"...wasn't engineered for it" is a pretty vague reason... I mean, most MGs
weren't engineered for radial tires, either, but that doesn't stop folks
from fitting them, and for good reasons.
I thought it would be obvious that there's a difference between
improvements to tire technology and making a structural change that the
vehicle was never designed for. I mean, if you want to nit-pick it wasn't
designed for an electronic fuel pump either, or halogen lights, or
intermittent wipers, but a thinking person would recognize that there's a
difference between upgrading an existing component to take advantage of
current design and technology and swapping something out that fundamentally
changes how the car was designed.
How 'bout I don't be vague? They did not engineer the vehicle structurally
to support tube shocks. This is particularly important on a unibody or
monocoque design vehicle where load and stress from road vibration must be
dampened across the entire structure.
Any advantage in ride must be weighed against the long term structural
impacts. There are no shock towers or hard points to mount the shocks on and
as such, in the long term you can expect to see the effect of it in the
body's stress points, like where the dog leg meets the rocker as well as the
mount points for the shocks, (seen both).
There are a few things that you can do to mitigate it. Performance sway
bars and a chassis stiffener for instance, but by that point you have
travelled for afield from the original intent of just "upgrading" to tube
shocks and you'll need to make other modifications to compensate for the
change in ride.
Or you could just slap them on, pretend they ride the same, and twenty
years from now a stranger will curse your name when a restoration shop tells
him that the structural cracks in the body can't be safely repaired.
~Scott Allen
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