A shock dyno strokes a shock through a controlled motion at known velocities and measures the force it produces in response. What comes out of the machine is a stream of force and displacement readings, which on its own tells nobody anything useful.
Shock dyno analysis software is the program that turns those readings into something an engineer can work from. It plots force against velocity and force against displacement, isolates gas force and seal drag, stores each run so it can be recalled later, overlays runs so two dampers can be compared directly, and exports the reports that get sent to customers.
Shock 6 is the program Roehrig Engineering wrote to accompany its dynos, and it has been the common choice in racing for close to twenty years. A large number of shops in this industry have never used anything else.
Shock 6 is no longer being actively developed for racing. There was no announcement, nothing in the program indicates it, and for most shops the first sign of a problem will be a Windows update or a failed dongle rather than any notice from the company that owns the software.
This article explains how that happened, what it does and does not mean for a shop currently running Shock 6, and what the options are for anyone who wants to keep years of accumulated dyno data usable. It also covers PASS, the analysis software Penske Racing Shocks built to replace Shock 6 in racing applications.
Not in a way a racing customer would recognize. The current release is version 6.6.12, which came out in 2022 and consisted mainly of the changes needed to keep the program opening on newer builds of Windows. Four years later it remains the current version.
No end-of-life date has been published and nobody has announced the product as discontinued, which is part of why the situation is easy to miss. The software has simply stopped receiving development.
Shock 6 has changed hands three times in the last decade.
Kurt Roehrig founded Roehrig Engineering in 1988. Along with its crank dynos, the company wrote the analysis software that became standard equipment in professional shock testing. MTS Systems acquired Roehrig in 2014. Amphenol acquired MTS in April 2021, and the MTS Test and Simulation business was sold to ITW in December of that year.
The ownership history matters because of its effect on development priorities. A racing software product serving a few thousand users competes for engineering time against test systems sold into automotive durability and aerospace qualification programs, which are much larger businesses with their own roadmaps. Racing work receives what attention is left over, and in this case that has amounted to a single compatibility patch in four years. None of that reflects on the engineers who originally wrote the software.
No. Shock 6 has no expiration date and no server that checks license status. An installation that works today with a functioning dongle will open files next season the same way, and a shop with a stable setup has no reason to change anything this week.
The risk accumulates gradually rather than arriving at once, and it shows up in a few places.
Windows is the most likely one. Each major Windows release changes something about drivers, permissions, or how programs written years earlier are permitted to run, and Shock 6 has already required one compatibility patch to survive that process. There is little reason to expect another one to be written. Some shops have addressed this by keeping an older computer off the network and using it for nothing but Shock 6, which works until that computer fails and cannot be replaced with anything the software recognizes.
Support has thinned alongside development. The engineers who wrote the program moved on years ago, and finding someone who understands its behavior in detail gets harder every season.
The program will not open(The program will open, but only in DEMO mode. Users can still analyze their data, but you will not be able to communicate and run your machine.,
Shock 6 licensing is tied to a physical USB dongle, which means a small piece of hardware controls access to a shop's entire history of dyno data. Shops have managed that risk for two decades by keeping careful track of the dongle. What has changed is the replacement path. Sourcing a new dongle for a product nobody is developing takes longer than it once did.
Some can, and for most shops this is the first question to settle about any replacement, ahead of comparing features or interfaces.
Ten years of dyno work amounts to thousands of recorded runs: customer builds, series spec packages, and the sessions where a handling complaint finally appeared as a recognizable shape on a curve. An experienced builder evaluates a new run by reading it against that history, which is how a problem gets identified quickly. That process depends on the old runs remaining accessible.
Those files exist in the format the software wrote them in. A replacement program either reads that format or it does not, and one that cannot open the archive leaves a shop starting its records over.
PASS stands for Penske Analysis Software Suite. It is shock dyno analysis software for Windows, built by Penske Racing Shocks to replace Shock 6 in racing applications.
Penske Racing Shocks has been the largest source of this hardware in North American racing for years. We service these machines and run them in our own facility, so the development freeze affected us the same way it affected every other shop. We bought the remaining licenses, brought the original Shock 6 software author back in, and built PASS from the ground up.
PASS is organized into modules that can be licensed separately.
Shock7 is the module for building dyno tests and capturing the resulting data. It includes predefined test templates for common race series, so a shop running a spec class can select the required test rather than configuring it from scratch, and it produces the standard analysis plots.
DCML, short for Damper Curve Machine Learning, predicts what curve a given shock build will produce before it is assembled. It also works in reverse, taking a target curve and returning the piston, shim stack, and adjuster settings that should produce it. The module is trained on measured data from physical shocks that Penske built and tested.
Demo Mode is free, does not expire, and opens any PASS file or any existing Shock 6 file with the complete set of analysis tools found in the paid modules. It does not build tests or capture data. Roehrig offered a free viewer for years and most shock builders kept a copy on a second computer for reviewing data away from the dyno, and PASS continues that.
Two things about PASS address the problems described above directly. It opens existing Shock 6 files, which was settled at the start of the project before any work went into new features. And licensing runs on keys tied to an account rather than a USB dongle, so a failed laptop means activating on the replacement machine instead of searching for a discontinued part.
In most cases, yes, with no mechanical work required. PASS supports the majority of Penske and Roehrig dyno hardware built in the last decade and recognizes supported machines automatically.
This matters because the machines outlast the software by a wide margin. A crank dyno bought in 2012 and properly maintained has years of testing left in it, and there is nothing wrong with the mechanical side of a shop that is running current hardware and stalled software.
Older units may need a hardware update before they will work with PASS. Where that line falls depends on the specific machine, so the way to find out is to send us the dyno serial number. There is usually a tag on the frame, and most people have never had a reason to look for it.
The fastest way for a shop to answer the migration question is to install the free version and open files it already knows. Pick a baseline run that is recognizable on sight and check whether the curve comes across the way it should. That takes about ten minutes and settles more than any comparison of specifications.
To check what a particular dyno needs, or to ask about licensing, contact us or use the PASS page. Support and dyno integration are handled by our team in North Carolina.