What Shocks?

I figure it is time I figured out what's going on with the suspension. Especially if I wish to go autocrossing or what have you in my behemoth. I know very little about suspensions. Is there a book anyone can recommend?

I put larger 17 inch rims on the old girl years back. They required 1" wheel spacers to make them fit and resulted in some strangeness in the steering at times. She drives very smooth on smooth roads like interstates and such, but the bumpy roads that are the reality in our little conservative paradise have the stang dancing around a bit.

Some of that might be due to the lower profile tires. I know the old ones on my 14 inch rims created and took up a lot of slop. I once blew a tire when I rolled it off one of those little rims in a corner. I'm not sure what the offset difference is between the old and the new rims, I mean I don't know if the actual distance of the tire center changed from before.

My stang has upper and lower front control arms with strut rod arm thingys holding the lower control arms in place. I assume they did that for adjustment, but I don't know if the alignment shop ever touches those.

I don't think anything in the front end is binding, but I do get a bit of bumpsteer on uneven surfaces. Not extreme, but is there a way I can eliminate it totally? Is that even possible? I've seen people drop their upper control arms for better steering geometry, but I always wondered if it would really help that much.

Then the other thing I need to figure out is why my car likes to do like Joe Jackson and step out when I go over large bumps. Basically the rear end hops, generally to the passengers side, when I go over a large bump. I understand that part of that has to be due to the solid rear axle setup on my car, but there was a time when she didn't react in that fashion.