Considering how much time I spend researching and analyzing automotive suspension dampers, I buy seriously cheap coilovers for my own car. This is partially because I know that dampers are wear items. I don't have thousands of dollars laying about to keep replacing high-dollar race shocks when they wear out or break. The other reason is that with a bit of knowledge and small amounts of money spent in the right places, you can make off-the-shelf coilover kits work really well. Here's what I do when I go shopping for a springs and dampers: 1. Be honest - How is the car being used? The first and most important thing is to make an honest assessment about how the car is going to be used. A $4000 coilover kit built for a street car is a very different piece of engineering than a $4000 racing damper kit. If this is your only car and you plan to do 1~2 track day events per year, you don't want to buy JRZs or Motons for it. The casings aren't designed to take the dirt and grime that comes from driving on the street, and the internals aren't built for the jarring high-piston speed impacts of driving around on city roads. The nicest racing dampers money can buy will last less mere months on a street car before they are completely destroyed. On the other hand, most low-buck twin tube coilover kits will happily take the rigors of street use and still deliver reasonable performance on the track. If this is a dedicated track car, ask yourself the question - "How many of these can I buy on my budget?" Remember, dampers are a wear item. They need servicing on a regular basis, and will sometimes need to be replaced. With race cars, this is a given, because one of the unfortunate realities of racing is car-to-car contact. As a rule of thumb, if I don't have the money on hand to buy two spare dampers, I won't buy the set. AST-Moton makes this extremely nice 2-way setup for my car. It's actually within my budget, but I won't buy it. It's not the right choice for the low-cost, rough-and-tumble environment that is SCCA IT racing. 2. Customer Service & Revalving Options Once you understand what you need, it's time to do some research. With the wealth of information out there on web forums, you'll have no problems finding out who makes suspension kits for your car. It's time to start calling them up and asking about their product. Along with the usual questions about fitment and which model coilover is the right one for the usage in question, I always throw in a few questions to get a sense of the company's customer service. At minimum, I try to get answers to the following: Do I like talking to the person on the phone? This is important. Remember, you are spending thousands of dollars on this suspension kit, and if everything goes well, you will be spending hundreds more on rebuilds and revalves over the coming years. If you can't stand the guy on the phone, how do you expect to get the service you need? How do I get the dampers revalved? If I'm going to spend more than a few hundred dollars on suspension dampers, I'm going to expect that they are fully rebuildable and revalve-able. The question here is, who does it, and where is it done? I always gravitate towards coilover manufacturers who can do the work in-house, in the country, and are willing to let me talk directly to the techs. If the damper has to be shipped overseas to be rebuilt or the seller won't give me a straight answer on rebuilds, I won't buy from them. What are my valving options? Are my valving options limited to what spring rates I'm using, or will they valve my dampers differently depending on whether it's a street, track, or race car? When I send my dampers in for a rebuild, do they ask about things like mid-corner oversteer or harshness at high speeds? Surprisingly, many aftermarket coilover manufacturers have in-house rebuild capabilities and are happy to work with you on the miniscule details of damper valving. You just need to ask. How do I buy replacement parts? Ask how much it would cost to replace a worn out piston rod or to replace the seals on the damper. If they give you boilerplate numbers or send you a price list for parts / replacement services, you are talking to the right people. What are their turnaround times for service? "3-6 weeks depending on whether we need to order parts and how busy things are" is a pretty good turnaround time. It doesn't hurt to ask if they have expedited service. It may surprise you that some high-end damper makers will fail this customer service test, while some cheap coilover manufacturers will pass with flying colors. Don't judge a book by its pricetag or forum cred. 4. Customizability If you are a DE driver or an aspiring racer, you will outgrow whatever suspension setup you buy today. This is a good thing. The smart thing to do is to choose a suspension setup that can grow with you instead of having to keep buying and selling whole kits. Before buying a kit, find out: Are the springs a standard diameter (2.25", 2.5", 60mm, or 65mm)? Do they offer top hats with pillowball mounts and/or do they use a standard shaft size so you can get aftermarket pillowball mounts? Alternatively, can they make mounts for you? If you don't like the standard valving, can you get it changed (without changing the spring rates)? Will the rebuilder dyno each damper so I can keep track of the behaviors as I get the valving changed? I always end up replacing the springs that come with most coilover kits, so the first question is a big deal for me. If your coilovers use a taper-wound spring (where one end is larger than the other), you are pretty much stuck with whatever spring options the coilover manufacturer offers. If your dampers use an oddball spring size (e.g. 70mm springs), it will be harder to get replacement springs, helper springs, or thrust bearings to customize your setup. The valving question is a big deal too. Effective valving is much more complicated than making the shock dyno show a double digressive curve. More often than not, the correct damping for your application will not look like this. You don't need to know this though. You just need to make sure that you have access who does, and make sure that they are the ones revalving your dampers. The corner of my garage is littered with spare coilover springs of various rates and lengths. Over the course of four years, my car control skills improved dramatically, necessitating the move to stiffer and stiffer springs. 5. Personal Preferences (Tech-y stuff) You can't expect to spend this much time around suspension parts without developing some personal preferences. Here are some of mine, along with some explanations as to why: Larger shock bodies over lighter weight A bigger diameter damper holds more oil, uses larger parts, and therefore will have better heat dissipation than a narrower bodied counterpart. The tradeoff is weight. A bigger diameter damper is naturally heavier and will usually necessitate the use of larger springs (which are also heavier). I don't want to worry about cooling my dampers though, so I almost always go for better heat dissipation and choose the girthier dampers. Twin tube over a cheap monotube On paper, monotube dampers have a lot of inherent advantages over twin tubes. What they don't tell you in books is that most of those advantages can only be realized if the monotubes in question use better materials and are built to very tight tolerances. Cheap monotubes tend to be built with crappy materials and inconsistently machined components, which means that they'll exhibit lots of internal friction and more hysteresis than their twin tube equivalents. As a rule of thumb, I won't buy a monotube damper kit that costs less than $300 a corner. Shortened shock bodies are nice A common feature in new cars is to have very little damper travel before they hit the bump stops. I'll gravitate towards any damper that has a shock body that has been slightly shortened to compensate for the fact that I won't be able to lower the ride height as much as I could with older cars. External canister with a hose where available (monotubes only) If the option exists and the rules allow for it, I'll usually take an external canister on a flexible hose. External canisters gives you more fluid, the potential for better cooling, and gives the damper manufacturer more options when it comes to installing adjusters. For me, this means I can fit a big damper in a small space, and I don't have to contort my hands around suspension arms to make adjustments. Buy springs with the most usable travel Springs aren't the same rate all the way through their range of travel. Depending on the manufacturer, a 500lb-f/in spring may be 550 lb-f/in at the start of its travel, 500lb-f/in in the middle, and 450lb-f/in as it gets close to coil bind. Springs also aren't very consistent. A random sampling of four 500lb-f/in racing springs of the same make and model might vary by as much as 5% on a spring tester. I don't really have the time to deal with inconsistencies, so I'll spend the money to buy the most consistent springs I can afford. For me, this narrows my choices to two brands: HyperCo and Swift. Use as little damping as possible Interestingly enough, too much damping increases both confidence and lap times. A heavily damped car will feel like it's planted and predictable, but will be slower because the suspension can't move freely through its range of travel. I try to run just enough damping so that the car doesn't bounce off of kerbs or exhibit scary high-speed instability. The stopwatch is your friend here. Remember, these are personal preferences and they do have quite a bit of bias. Don't take any of the above as gospel. 6. Red Flags Finally, there are some things that are red flags for me. I'm going to skip the obvious stuff like $300 ebay coilovers and obvious counterfeits and talk about some of the less mentioned ones: Adjustable dampers with over 30 clicks 30-way+ adjustment is an indicator that the damper manufacturer has cut the threads on the adjuster screw too fine, and that the adjuster basically won't do anything unless you move it 5 clicks at a time. Damper inserts for MacPherson strut cars There's really only one manufacturer that makes these - Koni. The long and the short of it is, don't do it. By definition the insert is a significantly smaller diameter than the stock damper housing, which is bad news for damping consistency and heat dissipation. The other cheap shock options have caught up and surpassed Koni's budget oriented dampers anyway, so don't even bother doing this. Rebuilds-by-replacement "service" Some companies will "rebuild" your damper by cross-shipping a new damper cartridge. What this really says is that they don't actually have the ability to disassemble or test your damper, and they're just sending you an off the shelf replacement every time you think you've worn one out. Combined camber-caster adjustable top hats There's a well-respected suspension company out there that sells camber plates with the adjustment slits cut diagonally. When you add camber, it also removes caster (and vice-versa). I have no idea why you would want this. What's worse, some cheap coilover makers have started copying this design for their MacPherson strut applications. If you see this, run. Companies that poke fun at needle valves The needle valve is a fundamental design component of automotive damper adjuster design used in everything from $1000 adjustable street dampers to $10,000 racing monotubes. There are companies out there that claim that they are an inferior design of a bygone age, and that their rotary, slide, or poppet valve based adjusters are far superior. This is nonsense. Each valve type has its advantages and disadvantages, and there are many applications for which a needle valve is the best possible option. Any company that claims that one type of valving is inherently superior to another has too many marketing people and too few engineers. 7. Whom to buy from The nice thing about being independent is that I get to say whatever I want without worrying about upsetting any sponsors. If you want to see examples of companies that tick all the right boxes, go to the following three websites: Motion Control Suspension Redshift Motorsports Fortune Auto Tein USA That's all for tonight. Happy hunting.

My first ever track car was a 98 Nissan 200sx. It was a 2-door Sentra 1.6, complete with a cast iron 115hp GA16DE motor, 14" wheels and a curb weight under 2300 lbs. On paper, it's the perfect base for a nimble, lightweight handling monster. But for some strange reason, I couldn't get it to handle. My beloved Nissan was easy enough to drive, but getting the car to turn was a constant problem. After three years and dozens of suspension mods later, I finally realized that the advice I received from books and online setup guides were missing some key points in how to set up front wheel drive cars. Here's what those books and guides are missing: Know the two major setup philosophies The first thing you need to know is that there are two major schools of thought when it comes to setting up production based front wheel drive cars, and the difference is in tyre size. One school of thought uses the same size wheel / tyre combination in the front as the rear. The other uses a larger wheel or a wider tyre in the front. This seemingly small difference makes a huge difference in how all of the other pieces fall into the setup puzzle. A larger front wheel and wider front tyre will naturally reduce the amount of understeer the car exhibits through every corner. You can run stiffer front springs, run less extreme alignment settings, and the car's behavior won't change as much when the tyres heat up. But it also means that you can't swap wheels front to back, and that you will need to really work with the brake bias to keep the small rear tyres from locking up. In contrast, most FWD club racing cars and street-driven track cars in the US use the same size wheels and tyres on the front and rear. Along with the economic benefit of being able to use the tyres all the way around, this approach will give you more setup freedom in the rear end of the car. The downside is that the added rear grip will make the car difficult to rotate and you need to rely on stiffer rear springs and stiffer rear anti-roll bars to make the car turn. There are tons of fast FWD track cars on both sides of the fence. But it is important to understand that these differences exist, especially if you plan to use coilover kits or anti-roll bars with off the shelf rates. A coilover kit with super-stiff front springs is probably not what you want if you plan to run the same 245/40R17s on all four corners of your car. Make the rear springs significantly stiffer than the front What a lot of people don't realize is that most passenger cars (FWD, AWD, or RWD) come with higher rate springs in the back than they do in the front. One reason for this is to help with ride comfort when driving over big bumps. By making the rear spring stiffer, automotive engineers can make the front and rear settle from a bump at almost the same time. This reduces the amount of bouncing the passengers experiences and gives the perception of a better ride. However, making the rear springs too stiff would make the ride jarring. So car manufacturers will use progressive rate rear springs to maintain a supple ride while keeping the advantages of a high rear ride frequency for when drivers hit potholes or speed bumps. Another reason for installing a stiffer rear spring is that the rear suspension of most passenger cars are designed with a higher motion ratio than the front. Look under your car and see where the springs mount to the control arms in the front and rear of your car. They will be further inboard in the rear than they are in the front. The further inboard the springs, the higher the motion ratio, and the stiffer the springs need to be in order to achieve the same effective rate at the wheels. Because progressive rate springs are difficult to engineer and produce, most aftermarket coilover manufacturers will use linear rate rear springs that are somewhere between the softest and stiffest rates provided by the factory rear springs. Generally, this is a mistake. The spring will be too soft for the car to handle, while simultaneously being too stiff for a comfortable ride. If you are setting up your car for performance, install a significantly stiffer spring in the rear than the front. So how much stiffer should the rear be? A good way to approach this is to calculate the motion ratios of the front and rear suspension on your car, and look at how different the front and rear motion ratios are. The bigger the difference between the front and rear motion ratios, the stiffer your rear springs need to be. If you are just starting out or aren't confident in your abilities, find out what kind of spring rates racers use for your car, and lower both the front and rear spring rates proportionately. For a detailed explanation of motion ratios and how to calculate them accurately, head to: http://alison.hine.net/cobra/tweaks/motionratio2.htm Dial in as much front camber as you can For some reason many track day enthusiasts don't put enough camber in the front of their FWD cars. Some people seem to think that even 2 degrees is too much. They will claim that it would cause uneven tyre wear or that it would increase braking distances. What these people don't realize is that modern R compound tyres are designed to work with a minimum of 2.5 degrees of negative camber. Even the latest generation of high performance street tyres are so sticky that they need extra negative camber just to keep a flat contact patch under hard cornering. At the last SCCA March Lion test weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting a friendly gentleman who was testing out a new acquisition - A 4th gen Prelude Si, prepared for the Improved Touring S class, very similar to my own. His primer-grey Honda had the weirdest looking setup of any ITS car I've ever seen. It must have been 5 or 6 degrees of negative camber in the front, and the ride height was so low it looked like an early 90's Super Touring car. Definitely not something you would expect from a club racing car running DOT R compounds. But you can't argue with results. Within 15 minutes of hopping in the car, the driver had belted out a 1:16.5 on NJMP Lightning. That's within a second of the ITS lap record. When he broke out the tyre pyrometer, it read a perfect even gradient across the tread. If you have a track driven car and want to run R compounds, I would recommend starting with at least 2.5 degrees of negative camber up front. Adjust your rear camber based on the front, and fine tune both sides using your pyrometer. FYI, I run 4.25 deg negative camber in the front and 2.25 negative camber in the rear. That's all for part 1. Click here for part 2, with more weird setup tips for FWD track cars.

We're back with some more odd-sounding setup tips on how to make FWD track cars fast. Add Toe-Out to the front wheels Adding front toe-out is common sense for racers and autocrossers, but is something that many drivers avoid on street-driven track cars. Most drivers will put a tiny bit of toe-in or run zero toe in the front of their FWD track cars. This is great for straight-line stability on the street, but will greatly hinder the car's ability to turn in. For a track car, start with 0.1 deg (or 1/16 in) total toe-out up front. This is just enough to make the car easier to turn during the entry phase of each corner, but not enough to cause the car to wander or become tail-happy. If you are worried about the car becoming tail happy, dial in a tiny bit of toe-in in the rear. The result should be a car that is stable under hard braking and is eager to point to the apex at turn-in. Use less camber in the rear This one comes straight out of the setup books of my good friend and mentor, Todd Reid. Todd took the unusual approach of running as little camber as possible on the rear of his NASA PTE-prepared Ford Probe. Convention says that this would result in a reduction of the rear contact patch due to the outside rear wheel going to positive camber, and this isn't entirely false. But it also makes it possible to rotate the car mid-corner, which is something that a lot of FWD track cars will refuse to do. The extra contact patch from the lack of negative camber also adds stability under braking and through the exit of every corner. This is Todd's Probe. This car graced the podium at the NASA Nationals a few years ago and was a regular winner at various organizations up and down the east coast. Never mind the 20 year old paint or the oddball air intake. Instead, look closely at the camber angle of the left front versus that of the left rear. Almost all modern FWD passenger cars will naturally gain more negative camber in the rear than they do in the front, so don't be afraid to stand the rear wheels up. If you have a Macpherson strut / Chapman strut rear, try reducing the camber angle of the rear wheels to half a degree less than the front. If you have a double A-arm rear, try it with a full degree less than the front. It won't drastically change the handling feel, but it will make it easier to control the car. In addition to being a veritable fountain of knowledge of vehicle dynamics and racing technique, Todd is also a pro driver coach. If you can spare the cash, have him spend a day or a weekend with you. It's worth every penny and then some. For more info, visit www.reidspeedinc.com or call (410) 441-0201. That's all for today. Click here for part 3, where we'll talk about weight distribution and brake bias.