It's hard to beat the utter simplicity of the standard Locost 4-link with parallel arms. It's NOT optimal, but it's very well behaved, generally speaking, and for a street car, a good choice. Packaging is also easy for a standard Locost chassis. If you build in adjustability to the links, it's also very "tuneable." The lateral locator is key to roll center height with the standard Locost 4-link design.
3-links are simpler (in theory), but also sensitive to the location of the top link off-center, and to it's length, as well as it's angle in space. I have no information on your Alfa Romeo, or what the engineers who designed were thinking, but it does sound like they used some of those considerations in their design. Now, will your stock 3-link set-up work as well in your Locost as it did in the Alfa? Unless you do an analysis of the Alfa design, that's pretty much unknowable because you won't know what kinds of torques and forces it was designed to produce and how that will work in your chassis, especially in combination with your front suspension design, which is likely different from the Alfa.
Probably the most modern, understandable, and compact book on 3- and 4-link suspension design is "Advanced Race Car Chassis Technology" by Bob Bolles. He covers all these issues plus a bunch you probably have not considered yet.
I hope this helps. It's a very complex subject.
Cheers,
_________________ Damn! That front slip angle is way too large and the Ackerman is just a muddle.Build Log: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=5886
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