OEM replacement for any Sprinter van. This includes everything from stock passenger vans, luxury coaches like the Airstream Interstate 19 and 24X, and heavily modified adventure vans. They are compatible with stock height and lifted vans.