Wheel hop maybe? Or, just a bump in the road.
http://www.mc2racing.com/tech/20061012a/index.html
What causes wheel hop?
A lot of people don't know why wheel hop occurs, which often leads to them throwing the incorrect parts at the car in an effort to eliminate the issue. Fortunately understanding (and correcting) wheel hop is not difficult. Here is what happens. When a car accelerates, you can picture the forces involved as something (the ground) pushing the driven wheels of the car forward. Obviously if you push the wheels forward, the car is going to move forward also. However, the wheels are not rigidly fixed to the chassis, so when the ground pushes on the wheels, they move forward a bit in the wheel well. Normally a car's acceleration is so small that this motion is negligible, but when a car accelerates quickly, especially during a launch, the wheels can move forward quite a bit in the wheel wells. As the wheels move forward, significant toe changes occur. Now, everybody knows that a tire can provide the most grip when it is perpendicular to the ground, parallel with the acceleration, and pressurized to provide the optimal contact patch. That being said, if the toe of the driven wheels changes during acceleration, the grip of the tire must be changing. Wheel hop is a result of this change in grip. Here is the sequence of events:
1.) Acceleration begins with good grip.
2.) The wheels move forward, toe changes, and available grip is reduced. Wheelspin occurs.
3.) During wheelspin, acceleration is very small. The wheels move back again, toe changes back, and the tire regains grip.
4.) Acceleration begins again, and the process repeats itself.
This rapid switching between grippy acceleration and wheelspin is wheel hop. My above description of the wheel hop process sounds tame, but the frequency of the grip changes and the magnitude of the forces involved is what makes wheel hop so violent. Race tires can prevent wheel hop since they have more grip (i.e., they don't lose grip even with the toe change), but cars that wheel hop with race tires will do so in a much more violent fashion.
