I have a big and boring program to calculate this for me, but in principle it is fairly easy to work out. The idea is that the tractive force at the contact patch creates a couple around the CG of the body, tending to rotate the nose up. A cunning designer alters the effective line of force in the suspension so that an additional force pushes up as well as forward. This rotates the nose back down.
Imagine a pure trailing arm with a horizontal arm, pin jointed at both ends. The tractive force will be applied to the body at the height of the arm, which will be at the height of the wheel centre.
Now tilt the arm upwards at the body end. There will now be an additional vertical force at the body, becasue a pin jointed arm can only react forces along its length. This can be used to prop the rear of the body up, compensating for the nose up pitch due to the tractive force.
If that were all that was happening then life would be simple, but in practice the springs get compressed by this and have to be accounted for (although less as the squat gets reduced), and of course not many people use pin jointed pure trailing arms. Finding the effective line of action of the force for other geometries is just 2d geometry, if anybody can remember how to do that.
<eddie> what do you want to use the car for? road, track or both? What do you like about the XKE suspension - ie why did you choose it? What power and weight will your car be?
Here's a link
Here's another one, which I found later and is a bit clearer
So it has a single, wide, lower lateral arm, and uses the halfshaft as the upper arm, and has a separate pin jointed trailing arm. Toe compliance is mostly controlled by the lower arm bushes.
I don't like using the halfshaft as the upper arm, but it obviously works. The disadvantage is that your camber control is limited due to the close spacing of the two arms in front view. If you wanted to adjsut your toe compliance and camber compliance you'd be hard pushed since the same bushes are used for both.
Having an arm totally dedicated to reacting the longitudinal loads is a very good idea.
Castor is reacted by the vertical rate of the lower arm bushes, I can't get very excited by castor control, it looks fine. Cheers
Greg Locock